Police Brutality in Canada
By Marcelo Colussi: Fear paralyzes. That is not new at all. We have all known it since time immemorial, and those who exercise some quota of power, in addition to knowing it, use it. Fear involves something irrational, primary; the "well-thinking" logic loses its supremacy there. Because it is a primary feeling, almost on the order of the unconditioned (instinctive) reflex, it brings us closer to the biological world..
Someone scared, let alone terrified, falls prey to the most visceral, most unthinkable reactions, leaving aside reasoned, cold and logical decisions totally aside. Making use of these circumstances, based on a hegemonic project, is something that is well known in history: whoever commands takes advantage of the fear of the other to exercise his power. That is, by all accounts, a wicked, Machiavellian mechanism. But who said that perversion is not an inherent part of the human?
Today, in our hyper-technocratic society, the management of emotions, including fear, is an element of capital importance for the maintenance of the system. Obviously, if someone manages and manipulates that fear, he is not the ordinary citizen, the mass man, as he has been called. It is he who suffers it, the object of manipulation; but the strings of the puppet are not precisely moved by him. For this there is what the American academy calls "human engineering." "We do not want another Venezuela in our country!" Right-wing candidates in any Latin American nation constantly repeat. And, of course, they win the elections. The fear of foreigners "who come to steal our jobs and bring crime" allowed Trump in the United States and many European leaders to win their respective elections, riding on those ghosts.
Caligula remembered as a despotic ruler, full of madness, perversion, and acts of extreme cruelty
In this logic, the Polish-American Zbigniew Brzezinsky, a member of important tanks of thought in the United States and a professor at Johns Hopkins University, one of the most conspicuous representatives of this imperial right that feels itself owner of the world, could say without ambiguity: «In the technotronic society the course will be set by the sum of individual support of millions of uncoordinated citizens who will easily fall into the range of magnetic and attractive personalities, who will effectively exploit the most efficient techniques to manipulate emotions and control reason ».
These techniques - increasingly refined and effective, by the way - respond, for their part, to a project of global domination. They represent what the shaman, the tribal witch or the holy Roman Catholic Apostolic Church may have done before. Religion has existed since "the first hypocrite found the first fool," said Voltaire, scaring him, it should be added: he who misbehaves will burn eternally in hell. People undoubtedly believed it for centuries. But «Hell does not exist; what exists is the disappearance of sinful souls ", clarified the current pontiff Francisco. To frighten with the unknown - the bogeyman or the man with the bag that is going to come, which frightens children - are mechanisms as old as the world. Without a doubt, they give results. "Religions are nothing more than a set of superstitions useful to keep ignorant peoples under control," commented theologian Giordano Bruno. Manipulating the fear of the population gives good results ... for those who manipulate, of course. Today the media industry, our modern "religion", is taking care of it with hyper-sophisticated techniques
. Maintaining terrified populations is good business for those in power, a great invention prepared from a hegemonic project of domination. The terrorizing agent can vary (the devil, communism, evil spirits, Islamic fundamentalism, the man in the bag, the gangs), although the effect achieved is always similar: someone with fear, someone terrified is very easily manipulated, they are paralyzes, becomes tame. But today - and this is what we want to highlight - the management of that fear has taken on tremendous dimensions. Human beings not only live in fear of the natural vicissitudes that we do not handle –as it has always been: death, natural disasters, uncertainty about fate– but today we increasingly suffer from “human catastrophes ». But even more so, which makes the situation more pathetic, that fear is rationally induced from a determined project of domination. "Our ignorance is planned by great wisdom," said Scalabrini Ortiz.
Why do Latin American populations, increasingly, seem to live kidnapped in their own homes, defended with bars and barbed wire, terrified of walking down the street, thinking paranoidly about the next assault? Interesting fact: private security agencies, together with the business of illegal drugs and the sale of cell phones, are the three sectors that have grown the most in the region in recent decades. “You don't have to be a sociologist or political scientist to realize the relationship that exists between the gang boy who is sent to extort a neighborhood and the private security agency, of a deputy or a military man, who the next day comes to offer his services, "said a young man from a Central American gang with crystal clarity. The current fear that exists in the world - whether in the prosperous North or in the famished South - is largely induced.
Today we are no longer frightened by spirits or demons on the loose (religions, which deal with all of them, are in retreat in an increasingly technocratic world). Today we are not afraid of ghosts. We fear (or are made to fear) terrorism (in the countries of the North) or crime (in the impoverished South).
The Scream - Edvard Munch symbolizes human anxiety.
Although the reasons for our terrors, if we analyze them exhaustively, are not precisely those diffuse new terrors, but the perception we have of them. Now, the perception we have of them is what the mass media builds for us. Almost all the perceptions of the world that we are incorporating are given to us - imposed on us, more correctly said - by those media.
Ask the reader what is inside, for example, a submarine. In general everyone will give roughly the same answer: a control panel, levers, dashboards with lights, sailors taking orders, a captain commanding a periscope, etc. Where does this "knowledge" come from? Of the hundreds or thousands of times that we have been bombarded with those images..
Where do our crippling fears of terrorism or rampant crime come from? Of the media matrices that have already been imposed on us. Are all Muslims bloody terrorists ready to pull a bomb out of their clothes? Are all young people from poor neighborhoods criminals ready to threaten us with a knife? Obviously not. But those are the imaginaries that have been imposed on us. "A lie repeated a thousand times ends up becoming a truth," Goebbels said during Nazism. Indeed, it is like this: modern manipulation techniques, increasingly subtle and refined, allow it.
America never apologized for destroying Iraqi children
The panic that was unleashed with the appearance of the coronavirus at the beginning of 2020, without denying that this pathogen is harmful, had a lot to do with the global media management that drove it. Hunger or work accidents cause more deaths than COVID-19, but the techniques of manipulating our fears presented this disease as the worst biblical plague in history, leaving the previous problems out of focus. In short: fear can be induced. The management of emotions, among them fear, is an element of capital importance for the maintenance of the system. Serving this is what the American academy calls "human engineering." The aforementioned Brzezinsky statement allows it to be seen with obvious evidence
Undoubtedly the world is not a bed of roses: there are deaths everywhere due to violent actions. Of course bombs explode and there are armed robberies; of course there are suicidal acts, generally called "terrorists", and of course there are also street crime, robberies with violence and "red areas" where not even the police enter. What a novelty! Every minute two people on the planet die from the detonation of a firearm. Obviously we do not live in a paradise. But, according to consistent studies, no less than ten thousand people die every day in the world due to lack of food, and more than two thousand due to lack of drinking water, while the always ill-defined and imprecise «terrorism» adds up on average ... 11 daily deaths
We are afraid of what we are told to be afraid of. And curiously, these fears seem manipulated: in the North of the world people are paranoid about the next terrorist act, which will surely be attributed to some so-called "Islamic fundamentalist group." The death of a person at the hands, for example, of a jealous husband or a delusional paranoid, is already presented as a terrorist attack, giving rise to a hyper-militarization of daily life ... and to preventive wars (which, curiously, are they always do against countries that have oil in their subsoil. What a coincidence, right?).
Muslim family killed in ‘premeditated’ terror attack in Ontario, CANADA
In the South, in impoverished countries and where life is violated daily by bullets, hunger or the lack of drinking water, people live in a paranoid state in the face of the presumption of crime that can appear on every corner. But as a community leader from a poor neighborhood in Guatemala stated: “The whole issue of the gang [youth gangs] has been greatly inflated by the media; they have a lot to do with this matter, because they oversize it. In reality, the situation is not quite as chaotic as it is claimed. You can walk down the street, but the message is that if you walk, you will be assaulted. Therefore: better to stay still in the house ».
At one point or another on the planet the slogan is that: from home to work and from work to home. The evil scares that are out there (Muslim terrorists or criminals) stalk us, make our lives impossible, they will devour us. Sadly, human engineering knows what it's doing ... and it manages to keep us quiet!
Maintaining terrified populations is good business (for those in power, of course). Never so timely as now the words of the Bolivian leader Domitila Barrios regarding all this: «Our main enemy is not imperialism, nor the bourgeoisie nor the bureaucracy. Our main enemy is fear, and we carry it inside. Someone speculated at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic that after the numerous protest demonstrations that traveled the world in 2019, the confinements, curfews and militarization of public spaces appear with the fabulous panic that was unleashed. The observation cannot be disregarded: the fear that invaded us - fear that was induced, one might say - kept us locked up. The "Stay at home" prevailed ... and the street demonstrations stopped.
Fear is a psychologically normal reaction in certain situations; it can be pathological in certain cases (phobic neuroses, for example: agoraphobia, claustrophobia, zoophobia, etc.). But the fear we are talking about here (against the "bad Muslim" or the "criminal who stalks us behind every tree") is a pure invention of human engineering, prepared from a project of domination. Is it time to open your eyes?
Rebelión has published this article with the author's permission under a Creative Commons license, respecting his freedom to publish it in other sources.
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