Fear
This post is actually one that should follow The marks of free people which I wrote a couple of days ago. Fear is a way of controlling the minds of people, is a way of making people do whatever the individuals inducing it want. Fear restricts freedom. Fear has been used and is continuously been used by governments, terrorists and religious leaders to control our behaviors and to increase their power. The government that magnifies the risk of national security threats is as guilty as the terrorist who explodes a car bomb or as guilty as the priest who threatens believers with hell. They all have as goal to limit our actions, to blurr our minds, to make us propagate fear and finally and most importantly, to increase their own power.
What is the recipee to avoid being controlled? The recipee is the same that the one who make us free according to what I said in The marks of free people. Independent thought, rational skepticism and rigorous questioning should be part of our modus vivendi. We should not trust our governments. Being well informed is not just turning on the TV at 9 pm and watching the news given by a particular news channel. It is looking for the information in different sources and looking for different opinions. We should not trust our priests, fathers, pastors, imams, etc if they threaten us with hell. They might be worse sinners that we are. We should not let terrorists dominate our minds. I remember when the Shining Path (Peruvian terrorist movement)threatened us by saying that they will bomb our universities if we went to study the days they declared "armed strikes". Guess what: We did not listen to them... we were free.
posted by Doctor Marco at 22:43
5 Comments:
Be afraid.... Be very afraid. (snickering)
You know what I think is funny. my grandmother had a room on the back of her house called a nuke. She said that was the craze back in the 40's or something. All these people were installing these rooms on their houses because the government warned them of a nuclear attack. Now my question was, what do you do when the attack is over. Do you come out of the room and expose yourself to nuclear fallout? Or, stay in the room until you starve to death? Either way you are destine to doom.
A recent event spawned this post by me declaring the same type of attack. I must say that I am afraid of being afraid.
Dr. you also most wonderfully display the obligation of responsibility that comes along with freedom. You continue to succeed at consistently writing wonderful and thoughtful posts. Truly a great honor to be blogrolled by such a man, writer, and thinker as yourself.
We will all have fear sometime in our lives. The thing we have to think about is what to do when it comes. Usually we have fear at a moment of decision-making. There are usually 2 options (or decisions to make). One based on courage and one based on fear. If we choose courage, even if we make a mistake we would not regret it. If we choose fear and we make a mistake, we will always regret it.
Thanks for your words, Crystal.
Nice comment, Aphrodite. It is true that appropriate levels of anxiety and stress help us function better. It is also true that the goal should be to conquer fear through information. We should not let others inject fear into us, like a drug that will confuse our minds.
Sarah is also right when she says that even rational thinking might not conquer fear. We have to decide that we want to be free, on top of being well informed.
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