Security is Everything

I spoke with my brother this evening. I may have mentioned that a couple of years ago he quit his job for political and ethical reasons. It took over a year and a half for him to find another one (but, as he said, the promise of ethics is not ease or reward). Fortunately, he now has a position which he likes and for which he is well-suited. Anyway, it had been a while since we spoke, so we had some catching up to do. As usual, he had some interesting things to say. His basic point: that the fundamental political message of the Bush administration is "be afraid, be very afraid" and that the message has been received, ingested, and incorporated in ways that we are only beginning to trace.

There has already been substantial commentary on the contemporary culture of fear. From the color-coded terror alert systems (are they even still around?) to the clearly false but nonetheless repeated ties of Iraq to 9/11, the Bush administration--and its media lackeys--trade in the currency of fear. What do they buy with all this fear? Power, the power to secure and to order, to eliminate rights, to spy and police, all in the name of security. We are insecure. We want to be protected. And we can never be secure enough.

This infantilizing message of insecurity overlaps with and is reinforced by some left emphases on victimization (a move that is contrary to and necessarily undermines two centuries of labor struggle). For some feminists, therapists, and mental health workers, the key to recovery is acknowledging how one has been violated. One should always believe the victim. We might recall some of the extremes of the cult of the victim--the McMartin daycare trial and panic around satanic child abuse and the repressed memory movement. Particularly striking in these phenomena were the ways the most severe and dramatic harms were those that had been repressed or forgotten, those that were unseen and unspoken. Some of the so-called backlash feminists focused on the culture of victimization on college campuses, viewing it as a kind of new Victorianism that denied women's sexuality and treated men as predators. One aspect of this work that is worth noting--the way it points out how some feminist work reinforces a sense of insecurity, a sense that women need to be protected, even as the women to be protected were privileged college students rather than women seeking to take care of themselves in an uncertain and volatile economy. These latter women, at least in the view of the msm, were more likely to be wiley sexual agents, getting pregnant in order to get benefits.

So, there are points of overlap between right and left messages around fear and security. You are vulnerable. You need to be protected. You are at risk. You are in danger.

It should hardly be surprising that these messages manifest themselves in personal life, in people's everyday experiences. As my brother said, it's like racism--people receive constant racist messages from the msm, so it's no wonder that they sometimes have knee jerk reactions that are racist; it's not surprising that racism inscribes itself in seemingly small ways in everyday interactions (and here I confess to liking Crash (the 2004 movie) very much--I think it showed how racism travels through everyday interactions, seemingly beyond the intentions or knowledge of its carriers).

And, we should also keep in mind that fear sells. Advertising relies on our anxieties, our fears of being ostracized or uncool. But even more, people are willing to pay big money for security--to live in doorman buildings and gated communities, for locks and alarms, guards and weapons. Some people take their kids out of public schools--too dangerous. Others never put them into daycare--too dangerous. And now it's clear that even churches are pretty dangerous, particularly Catholic ones. Nothing is safe--neither the streets nor the internet, neither health food nor junk food, not the air, not the soil. Danger is everywhere.

It's no wonder people carry these fears into their everyday lives, looking for security wherever they can find it, even if it means projecting the fears into fantastic sites and seeking to eliminate them.

Comments

[Craig]

We were doing Montesquieu in my social theory class the other night. I was explaining the "nature" and "principle" of despotism. The "nature" is that the prince, alone, rules without law and everything is "dragged along by his will and caprice." The "fundamental law" of despotism is that the despot delegates his absolute power to his vizir. I illustrated this with the common sense wisdom that Bush is a puppet and Cheney is the actual power in the White House - or, again, the the one ostensibly in command delegates his authority to the second in command so as to enable him to pursue his desires (in Bush's case: football and pretzels). The "principle" of despotism is fear, including the fear of arbitrary violence that is not restrained by law in any way. Finally, I pointed out that Montesquieu makes a comment about the association between despotism and a strong Church. With each point they became increasingly uncomfortable. I wonder how many term papers I'll get on the topic "Is America a despotic regime in Montesquieu's sense?"