"... On Jul 14, 10:29 pm, Slip Disc <[email protected]> wrote: ..."
> Much of the fears you cite have been quelled in our time. We've > commandeered much of the planet and created secure environs in which > to abide without fear. I can't agree with the first part of that statement. Yes, it's true we've accomplished much through the sciences, business, engineering, technology, etc. But the majority of our species' souls and spirits (e.g., our beliefs, hopes and faith) are back in the dark ages and beyond. (See my post to Rigsy above.) > While fear plays a role in our daily lives it > is no longer the driving force of our existence, perhaps for some but > not for all. I'd say pretty much all. There are very few who have escaped the grip of fear. I will allow however, that there are many who proclaim such freedom but unconsciously are still very much in it's grip. It's easy to see core fear at work in the religious and a bit more difficult in those who profess a secular mind, but it's there nonetheless. Fear is an inescapable fact of life. The entire history of the human species can be written in terms of fear and how we deal with it. It's pretty much settled science that there are but two reactions to fear: fight or flight. It's easy to look about in the passage of a day and see how people's behavior fit into one of those two categories and sometimes both simultaneously. Manifested in it's more popular forms today, this fear is addressed in terms of anxiety and tension. Medical science is just beginning to realize how major a factor anxiety and tension are in the body's ability to recover from injury and to even become ill in the first place. Feeling Poorly For Dummies parodies our "self-help" industry trying to cure our perceived miseries. > I'm sure there are places where what you present is as > real today as it was in the past but for much of the world it no > longer holds true. We have a great deal of amenities and for many life > is good with little to fear. There is something much more powerful > than fear and that is the cosmos. What is there to fear, "really"? I'd say that's true. Places such as the U.S. -- actuallly we sort of excel at it -- Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia, South America, the rest of North America, the Antarctic and all the ships at sea and in space. That about covers the places where it still exists -- this fear as a driving motivator of human behavior. I'd also agree we have many amenities but that is mostly irrelevant since we will have more in the future than we do today. It's an ongoing thing. People in the sixteenth century had more amenities than those who lived during the tenth. I will allow that sometimes those amenties when new, frightened a lot of people. I'm not sure what you mean by the cosmos nor how it is more powerful than fear. From my perspective the only thing more powerful than fear is us. And the cosmos to me means everything else. You're as much a part of the cosmos as is Betelgeuse and beyond. > Let's not veer too far off track but remember this is or at least was > about your insistence that men fear and hate women, that all male > dominance is attributed to fear and your attempt to validate this > assertion by means of primal emotion. By asking a question: What else can you offer up as a rational reason why there always has been and is so much animosity between men and women? What else can it be but fear? It's what poets and artists have written and painted for eons. We keep exploring inward as well as outward and regardless the direction we look, the primal motivating force behind it all is fear. Fear of the unknown. Human beings are the world's greatest xenophobes and have become elaborate in our means of dealing with the associated risk. Fear is a good subject to explore at the moment because there is a lot of it in evidence and examining it is relatively easy. The financial marketplace -- the stock market, investments, banking, insurance -- commonly uses such terms as risk appetite, risk aversion, haven from risk, confidence, lack of confidence, fearful of this and that -- and is probably the most fluid and evident example of fear in action. The market ebbs and flows, bursts and shrinks on rumors, speculation, numbers from incredulous sources and at times pure raw emotion -- all of it evoked in the chamber of fear. Consider the pressures on human society at the moment. We're new into a century that looks closely over its shoulder at the most violent century in human history. We've just concluded nearly a full hundred years of war which is fear at its most brutal and are looking for a more peaceful world. Actually we've found it, or at least a good start. Compared to the majority of the twentieth century (I refuse to capitalize it) we have a relative state of world peace right now. War makes for good friends for the ones that survive. Our closest and wealthiest allies are now those we fought the hardest in two world wars and our cold war enemies have become enthralled with capitalism rather than warfare as a means of competition (perhaps even for world domination, but that's a big if). Reference: The books by Clavell; King Rat, Taipan, Shogun, Noble House, show the exquisite detail of how Asian and especially Chinese foresight works. They seems far better investors than do we in the western world (long term gain vs short term gain). Example? Hong Kong and Singapore for two. Yet out of this we've managed to run the car off the road with greed (another form of fear) and corruption (yet another) to the point we are currently afraid that if we don't get the economy (the buying and selling of goods, services and merchandise) moving again soon we may wind up with another depression. I think most people also realize we've made a sea change into a whole new world (which Huxley parodied) and we don't know what the rules are. Yet. Unemployment, our own debts (personal, civil and governmental), the debts of other nations, some going bankrupt, the tremendous amount of money the whole world is borrowing. There's one trend going on I'm not particularly thrilled with: back in the heyday of checks some people discovered you could live for a short time by kiting checks. Always writing a new check a little bigger to cover the last check plus enough to live on for another week or two. This seems to be what some nations are doing with their own bonds including and similar to our Treasury bonds which we have issued a lot of in recent years. Now I've seen signs that nations are issuing bonds in amounts to cover the old bonds which have come due plus a little more to live on for a while. Okay, this sounds like a scary position to be in and it is, but not the way you might think. We -- the big global we -- have created a fiat economy. It was the only way to finance all the wars we were having last century. But we came out of those wars prosperous and on a buying binge which easily elimiinated all the huge debt and drove up prices way beyond their real value -- the real value being a point of equity between a good or service and the amount of currency in circulation. But as Smith pointed out, when demand is strong, production and prices increase. And it's okay to spend more than we should for something. A certain amount of kiting can actually pull real wealth along behind it. In other terms its called inflation. But we went way overboard. We leveraged exponentially when you consider the fancy complex investment devices we created. I'm sure you've heard the term deleveraging bantered about. That's what we're doing. The problem is we don't know how much over-value there is in investments being held around the world so we don't know the totality of the shock to the system. A major depression is within the realm of possibility. We just don't need to find a heretofore hidden Deepwater Horizon in our global economy. Not right now. The global economy is just beginning to rebuild it's reserves against such shocks -- which is a great way to buffer ourselves against such future shocks (which we know will happen -- we've not yet fully learned our lesson.) But in the meantime our fiat economy moves on, creating new wealth out of need, want and desire. Okay so I went to far with the economics. What can I say. The subject fascinates me. But all of that adds up to new pressures, new tensions, new doubts and risky steps. Our fear index is probably spiking at the moment. Fortunately like the body physical we can stand periods of high pressure for short times with no discernable damage. But I'm not worried and neither should anyone else. We've been here before. Even got the t-shirt collection. It's just another new set of fears, anxieties, worries and doubts to deal with and get past. We always have and there's no reason we shouldn't. It's our creation and we're not going to let it get away from us.
