From: Emlyn O'regan (oregan.emlyn@healthsolve.com.au)
Date: Wed Feb 26 2003 - 22:52:32 MST
> Emlyn writes
>
> > I'm going to do something that is perhaps ill advised, and
> take this post at
> > face value...
> >
> > Lee Corbin wrote:
>
> Why, I do thank you, Emlyn. It is definitely a step in the right
> direction to take my posts at face value.
Excuse me, it was not really ok for me to start my post that way. My
apologies.
>
> > I think both Steve and Amara are talking about a more
> general propensity in
> > people toward letting fear dominate their thinking, and
> thus behaviour.
> > They're not talking specifically about mad survivalism.
>
> Okay, thanks. This is perhaps something that quite a few of
> us do agree on, after all, even though we approach it differently
> and attend to different symptoms. In my view, obsession with
> safety surely must have always characterized some subset of the
> bell curve, and the very recent exhibitions of it---at a time
> when truly we as individuals face fewer risks than ever before
> ---is simply caused by people not having enough ordinary things
> to worry about. My mother is perfect example. She'll find
> something to worry about, up to a level, as if meeting an
> internal need.
We all know a lot of people like this - It's pretty normal, I think. And I
agree with you that we have less to worry about than ever before.
>
> > The problem is with a general trend toward a focus on
> safety and security,
> > rising from fear, in the west. It comes out in all kinds of
> funny little
> > ways, like people buying really big stupid cars (because
> they feel safer),
> > or people deciding they need guns under their pillows, or
> even people taking
> > a boring but career oriented job instead of doing what they
> really want to
> > do with their lives.
>
> You see, I look at exactly the other side of the coin. To
> some extent I have been guilty of all these examples you
> posit. Take cars, for example. After I became a cryonicist,
> I become somewhat more cautious---but not to the degree that
> many cryonicists do. I began, for another example, to begin
> wearing my seat belt. Who can really say with any authority
> which risks are worth taking and which are not?
Hey, I wear my seat belt too. It's convenient and seems to make a big
difference to something which, statistically speaking, is damned dangerous,
which is being in a motor vehicle.
>
> What we can do is observe general tendencies.
>
> The remainder of your examples are more typical of those
> people of your ideological persuasion
I hope you're not calling me a socialist! Grrr! :-)
> , whereas, were I
> to detail them, my examples might typify mine.
>
> To take just one,
>
> > And now, we've had the growing example of the mother of all
> scare campaigns,
> > beginning just after September 11 and continuing, with
> increased frenzy, at
> > the present moment. The War of Terror is a war on a concept...
>
> Perhaps you meant "War on Terror?".
Yup. My (frequent) spelling errors were indicative of me being a bit
overheated.
> No matter. From
> the perspective opposite to yours, there are these
> people (who we call "terrorists") who crash planes
> into buildings, blow up ships, and would probably love
> to detonate an A-bomb in one of our Western cities.
> A lot of other people naturally resent this a great
> deal, and even hate them. Sounds natural and predictable
> to me.
I'm well aware of the common definition of terrorist. I think they used to
be called spies or enemy agents.
Statistically speaking, you and I are so extraordinarily unlikely to be
harmed by a "terrorist" that it makes no sense to devote any personal
resources to the task of thwarting them, imo, and certainly it makes no
sense to let personal freedoms be impinged on to that end.
Rationally, if we were to go after safety, we'd probably look a lot more at
heart disease, cancer and car accidents (I really should go googling to
check that these are something like the top causes of death).
I think people get fixated on scary things (like terrorists, or
meningococcal, or meteor strikes), mostly to feed the need for worry.
Actually, I think we all have that, and that it is exacerbated by a chaotic
environment (ie: the increasingly complicated and excellent world in which
we live). I know I worry about things more than I rationally deduct that I
should.
(An aside:
I'm not particularly fond of terrorists, per se. I must say, though, that I
believe (a) that they are disparate people fighting for disparate ideals
using disparate methods, (b) that they are defined as terrorists usually by
people who I wouldn't trust with my children, and (c) that I can't tell
often if the people fingered even exist, as I can only hear about it second
or third hand, and they are defined as shady (and so hard to measure) types
anyway. While I believe that certain organisations do exist (say hamas, or
the tamil tigers, or maybe al qaeda (undecided on that one)), I disbelieve
this very new and really quite useless notion of generic "terrorists".)
>
> > There is a campaign asking us to look out for terrorists in our
> > midst, and report on them to the government, with the slogan "Be
> > alert, not alarmed" (which invokes thought processes like "Not
> > alarmed? Why? Is there something I might be alarmed about? Is it
> > really that bad? Oh shit!").
>
> True. But I'm not convinced that this has made people
> be much more fearful than they would anyway. The day
> after 9-11, children (obviously studying how their parents
> were taking this in) would ask, "Are we going to die?".
> People overreact to tragedy due to innumeracy, at least
> in the sense that too many really believe they're next.
> Perhaps this is part of what Amara and Steve were criticizing.
I find the opposite, that many people I talk to are more fearful now than
they were in the past (say early nineties, after the fall of the berlin
wall, for a baseline).
In fact, from the increasingly hard to find libertarian presence here, and
the apparent replacement by jingoistic pro-war rhetoric, I think there is
much increased fear right here on-list.
>
> > This is my alternative explanation... some of us disagree
> fundamentally with
> > the defacto ideology of the modern west, that being a
> culture of fear and a
> > negative individual obsession with unachievable personal
> goals like (total)
> > safety and security.
>
> I had the above explanation for the focus on total safety:
> in a word, because we've never had it so good.
I agree.
> But I would
> characterize the "defacto ideology" of the modern west as
> an emphasis on individual benefit, a respect for property
> (to the rejection of community ownership), and towards
> secularism. "Culture of fear"? When did that start,
> would you say? 1920? 1960? 1700?
More recently I'd say there is an emphasis on individual benefit, a
fetishisation of property, a reaction back toward religion, and a culture of
fear leading to an embrace of centralised authoritarian solutions to
perceived dangers.
Also, for culture of fear I would put the date very recently. It coincides
with the particular conservative governments now in office in Australia and
the US, so for us started in the late nineties but really kicks in from 2000
onward. I also believe that it coincides with global economic downturn,
which is certainly not the fault of those governments as far as I am aware.
I do accuse them, however, of using the downturn as part of the meme of
"these uncertain times" (chaos => fear).
I think it derives from further back, of course; I think we have had an
unfortunate tendency toward irrational fear for a long time. It's just that
recent governments have pushed all the buttons on purpose, because they
derive their ongoing support from the compliance brought by the fear. The
message is "The world is fearful and the problems are too big for you. Only
your government can control the uncontrollable".
It is hard for me to say this last part... I think that perhaps this fear
comes from the social change away from a group oriented society, toward more
strongly enabled individuals. I wonder if the world really was simpler a few
decades ago, and if it is more difficult cognitively to live in it now, for
westerners. I wonder if some very basic memes that are strong especially in
this country, about unpredictability being mitigated by regulation and
central control, are the controls that are now being tweaked by the new
authoritarians. What I'm getting at is, maybe we are now technologically and
economically enabled to be able to have a more individualist, unregulated,
free society, but perhaps we aren't socially ready to embrace such? There
seem to be pervasive, semi-dormant statist memes underlying much of common
belief, which are ripe for the authoritarian's picking.
To me, transhumanism partly is about acknowledging that if you are to have
an indivualist, freedom-oriented society which is the best it can be given
current/future technologies, you must have an ideology to support that,
which helps individuals manage freedom & retain high trust in a
decentralised dynamic setting.
>
> Thanks for your thoughtful and courteous post.
>
> Lee
And thank you.
Emlyn
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