Culture of Fear (And How it Controls Us)
Over the summer, the Peace Education Center of the Hudson Valley will have a table at the wonderful Rosendale Farmers Market (I will be there two Sundays a month, so come visit!). This past Sunday was our first day and I had a lovely time chatting with folks, primarily about the things I usually talk about, violence, peace, justice, healing, etc… While speaking with one man—someone who had previously attended the PECHV’s Earth Day Celebration—we started discussing the power of fear. He asked me what role I thought fear played in why the world works as it does. I replied that fear is central to creating the horrors and chaos we see today (and throughout history). Fear is a necessary component of systems of violence. Fear makes the Culture of Violence possible; it not only creates the Culture of Violence, but it also supports and perpetuates it.
While I wouldn’t categorize Fear as a Root Cause (if you’ve read earlier posts, you’ll know what I’m talking about), I would call it a mechanism that manifests on so many levels thus sowing division, mistrust, othering, silence, and sabotage. As a mechanism, it makes most Root Causes acceptable and even palatable, ushering in efforts of control and violence.
Perhaps in another post, I can dig into fear on a personal level; the fear that holds you back from speaking, doing, and living the life you want to live. And let me say this about that kind of fear: I have a healthy fear of wasps and bees, being allergic to them, and a largely irrational fear of flying. Both of these fears can keep me from doing things. I also have internalized trauma that often manifests as fear or shame thus limiting my ability to be fully me at times. I fully recognize that these types of fear can also be part of systemic fear but what I want to talk about is the fear that is imposed upon us by those in power to maintain a Culture of Violence.
The fear my neighbor and I chatted about last Sunday is the fear that those in power use to manipulate ‘the masses’ and this fear, when we succumb to it—and most of us do at one point or another—allows the Culture of Violence to flourish. What am I talking about? Hmmm, let’s pick a few examples. The US is keen on making citizens fear ‘the other’, whether immigrants, the poor, the “communists”, Socialism, people of color, or really, anyone that doesn’t look, think, or act like you. Of course, most of this manipulation is done to maintain White Male Christian Supremacy and to support the use of force and physical violence all over the world.
Fear is used on young children to teach them to obey authority - even when the authority figures may cause them harm. In classrooms, students' movements, thoughts, and experiences are restricted under the guise of protecting them but really, we are using fear of punishment to teach them that being controlled is OK and normal. When we teach history, we use “fear of the other” as a means to inculcate learners into believing that all the war and violence unleashed on the world (by the US and other imperial powers) was done as a matter of protection (thus making it acceptable to overly fund our military and police forces.) We use surveillance freely and encourage ratting each other out thus breeding more mistrust and division. This mechanism of fear leads to a Culture of Silence (thanks, Freire) wherein people are afraid to speak out against injustice and violence. It also leads to mob-mentalities entrenched in Us and Them thinking. So, simply, fear begets obedience which begets silence which begets sabotage which begets cultural and structural violence which begets direct violence.
What’s the antidote? Trust. Openness. Curiosity. Learning. Reflection. Love. If we grounded classrooms and community spaces (or heck, even our families) in any (or all) of these things instead of FEAR, we’d create young people—and a society—with different mindsets and visions for the world.
