The Three Legged Stool Part 3

Pop Quiz:

What New Age philosopher said: “The best use of imagination is creativity. The worst use of imagination is anxiety.”?

What poet said: “Our anxiety does not come from thinking about the future, but from wanting to control it.”?

What Russian author said: “Our whole life is taken up with anxiety for personal security, with preparations for living, so that we really never live at all.”?

What President said: “That’s why, over the past six years, deportations of criminals are up 80 percent. And that’s why we’re going to keep focusing enforcement resources on actual threats to our security. We’ll prioritize, just like law enforcement does every day. It does not apply to anyone who might come to America illegally in the future. It does not grant citizenship, or the right to stay here permanently, or offer the same benefits that citizens receive -– only Congress can do that.”?

What Stoic philosopher said: “Man is not worried by real problems so much as by his imagined anxieties about real problems”?

Answers at the end of the post.

To be scared is a visceral reaction to an external stimulus. Movies such as Halloween and Friday the 13th are little more than a string of horrifying stimuli intended to scare the viewers. Samuel Johnson made the following observation: “Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” He is scared not fearful.

Fear, on the other hand, is a mindset. People are said to live in fear. Being scared is immediate and short lived whereas as fear becomes a way of life. Anne Frank is a classic example of living in fear. The Democrats use fear as a tool for manipulation and the creation of fear is made easier because of ignorance and dependence. Fear of the unknown is the byproduct of the education system. The unknown has no limits because knowledge is not dispensed in our schools.

So how does the Democratic Party instill fear in the electorate?

It should be noted that the only principle of mathematics that the Democrats embrace is division and one objective of their campaign of fear is to pit the oppressed (those in whom fear is instilled) and the oppressors (those instilling that fear) against each other. What follows are examples of how they create deep divisions among Americans, many of which may be irreparable. It is their intent to use the enmity they create to gain political advantage.

Reflexive Response to Trigger Terms

Rather than providing a thoughtful rationale for dealing with political issues the media and the politicians create verbal triggers to cause a desired response. There is a lengthy list of such terms that would make Pavlov proud. This amounts, collectively, to pseudo-intellectual name calling and it is driven by societal ignorance,

Toxic Masculinity

This mythopoetic term is intended to instill fear among women. For thousands of years men have, according to revisionist historians, built a power structure that favors men, dominated all financial matters and suppressed the hopes and dreams of every woman since Eve, Archie Bunker defended his misogyny by noting the Eve was created from one of Adam’s ribs…a cheaper cut.

The myth has been propagated that women get paid only sixty percent of what men get paid. The inanity of this “fact” is exposed when you point out that, if it was true, greedy capitalists would have replaced all men in the work force with women. This would result in a forty percent reduction in labor costs…and greater profits

Negative traits are attributed to men such as aggressive behavior, the need to “win” at all costs, and physical strength and courage. These traits, it is argued, tend to intimidate women and make competition in the workplace difficult, if not impossible. Is it any wonder “men” like William “Lia” Thomas want to compete with women in athletic events?

The only thing that divides men/oppressors and women/the oppressed more effectively than this feminist claptrap is marriage, which, according to the high priestesses of feminism, is the very definition of oppression. Occasionally men think that also.

White Patriarchy

It is an article of Leftist faith that adding the word “white” to any pejorative heightens the level of fear. It turns out that white men are the bane of Western Civilization. Please disregard the Enlightenment and the Renaissance, the writings of Shakespeare and the discovery of the New World…all dominated by men. And while we are it please disregard the first Queen Elizabeth, Joan of Arc and Isabella I of Castille.

In addition all accomplishments of white men are to be ignored: e.g. the telephone, the automobile, air travel and cosmetics.

White Supremacy

The use of this slander requires the complete erasure of the history of the Democratic Party, The Left has gone so far as to argue the being white is, in and of itself, white supremacy. If three people are sitting in a restaurant and two are white the entire conversation is said to be an exercise in white supremacy. Yet Democrats, such as Senator Robert Byrd, Senator Theodore Bilbo or Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black, were all members of the Ku Klux Klan and this is dutifully ignored. On the other hand, former KKK member Davis Duke. who was a Democrat from the early 1970’s until 1988, became a Republican poster child when he switched parties and ran for office in Louisiana in 1989.

By a simple act of legerdemain the Democrats changed to debate from individuals to the system. Systemic white racism became the new designated evil. It had some traction among the ignorami because it is impossible to define and sounds far more oppressive. Condemning the system supports the argument that Blacks are forever “enslaved” and living in fear as they did in the South for 100 years after the Civil War.

Whites are always cast as the oppressors and Blacks the oppressed.

Racism

This term has become basically a punctuation mark for Leftists. Sadly they have no idea what the term means. President Obama admitted that he was “lazy”. If you suggested that Obama was lazy you were accused of being a racist. That is incorrect. If you said “Like all Blacks Obama is lazy” that would be racist because the attribution a characteristic to an entire race rather than an individual is racist.

Science

The use of science is a reliable tool for creating fear. It works because most people have not even a rudimentary grasp of basic scientific principles. It is also easy to censor opposing arguments. Ask Galileo.

Anthropogenic climate change has been a leading fear factor for the last fifty years. It began as Global Cooling. Then it morphed seamlessly to the opposite, global warming. When the thermostats refused to cooperate it became just plain old climate change, allegedly driven by CO2, methane and holes in the ozone layer. When all predictions from the “experts” proved to be inaccurate it became, for a brief moment “global chaos”.

As a result of this scientific malarkey some young women underwent hysterectomies because they refused to bring children into a world that was going to become uninhabitable. In addition, we are burdened with aviary cuisinarts, i.e. power generating windmills, electric vehicles and rolling blackouts in Europe and California. Every law that was even considered by Congress was scrutinized to determine the potential impact on the global climate.

Upon reflecting on the success of the climate change flim-flam the Left seized upon the China/Fauci engineered Covid virus to exercise their authoritarian impulses. The fear that was generated was so deep that people still wear masks while driving alone in their cars. Any dissent from the governmental overreaction was tamped down by censorship, ostracism and hysteria. One of the better sartorial responses was a T-shirt that said: Make Orwell Fiction Again.

The operative pejorative is “Science Denier”. It is difficult to gin up a more idiotic cliche. Science is seen as a tool of the oppressors.

LGBTπ

In the 1990’s Acronyms Are Us introduced LGBTQ… to the world. Most people thought little of it until a reality that had been accepted and written about for centuries became a battering ram to to force Gay Pride into the national dialogue. Matthew Shepard was murdered during a drug deal gone bad. When it was discovered that Mr. Shepard was gay the kaleidoscope was turned and the crime became an attack on the gay community. LGBT became a “protected class” based on a confected history of intolerance and violence. The Democrats and their media parrots regularly remind the public of this intolerance and violence thereby spreading fear among the LGBT community.

Today the T in LGBT has become the point of a new divisive dagger in the effort to divide us. The word “transphobic” was created by our linguistic therapists to draw special attention to the tiny minority who claim to be transgender. In New York City, home of collectivist warmth, they recognize 31 genders, including HIJRA and Two-Spirit. More divisions means more societal conflict. And who has jurisdiction over the “Furries”, PETA or the ASPCA?

How about this factual tidbit…in 2016 a gay nightclub was attacked and 49 people were killed. Another 50 were injured. Information was muted about the perpetrator who, as it turns out, was a Muslim. Perhaps the media felt he was just exercising his first amendment right to practice his religion.

To be LGBT is to be oppressed. To be straight is to oppress.

Nazi/Gestapo/Fascist

When in doubt the Left simply identifies those with whom they disagree as a disciple of Adolf Hitler. The Mayor of Minneapolis and the District Attorney of Philadelphia have announced their intention to drive the Nazis from their respective jurisdictions…by which they mean Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents. It is reflexive for Leftists to define anyone they disagree with as a Nazi, a fascist or a modern Gestapo member. It might be instructive to ask Senor Krasner if, when he is chasing the Nazis from the City of Brotherly Love, he will also be deporting all socialists. After all a Nazi is a member of the National Socialist German Workers Party. Likely he would only respond with a blank stare such is the level of his ignorance. It also begs the question as to why the Left does not include the term Communist in their catalogue of villains. Turns out practitioners of the Marxist-Leninist arts killed more than 100 million people in the twentieth century. Hitler was Mother Teresa by comparison.

The Fruits of Their Labors

The use of fear has two parts: (1) identifying and vilifying the “oppressors” and (2) ensuring their ex-communication from polite society. The latter is effective when dealing with the anxious generation as social isolation is seen as a fate worse than death. Any effort by President Trump to bring us together and restore the Shining City on the Hill that John Winthrop envisioned America to be is met with an open and irrational resistance by the Democrats and their violent foot soldiers such as Antifa.

Time to dispel the fears and heal the divisions and, dare we say it, Make America Great Again.

Answers to the pop quiz:

What New Age philosopher said: “The best use of imagination is creativity. The worst use of imagination is anxiety.”? Deepak Chopra

What poet said: “Our anxiety does not come from thinking about the future, but from wanting to control it.”? Khalil Gibran

What Russian author said: “Our whole life is taken up with anxiety for personal security, with preparations for living, so that we really never live at all.”? Leo Tolstoy

What President said: “That’s why, over the past six years, deportations of criminals are up 80 percent. And that’s why we’re going to keep focusing enforcement resources on actual threats to our security. We’ll prioritize, just like law enforcement does every day. It does not apply to anyone who might come to America illegally in the future. It does not grant citizenship, or the right to stay here permanently, or offer the same benefits that citizens receive -– only Congress can do that.”? Barack Obama

What Stoic philosopher said: “Man is not worried by real problems so much as by his imagined anxieties about real problems”? Epictetus