polyphonic

“…the notion of social control…the requirement of every sovereign state to exert control over the behavior of its citizens, to keep them orderly and reasonably docile. For fifteen years, Western nations had maintained their citizens in a state of perpetual fear. Fear of the other side. Fear of nuclear war. The Communist menace. The iron curtain. The evil empire… then suddenly, in the fall of 1989, it was all finished…the fall of the Berlin Wall created a vacuum of fear. Nature abhors a vacuum. Something had to fill it…environmental crisis took the place of the Cold War…now we have radical fundamentalism and post-9/11 terrorism to make us afraid…point is, although the specific cause of our fear may change, we are never without fear itself…afraid of strangers of disease, of crime, of the environment…the homes [we] live in, the food [we] eat, the technology that surrounds [us]…particular panic over things [we] can’t see- germs, chemicals, additives, pollutants…the military-industrial complex is no longer the primary driver of society. In reality for the past fifteen years we have been under the control of an entirely new complex…the politico-media complex…dedicated to promoting fear in the population- under the guise of promoting safety.” (Chrichton 455-456)

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How quickly I forget that this is meaningless.