Is It Fear?

After digesting yesterday's essay by UBC prof William Rees about how humanity is suffocating other forms of life on our planet, I was left wondering what they're afraid of, why aren't they talking to us about what is happening, right now, beneath our own feet?

As Rees pointed out, "We are clever enough to document — in exquisite detail — various trends that portend the collapse of modern civilization, yet not nearly smart enough to extricate ourselves from our self-induced predicament." 

For a decade, perhaps a bit more, I've been covering one major report after another on research documenting the alarming collapse of non-human life - insect, mammals, birds, sea mammals, fish, the lot. Some species have fallen extinct but the worrisome problem is that virtually all species are in severe decline, often upwards of 66% of their numbers over the past 40 years which, of course, coincides with the advent of neoliberalism.

Even in Canada, everything from casual windshield “surveys” to formal scientific assessments show a drop in insect numbers. Meanwhile, domestic populations of many insect-eating birds are in freefall. Ontario has lost half its whip-poor-wills in the past 20 years; across the nation, such species as nighthawks, swallows, martins and fly-catchers are down by up to 75 per cent; Greater Vancouver’s barn and bank swallows have plummeted by 98 per cent since 1970. Heard much about these things in the mainstream news?

...

Scientists estimate that at the dawn of agriculture 10,000 years ago, H. sapienscomprised less than one per cent of the total weight of mammals on the planet. (There were probably only two to four million people on Earth at the time.) Since then, humans have grown to represent 35 per cent of a much larger total biomass; toss in domestic pets and livestock, and human domination of the world’s mammalian biomass rises to 98.5 per cent!

...

It took all of human history — let’s say 200,000 years — for our population to reach one billion in the early 1800s, but only 200 years, 1/1000th as much time, to hit today’s 7.6 billion! Meanwhile, material demand on the planet has ballooned even more — global GDP has increased by over 100-fold since 1800; average per capita incomes by a factor of 13. (rising to 25-fold in the richest countries). Consumption has exploded accordingly — half the fossil fuels and many other resources ever used by humans have been consumed in just the past 40 years.

As the Bonn climate summit wraps up it reveals how ineffectual our nations have become and why they'll never succeed in bringing climate change under control. They're still treating climate change as a standalone crisis. They imagine they're dealing with a disease but it's really just one of several symptoms of the greater threat that confronts us - ourselves.

You cannot take climate change in isolation of its companion threats that are also existential. Climate change cannot be separated from over-population and over-consumption of our planet's finite resources.  Rees pointed it out beautifully. It took our species 200,000 years to reach one billion and just another 200 years to increase that more than seven fold and, in the course of those same 200 years, GDP has swelled about a hundred fold. That's hundreds of times more production, more consumption, more waste, more pollution and contamination of every form imaginable. And what are our politicians doing? With their corporate partners they're obsessively pursuing perpetual, exponential growth. Every foot is on the gas pedal but nobody's hands are on the wheel.

That's not democratic leadership. That's nihilism.

They can't even respond to climate change beyond purely gestural proposals - carbon taxes. What exactly is that going to do? Nothing, it's a sop.

Rees didn't write an op-ed. He penned an essay. He wasn't expressing an opinion. He was writing from fact, scientific knowledge documented in "exquisite detail." His was not some dodgy belief-based construct. That's the crap peddled to us by our political caste, the nihilists.

Surely we have reached a point where you have to ask yourself why you're supporting and empowering nihilists. Why? The science has been pouring in for more than a decade. There's a mountain of research and analysis and it's compelling. 

What's your problem? Is it simply too much to take in? Can you not get your mind around the enormity of the change that has set in over just the past forty years? Do you, like our leaders, need to pretend this isn't happening or that it's not immediate or a mortal threat to our civilization?

How Did We Become a Land of Cowards?

Bill C-51 speaks to the cowardice that has taken hold of Canadian society at the instance of the fear-mongering federal government.  Conservatives and Liberals and, for that matter, a solid majority of the Canadian public support it.

What, some nutjob shoots somebody and so we need to turn the thumbscrews on the already dwindling rights and freedoms of all Canadians?  We're following in the jackboot steps of the United States.  We're becoming a land of cowards.

American pundit Ted Rall has a column in The Japan Times that should speak to all of us.

For a country that used to pride itself on a certain stoicism, the United States has become a land of whiny little boys and girls.

Oh, how we cried after 9/11. Three thousand dead! Those “Wounded Warrior” TV ads asking for donations to support Afghanistan and Iraq war veterans — excuse me, but why am I spending 54 percent of my federal tax dollars on defense if I also have to donate to a sketchy charity? — use the same melancholy tone and weepy delivery as Sally Struthers’ classic “save the children” messages. Obviously it sucks to lose your arms and legs, but let’s grow a pair. Fewer than 7,000 Americans got killed invading two countries where they had no business being in the first place.

Let’s put those numbers into proper perspective, shall we? The Soviet Union lost 20 million people fighting the Nazis (who invaded them, by the way). France lost 11 percent of its population during World War I — the equivalent for us would be 34 million Americans. But the Russians or French don’t bitch and moan as much as us.

Speaking of which, Americans have a lot of balls calling Frenchman “surrender monkeys” considering that nearly twice as many French soldiers were killed in the 1940 Battle of France over six weeks as the United States lost in Vietnam over the course of a decade. Meanwhile, we’re still whining about the 58,000 we lost in — no, invading — Vietnam.

Here at home, we’re infested with wimp cops.

In recent weeks, we have been treated to grand jury testimony in the shootings of two black men, Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner in Staten Island, New York.

Both killer cops are bruisers — big, muscular guys. Most of all, they are cops. Cops have partners. They have the backing of the state. They carry tasers. They have nightsticks. They go to the police academy, where they train long hours in the art of subduing human beings. And as we well know, they have access to military-style hardware and defensive gear.

It's said that some 80 percent of Canadians questioned support Bill C-51 although most of them have no real idea of what it does or what the existing laws allow our police and security agencies to do.  Harper says "terrorism" and they predictably clap their flippers like trained seals.  These are people who are now inherently fearful, skilfully groomed to cowardice by a fearmongering government and its allies in Parliament.

It's the equivalent of handing over your lunch money to the schoolyard bully only on a national scale.  To those who would consider attacking us - real terrorists - we've just shown them how enfeebled we've allowed ourselves to become. 

They, potential terrorists and our supposed leaders alike, now see us for what we are - easy meat.

  

Ask Yourself, Have You Been "Tuned Up" Yet?

This breathes new meaning into the phrase "bored to death."

Behavioural pschology suggests we may have been conditioned to submit to neoliberalism.  We have been made susceptible to manipulation and control.

Alfie Kohn, in Punished by Rewards (1993), documents with copious research how behavior modification works best on dependent, powerless, infantilized, bored, and institutionalized people. And so for authorities who get a buzz from controlling others, this creates a terrifying incentive to construct a society that creates dependent, powerless, infantilized, bored, and institutionalized people. 

Similarly, researcher Paul Thorne reports in the journal International Management (“Fitting Rewards,” 1990) that in order to get people to behave in a particular way, they must be “needy enough so that rewards reinforce the desired behavior.”

...Behavior modification is fundamentally a means of controlling people and thus for Kohn, “by its nature inimical to democracy, critical questioning, and the free exchange of ideas among equal participants.”

 ...In democracy, citizens are free to think for themselves and explore, and are motivated by very real—not phantom—intrinsic forces, including curiosity and a desire for justice, community, and solidarity.

This insight brings to mind an item from July, 2012 that looked at the emergence of a new, highly conditioned class, the "Precariat."  Make people insecure.  A state of constant insecurity makes people complacent, fearful, obedient.  It leaves them susceptible to manipulation and control.  Put the masses in an "every man for himself" environment and you can effectively and quickly displace any instincts or desires for 'justice, community and solidarity.'  That done, it's an easy matter to usher in illiberal democracy and the corporate state.  

The Stench of Fear

The smell of fear is real.  It's detectable. 

It is said that higher predators can detect it and it triggers them to attack.  Even if they can't smell it, they can surely read it in how we behave.  You encounter a cougar, turn and run, that cougar will be coming for you.  Chances are, showing that cougar your back will be your very last mistake.

In America, the rich folks seem to be on the verge of turning their backs and fleeing.  The smell of fear is definitely in the air.  AlterNet's Lynne Stewart Parramore lists five signs that America's one percenters are losing it.

She writes that the uber-rich have been coming out of late complaining about how beset they feel, how they're like Jews at the hands of the Nazis.  They're doubling down on the line about how they're the job creators, the very engine of the American economy.  They now have 'wealth psychologists' to nurse them through their affluence burden.  They hire coaches to help their kids with 'sudden wealth syndrome.'  Their kids slaughter plebs and escape punishment with the defence of 'affluenza'.  They're barricading themselves in to insulate themselves and their wealth from the great unwashed.  America now has more private security guards than teachers and "guard labour" is a booming segment of working America.  Finally, they're spending their money like there's no tomorrow from $300 hamburgers to $5,000 Evian water baths.

Parramore's conclusion?

All of this behavior leads us to believe that the rich are getting a little nervous about all that cash they're hoarding, and how they got it. Maybe burying yourself alive in a bunker with an open line to your wealth therapist is the only thing left to do.

What awaits these people when the masses catch the scent of their fear and turn predatory?  I can't hardly wait.

Displaced Fear

 Conservatives are fear-driven.   Their minds work differently than ours, or at least they work differently than progressives' minds. 

Brain scan research has found that rightwingers process information via the right amygdala, the centre of the brain's threat response system.  Lefties perform the same process using the insula, a small part of the brain that functions quite differently.

According to neuroscientists who study it, the insula is a long-neglected brain region that has emerged as crucial to understanding what it feels like to be human.

They say it is the wellspring of social emotions, things like lust and disgust, pride and humiliation, guilt and atonement. It helps give rise to moral intuition, empathy and the capacity to respond emotionally to music.

As one researcher put it, "It's not that conservative people are more fearful, it's that fearful people are more conservative."

Which leads me to ponder why the inherently fearful group shows itself to be the least concerned with the most fearful threat facing civilization, climate change?   By their predisposition they should be quivering in their boots and demanding action, real action, now.  But, as a group, they're not.

Maybe the answer lies in two things - denialism and displaced fear.  Maybe it's the right's very susceptibility to fear that drives them into the warm arms of denialism for the assurance that all will be right; that this is a hoax.   There's really nothing to worry about.  And, to seal the deal, they're given a heaping serving of displaced fear.

Years ago I went to the dentist with a toothache.  It was painful and it was a tooth on the bottom left at the back of the jaw.   The dentist looked carefully and he found the problem tooth - at the top row, midway on the left side.   He explained it as "referred pain."   He fixed the upper tooth and, voila, the pain in the lower tooth miraculously vanished.

Maybe something similar is happening with fearful conservatives.  Coupled with the comforting assurances that lie at the core of denialism, they're being conditioned to project or refer their fears onto a supposed threat of utter ruin of the economy and a conspiracy by scientists and tree huggers.  Don't fear climate change, fear the messengers for they're the threat, not global warming.   Don't listen to them, they're dangerous and they're up to no good.

Anyway, that's my layman's guess of how the inherently fearful mind could be trained to avoid the fearful reality of climate change.  One thing I do know is that there are few conditions that can be as easily manipulated as fear and it's the perfect fuel for igniting suspicion and anger.

New Studies Confirm Conservatives are Fear-Driven

Sideshow Steve Harper understands the power of fear to distract and manipulate his supporters.   He conjures up images of threats and dangers and watches  his Conservative flock recoil in shock and terror.

Two new studies confirm the brain differences between conservative and liberal minds.

First, in the American Journal of Political Science, a team of researchers including Peter Hatemi of Penn State and Rose McDermott of Brown University studied the relationship between our deep-seated tendencies to experience fear—tendencies which vary from person to person, partly for reasons that seem rooted in our genes--and our political beliefs. What they found is that people who have more fearful disposition also tend to be more politically conservative, and less tolerant of immigrants and people of races different from their own. As McDermott carefully emphasizes, that does not mean that every conservative has a high fear disposition. "It's not that conservative people are more fearful, it's that fearful people are more conservative," as she puts it.

I interviewed the paper's lead author, Peter Hatemi, about his research for my 2012 book The Republican Brain. Hatemi is both a political scientist and also a microbiologist, and as he stressed to me, "nothing is all genes, or all environment." These forces combine to make us who we are, in incredibly intricate ways.

Darren Schreiber, a political neuroscientist at the University of Exeter in the UK, first performed brain scans on 82 people participating in a risky gambling task, one in which holding out for more money increases your possible rewards, but also your possible losses. Later, cross-referencing the findings with the participants' publicly available political party registration information, Schreiber noticed something astonishing: Republicans, when they took the same gambling risk, were activating a different part of the brain than Democrats.

Republicans were using the right amygdala, the center of the brain's threat response system. Democrats, in contrast, were using the insula, involved in internal monitoring of one's feelings.  Amazingly, Schreiber and his colleagues write that this test predicted 82.9 percent of the study subjects' political party choices—considerably better, they note, than a simple model that predicts your political party affiliation based on the affiliation of your parents.

I also interviewed Schreiber for The Republican Brain. He's a scientist who was once quite cautious about the relevance of brain studies to people's politics. As he put it to me: "If you had called me four years ago and said, what is your view on whether Republicans and Democrats have different brains, I would have said no." Now, his own published research suggests otherwise.

One again, though, there's a critical nuance here. Schreiber thinks the current research suggests not only that having a particular brain influences your political views, but also that having a particular political view influences and changes your brain. The causal arrow seems likely to run in both directions—which would make sense in light of what we know about the plasticity of the brain. Simply by living our lives, we change our brains. Our political affiliations, and the lifestyles that go along with them, probably condition many such changes.

...It is hard not to infer that fear of outsiders or those different from you—along with greater fear dispositions in general—may be related to the role of amgydala, a brain structure that has been dubbed the "heart and soul of the fear system." The amygdala has been repeatedly implicated in politics. Indeed, Schreiber's research builds on prior brain studies: In a group of University College of London students, for instance, conservatives showed more gray matter in the right amygdala.

Save Your Fear. You May Want It, Later.

Rovian politics have demonstrated just how far an inept administration can go so long as it knows how to inculcate fear in a public willing to allow themselves to be scared witless.   Harness fear to anger and you've really got something very powerful.

Fear conditions people.   It conditions them to surrender hard-won rights and freedoms to the unscrupulous.   It turns them gullible and suppresses critical thinking as somehow disloyal.   It evokes "just because" illogic.  It is the elixir of the Wizards of No.

Bush-Cheney used fear and anger to persuade the American people that invading Iraq was "the right thing to do."   Even after no weapons of mass destruction were found to exist, they continued to fall back on the "right thing to do" justification to defend their indefensible and oh so illegal war.

Uber-rightwingers like Harper know the value of fear and they use it all the time.   It's what keeps them in the game.  It's what shapes their legislative agenda.   Here's a clear example, crime.   Harper has used the fear of crime to justify his punishment and imprisonment fetish.   Crime rates are steadily and happily declining but that's unimportant.   What counts is the fear of crime  you can instill in the public.  Tell me that's not kinky.  What's next Steve, nipple piercings?

There's another benefit to fearmongers.   Fear makes a dandy substitute for vision and leadership.   Make the citizenry fearful and angry enough and you're off the hook.   Any bozo in the White House could pick up the phone and tell the Joint Chiefs of Staff to loose the hammers of hell on a place like Iraq - provided the public is suitably conditioned to see that country as a threat, to fear that country. 

Then there's our own Furious Leader.   What vision has he ever shown?  None.  The guy's an empty suit.  Remember all those ideas he had before he became prime minister?   Where did they go?  Look at the way he's run elections since then.  Instead of presenting clear platforms - the sort that require vision - he turns them into referenda on the opposition leader instead.   He pumps his people up, makes them fearful of the opposition, and squeaks back in for another term having avoided any real assessment of the lousy, ever dodgy way he governs.

Another rarely considered quality of fear is that it's not limitless.   Each of us can only handle so much fear.   We have to be able to eat, to sleep.  Life must go on.   The more of your fear quota that's allocated to, say, fear of crime, fear of Muslims attacking your town, fear of creeping socialism (interesting how that's become a mortal threat again), fear of somebody taking your guns away - the less fear you have available for actual threats.   Once your plate is full, who wants to hear about things like global warming, corporatism, environmental degradation or the encroachment on democracy by forces of oligarchy?  That's why you need to save your fear.   Keep it for things that matter.

Here's a suggestion.  Don't be afraid.  Save your fear for things that really matter like the need to defend democracy (something that's as old as democracy itself).   Be fearful for your democracy.   Be at least a little fearful of runaway global warming because we're all experiencing the taste of that lash right now and there's plenty worse to come.

Be fearful of threats that you can do something about.   Use that fear to energize yourself to seek solutions or to demand that those in power come up with answers and take action.   When you combine rational fear with courage and optimism, those whose stock in trade is manipulation have something of their own to fear - you.

Look at the United States during the "Red Scare" of the 50s or during the Bush-Cheney years if you have any doubts about the destructive power of fear.   Realize that there are people who will exploit your fear as a weapon against you.  Reject these creatures and their ways out of hand.   Make them fearful of you because, inside, they're really cowards.   That's why they have no real, coherent vision.  Their type can only do things to you, not things for you so turf them.  You deserve better and they have no intention of providing what you deserve.

We're at real risk if we let others manipulate us with fear.   There's simply not enough fear to squander it on these guys.

What Kind of Moron Does It Take to Support Republicans? Ask the Republicans

How does the Republican Party see the rank and file, small donors to their cause? Well, thanks to an internal, 72-page GOP document carelessly allowed to fall into Democratic hands, now we know. From Politico:

"The small donors who are the targets of direct marketing are described under the heading 'Visceral Giving.' Their motivations are listed as 'fear;' 'Extreme negative feelings toward existing Administration;' and 'Reactionary.'" That's right, the Republicans know their real party faithful. They ought to. They spent the entire dark years of the Bush regime making the American people fearful, preying on their vulnerabilities. Now fear drives the flow of cash into their coffers. And, yes, the Repugs know their nearest and dearest are indeed reactionary. They're knee-jerk rednecks, just the way the Grand Old Party likes'em.

Does anybody think that bottom feeder that passes for our prime monster is any better than his Republican, American Idols? Inculcating fear, anger and bigotry is their very stock in trade.

Reactionary people are stupid. They don't think, they react. You feed them the right stimulus, a heaping helping of fear, or appeal to their base bigotry and out pops their chequebooks.

The Republicans, having been caught with their pants down, are running for cover just as fast as their little paws can carry them. And that, kids, is why these far-rightwingers are assholes.

Land of the Free, Home of the Brave

I was never enamoured of the Star Spangled Banner. Like most national anthems, it is stilted and awkward and just a bit creepy, like joining strangers in a group hug. I guess I've just got too much "true patriot love."

Ever since the attacks on New York and Washington on September 11, 2001, I keep coming back to the last line of the American anthem and I've come to really appreciate what it says. To me at least, it's the best, single line of any anthem I've ever heard.

Land of the free, home of the brave. Even if that was always a blend of myth and reality, the past five years have shown how directly linked are a people's bravery and their freedom.

In the greater scheme of global conflict, the casualties inflicted in the al-Qaeda attacks were actually pretty modest. Roughly 3,000 killed. You would have to look pretty far down the list of human suffering before you got to that one. But look what it did to the American people, the folks from the Home of the Brave.

The September 11th attacks inflicted real terror on the American people. Who watched the WTC towers collapse, one after the other, and wasn't profoundly troubled? Outside of bin Laden's inner circle, those images sent shockwaves around the entire world.

No one can fault Americans for being fearful on that day and in the days immediately after when they had to wonder if there were more attacks looming. What surprised me, however, was how persistent and deep that fear turned out to be. Remember the day when Tom Ridge asked his fellow citizens to lay in supplies of duct tape and plastic sheeting, just in case? Store shelves were torn bare of the stuff and across the U.S. people raced to hermetically seal up their homes in fear of a non-existent danger. It was then that I realized how far America had fallen from being the Home of the Brave.

As I watched Americans being fed a diet of fear by al-Qaeda and then by their own leaders, I saw how ready they were to give up their freedoms in exchange for empty assurances of their safety. The Patriot Act, warrantless wire taps, secret and indefinite detention without charge or benefit of counsel, data mining, illegal warmaking, each marking a surrender of basic freedoms and human rights.

Bravery is only tangible when the brave resist what threatens them. If they capitulate to those who infect them with fear, they just as quickly lose their hold on their freedoms.

Those of us lucky enough to have been spared this defining moment of truth need to profit from this lesson. We need to reflect on our rights and what they really mean to us and our society. We need to recall how each of those rights has been paid for - in blood - and often more than once. We need to understand that, if we fail to defend those rights, there are and have always been those who would strip us of them.