How much fear do we want? Enough of it preserves our lives. Too much of it diminishes our lives. Currently, the balance is skewed by an overload of fear. Anxiety, its clinical name, is in epidemic proportions..
In favour of the measure to monitor social networks, it can be argued that it can significantly improve security agencies’ ability to deal with terrorist organizations. The claim is that intelligence agencies that monitor the networks, in many cases, can protect their territory from terrorist attacks. For instance, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), after keeping movement on extremist groups’ social networks under surveillance, has been able to arrest several terrorist suspects and allegedly disrupt their terrorist plots.
Yet how much fear do we want? Enough of it preserves our lives. Too much of it diminishes our lives. Currently, the balance is skewed by an overload of fear. Anxiety, its clinical name, is in epidemic proportions.
Employment is less secure. Computing and robotics shrink the number of jobs. Domestic violence, bullying and suicide make terrible the lives of many Australians. Progressive political leadership freezes in the face of conservative attack. Terrorist threats, unknown decades ago, require new organizations, structures, laws and restrictions. There is growing unease about inequality. And the media knows a scary story will sell.
Internationally, climate change threatens the global future. Defence spending, with surgical and large-scale killing capacity, increases daily. Several, formerly stable, countries have unstable leaders. Terrorism, which by definition terrifies, becomes an everyday experience.
Our fear of non-survival is so powerful that we can easily become unhinged or be manipulated by unscrupulous politicians. It is easy.
It goes like this. "We are being threatened by those evil people over there. These are extraordinary times. Trust me, do whatever I say and you will be safe, you will survive.’ ‘Sounds good what do we have to give you to protect us?’ Give me the extra powers I need and some of your freedoms. And I need access to your thinking and base fears.’"
So runs the contract, which operates at observable and obscured unconscious levels. It has a label: Fight-Flight.
"Our fear of non-survival is so powerful that we can easily become unhinged or be manipulated by unscrupulous politicians. It is easy."
Citizens need to believe that the force which threatens is evil, but we are good. Only the strong will survive, so the vulnerable and infirm will have to be sidelined. Opposition to, or questioning of,