American Culture - i need help answering a question

[Sonic]

"An inescapable, pervasive culture of fear leads to a "fight or flight response" in the populace which in effect has moved American society into an "everything is either black or white" mindset. Discuss."

i have a tentative answer, but would appreciate any help you will offer attacking this from different angles.

my answer so far:
almost inescapable, although ironically it saturates our very diversions from it, sports scandals, celebrities in jail, cynicism in art. A lack of honesty from anyone in power -- but of course no one can ever accept that they are constantly being lied to. Like fanatics, an extreme faith hides a much deeper insecurity.

"excessive irritability with a preponderance of negative judgments, the pessimism of 'unfree will' - in other words: a lack of strength in resisting stimuli, and doubt. These psychological states can all be observed in the madhouse, if in an exaggerated form. Also nihilism - the penetrating feeling of--'nothingness'.. To give excessive weight to moral values or to fictions of the 'beyond' or to social distress or to suffering in general: every such exaggeration of a narrow viewpoint is in itself already a sign of sickness, also the predominance of the herd instincts in us" -nietzsche

related to morality. Moral values have hitherto been the highest values (faith, equality, love, truth, purity, complete responsibility for ones own fate, freedom, the entire monetary system depends on the myth of the 'invisible hand' of god giving all the moneys to the people who will use it in the best most righteous way possible) -- but we now recognize in our 'virtues' a subtlety, a cunning, a form of lust for gain and power. The belief in absolute truth turns and directs its stare at its neighbor values and discovers the fiction from which they, and it, spring. Extreme positions are not replaced with moderate ones, but with other extreme positions, often worse than the first.


* * * * * * * * * *
of note: An example would be the former president Bush stating that the world had a choice to make; "Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists."

"People who suffer from depression, even in mild forms, commonly view the world in black and white, categorizing experiences and events in extreme terminology that fits with their generally negative perspective on life."

this is an inductive informal fallacy of the type 'hasty generalizations' or red herrings which asserts that qualities of one thing are inherently qualities of another, merely by an irrelevant association, and are likely based on an Appeal to Emotion

Black and White Thinking is like an infection, reducing the terms of discussion unnecessarily, eliminating an entire range of possible ideas and often demonizing others by implicitly categorizing them in the "Other" - the evil that we are supposed to avoid."

[Hellspell]

amen to that.

[#M|A#Wolf]

This sounds like some kind of important homework you should be doing on your own :S. Besides, I understood less than half of what you said.

[jAcKRoCk*]

Sounds like you are going to fail *troll face*

[Lantry]

Just talk about the duality of man.

[millertime]

Let me forecast the future for you!

The last battleground for your freedom is cyberspace, all Western governments are beginning to implement controls on the free flow of ideas, information, etc.

We have had a war on Drugs for 25 years...
A war on terror for almost 10 years
Now you are seeing the beginning of war in cyberspace, why?

Because the web is the last government frontier to control our minds and hearts.

The current level of website hacking is extremely high, why, the intent is to have a cyberspace version of 911 then with popular support, governments introduce laws to put law and order on the wild web, side benefit it will also allow it to control the free flow of information and ideas, etc .

You are watching history being made!

Can it be stopped?

Does anyone really care?

Trust your feelings....if it does not feel right....it is not right!!!

[titiPT]

Oh noez, it's millertime!

[tempest]

Run! It's the communists terrorists mexicans liberals socialists obamas governments CYBERWARRIORS!!!

[Lantry]

The last battleground for your freedom is cyberspace

At least until the day when space travel becomes available to the general public! Firefly, anyone?

[#M|A#Wolf]

Is there a new kind of drug I should be aware of?

[Frogulis]

Damn, I'm cold.

millertime: 911 is a number that means nothing in many countries.
Please find yourself some better terminology to describe "911" so people from any other countries other than the US (there are many here, including myself) can feel relevant.
I know the topic is about American culture, but...hold on...
HOLD ON! WHAT WAS YOUR POST EVEN ABOUT?! :O

:)

[tempest]

911? Isn't that the police emergency number in the US? :D

[V-Man]

Anecdotally, I've seen a bit of a reversal of this -- that is, people shying away from any sort of specificity and preferring a sort of "grey area" or spectrum of correctness. Of course, this leads to the ironic extreme generalization that any form of black-and-white thinking is bad. (Insert a list of problems resulting from this in my personal life.)

[#M|A#Wolf]

Are we still talking about American culture?

[Sonic]

i agree with internet control or censorship being an issue, but its not the main focus of my friend's question, which put in another way, is "what are the causes of 'everything is black or white' thinking (in the US specifically but anywhere is okay)" and "Is there a pervasive colture of Fear? What are it's effects? What is it really?"

[Sonic]

full metal jacket is awesome and that duality of man scene is very relevant to the question. Any other movies with things like that? Im sure theres many just cant think of them.

Anecdotally, I've seen a bit of a reversal of this -- that is, people shying away from any sort of specificity and preferring a sort of "grey area" or spectrum of correctness. Of course, this leads to the ironic extreme generalization that any form of black-and-white thinking is bad. (Insert a list of problems resulting from this in my personal life.)

I agree with you in some sense, people who are aware of the problem lose the ability to really decide for sure on anything. The problem is, they're right. There are no definite answers. This leaves all the decision making to the fanatics, liars and the tyrants and the selfish.
****
using a meta-perspective we don't confine ourselves to a black and white Aristotelian logic reality where things are either exactly the way we see them or not. (‘Aristotelian logic’ is two-valued thinking that supposes that things are either true or false, one way or the other with no in between.)

There is a famous Zen koan or riddle which asks ‘is God dead?’ This question is essentially a trap for the student to fall into by answering either ‘yes’ or ‘no’. This true/ false logic assumes there can be only two answers and by adopting it the student loses their Buddha nature.

The key and true value of the riddle is not so much in the content but in the change in the thinking process and consciousness of the student.

This is very similar to the type of thinking required to comprehend certain scenarios thrown up by quantum physics. In the case of Schrodinger’s Cat, a cat is placed into a sealed box with a poison gas capsule. Also in the box is a radioactive isotope with a radioactive detector. As soon as the detector senses any sign of radioactive decay it will release the gas into the box, instantly killing the cat.

According to quantum theory, the radioactive isotope has a 50/50 chance of decaying. Thus the cat has a 50/50 chance of either living or dying. Curiously, until the box is opened the cat remains in an indeterminate state. Whilst in the box it is both ‘not dead’ and ‘dead’.

In this situation our standard existential language falls short. “The cat is…x” is an insufficient description just in the same way the description ‘the area is poor’ or ‘John is ugly’ remain insufficient to convey the true essence of the thing or person.

Indeed it is doubtful if our language can ever convey such a definitive essence. Indeed for centuries mystics and sages from the East have held the belief that the ultimate nature of reality transcends language.

in Jerusalem ‘is’ the sacred site in the Old City ‘really’ the Temple Mount or Noble Sanctuary? Once we put a label on something does it stop ‘being’ the things it could also be?

From analysing history it is apparent that certain upper echelons of society and state decision making remained uneasy about the mass populace exercising too much control over society or becoming too introspective with their own emotions. The 18th century American statesman Alexander Hamilton deeply distrusted the mass population especially in political decision making and infamously referred to them as ‘the great beast’.

Similarly influential thinkers like Sigmund Freud were also uneasy and cynical about human nature, believing that mankind harboured dangerous innate irrational desires that if not managed properly would lead to a breakdown in society. In effect, he believed that we each had within us a primal beast that needed to be kept in check. His nephew, Edward Bernays would become instrumental in keeping the population duly contained through the use of ‘public relations’.

Bernays used this to channel the population’s attention towards ever increasing consumption and dependence. He was instrumental into linking products and ideas with people’s unconscious emotions and drivers. Simple things became replaced by ‘desires’. And helped shape identities. The present day marketing and advertising industries have largely continued this trend in an age of celebrity and aspirational status.

This can lead us to sacrifice other values lower down the scale, such as ‘keeping healthy’ or ‘being stress free’, ‘having time to enjoy family life’ or ‘positively contributing to society’.
Our cultures and society also wield a subtle control over us by the way we are defined and labelled. Consider when people are identified as ‘radical’, ‘maladjusted’, ‘unhinged’, or diagnosed as ‘psychotic’ or ‘mentally unstable’. Michel Foucault wrote about the power of such labelling, particularly in the 18th century when ‘madness’ was used in a broad sense to taint and stigmatize all elements of society that were too radical from the norm, not just the mentally ill. As such it became used as a means of social control.

[#M|A#Wolf]

:S,

[titiPT]

Do i have to be the one to say it?

TL;DR

[Ruthless]

Sonic...are...you.. God??

[Sonic]

‎"The genius of our inverted totalitari­an system "lies in wielding total power without appearing to, without establishi­ng concentrat­ion camps, or enforcing ideologica­l uniformity­, or forcibly suppressin­g dissident elements so long as they remain ineffectua­l. A demotion in the status and stature of the 'sovereign people' to patient subjects is symptomati­c of systemic change, from democracy as a method of 'populariz­ing' power to democracy as a brand name for a product marketable at home and marketable abroad. The new system, inverted totalitari­anism, is one that professes the opposite of what, in fact, it is. The United States has become the showcase of how democracy can be managed without appearing to be suppressed­."

Among the factors that have promoted inverted totalitarianism are

• the practice and psychology of advertising
• the rule of “market forces” in many other contexts than markets
• the penetration of mass media communication and propaganda into every household in the country
• the total co-optation of the universities
• political fanatacism/fables
• the idea of everyone's personal indebtedness to the higher powers

Among the commonplace fables of our society are hero worship and tales of individual prowess, eternal youthfulness, beauty through surgery, action measured in nanoseconds, and a dream-laden culture of ever-expanding control and possibility, whose adepts are prone to fantasies because the vast majority have imagination but little scientific knowledge. Masters of this world are masters of images and their manipulation.'

The main social sectors promoting and reinforcing this modern Shangri-La are corporate power, which is in charge of managed democracy, and the military-industrial complex, which is in charge of Superpower. The main objectives of managed democracy are to increase the profits of large corporations, dismantle the institutions of social democracy. Its primary tool is privatization. Managed democracy aims at the “selective abdication of governmental responsibility for the well-being of the citizenry” under cover of improving “efficiency” and cost-cutting.

Wolin argues, “The privatization of public services and functions manifests the steady evolution of corporate power into a political form, into an integral, even dominant partner with the state. It marks the transformation of American politics and its political culture from a system in which democratic practices and values were, if not defining, at least major contributing elements, to one where the remaining democratic elements of the state and its populist programs are being systematically dismantled.” This campaign has largely succeeded. “Democracy represented a challenge to the status quo, today it has become adjusted to the status quo.”

One other subordinate task of managed democracy is to keep the citizenry preoccupied with peripheral and/or private conditions of human life so that they fail to focus on the widespread corruption and betrayal of the public trust. In Wolin’s words, “The point about disputes on such topics as

• the value of sexual abstinence
• the role of religious charities in state-funded activities
• the question of gay marriage
• the morality of capital punishment and/or drug laws/enforcement

and the like, is that they are not framed to be resolved. Their political function is to divide the citizenry while obscuring class differences and diverting the voters’ attention from the social and economic concerns of the general populace.” Prominent examples of the elite use of such incidents to divide and inflame the public are the Terri Schiavo case of 2005

On inverted totalitarianism’s “self-pacifying” university campuses compared with the usual intellectual turmoil surrounding independent centers of learning, Wolin writes, “Through a combination of

• governmental contracts
  
• corporate and foundation funds
  
• joint projects involving university and corporate researchers
  
• wealthy individual donors
  

universities (especially so-called research universities), intellectuals, scholars, and researchers have been seamlessly integrated into the system. No books burned, no refugee Einsteins. For the first time in the history of American higher education top professors are made wealthy by the system'

Wolin reminds us that the image of Adolf Hitler flying to Nuremberg in 1934 that opens Leni Riefenstahl’s classic film “Triumph of the Will” was repeated on May 1, 2003 during Bush's flight to proclaim "Mission Accomplished" (The U.S. military spends more than all other militaries on Earth combined. The official U.S. defense budget for fiscal year 2008 is $623 billion; the next closest national military budget is China’s at $65 billion, according to the Central Intelligence Agency.)

[Foo]

"An inescapable, pervasive culture of fear leads to a "fight or flight response" in the populace which in effect has moved American society into an "everything is either black or white" mindset. Discuss."

I won't write the answer for you, but here are some ideas:

1. mention the obvious psychological impact of the herd mentality
2. mention the general lesser intelligence and gullibility of the American populace (and why this is so)
3. mention why pursuing material gains (at least via direct and utterly selfish ways) has overcome much of the American populace (why/when did this start?)
4. compare American philosophy to other Western cultures philosophy, as well as Asian philosophy (see Rorty, Searle, and Davidson)
5. mention the American government's ideological influences on the populace over the time period that they were instated; how did the populace change under Reagan, for example, to Bush?

[Sonic]

"An inescapable, pervasive culture of fear leads to a "fight or flight response" in the populace which in effect has moved American society into an "everything is either black or white" mindset. Discuss."
I won't write the answer for you, but here are some ideas....

Italians claim country run by Goldman Sachs
Reading IS fundamental: Financial Terrorism: How The Economic Elite Made Off With $46 Trillion
Dylan Ratigan's Epic Rant on the International Banking Cartel and Political Corruption


1. "The problem that I set here is not what shall replace mankind in the order of living creatures (—man is an end—): but what type of man must be bred, must be willed, as being the most valuable, the most worthy of life, the most secure guarantee of the future.
This more valuable type has appeared often enough in the past: but always as a happy accident, as an exception, never as deliberately willed. Very often it has been precisely the most feared; hitherto it has been almost the terror of terrors;—and out of that terror the contrary type has been willed, cultivated and attained: THE DOMESTIC ANIMAL, THE HERD, the sick brute-man—the moralistic priest in man...
!What is good?—Everything that heightens the
feeling of power in man, the will to power, power itself.
What is evil?—Whatever springs from weakness.
What is happiness?—The feeling that power increases—that resistance is overcome.
Not contentment, but more power; not peace at any price, but war; not virtue, but fitness(virtue in the Renaissance sense, virtu, virtue free of moral acid).
The weak and the botched shall perish: first principle of our charity. And one should help them to it.
What is more harmful than any vice?—Active sympathy for the botched and the weak—THE HERD MENTALITY.


2. stupidity and gullibility:
"The pathetic thing that grows out of this condition is called faith: in other words, closing one’s eyes upon one’s self once for all, to avoid suffering the sight of incurable falsehood. People erect a concept of morality, of virtue, of holiness upon this false view of all things; they ground good conscience upon faulty vision; they argue that no other sort of vision has value any more, once they have made theirs sacrosanct with the names of “God,” “salvation” and “eternity.” I unearth this theological instinct in all directions: it is the most widespread and the most subterranean form of falsehood to be found on earth. Whatever a theologian regards as true must be false: there you have almost a criterion of truth. His profound instinct of self-preservation stands against truth ever coming into honour in any way, or even getting stated. Wherever the in fluence of theologians is felt there is a transvaluation of values, and the concepts “true” and “false” are forced to change places: whatever is most damaging to life is there called “true,” and whatever exalts it, intensifies it, approves it, justifies it and makes it triumphant is there called “false.”... When theologians, working through the “consciences” of princes (or of peoples—), stretch out their hands for power, there is never any doubt as to the fundamental issue: the will to make an end, the nihilistic will exerts that power...."
--Stupid people can be happier, but it is a shallow, superficial happiness. They don't have to deal with complex thought or larger-historical world events.

3. Why are we slaves to materiality? It's not just us, granted we are the epicenter of corporate corruption, it has spread around the world... See Zeitgeist Pt II-Addendum and III-Moving Forward, and the book/movie titled 'The Corporation'.

4. compare philosophies... too deep of a topic for right now (I will: see Rorty, Searle, and Davidson)

5. it seems #2-5 are all very related, see the book/movie titled "Manufacturing Consent" (1989). You are apt to mention Reagan. Also, Hoover, Bush Sr., it is really economic power over policy that has been changed the most in America compared to other western countries.



The Police State: Chief Says No Cover Up In Fatal Police Beating Of A Hog Tied Homeless Man
How Corporations Became 'Persons'... The amazing true story of a legal fiction that undermines American democracy.
All Roads Lead to Rothschild

[#M|A#Wolf]

Sonic...are...you.. God??

He is God.

[Waffles]

The original topic/post was not a question.