State of Fear

Although for the most part I believe that our current rate of growth in technology and information is generating so much potential for exponential wealth and standard of living increases that it will free us from the Leviathan of government control (mainly because our society will become far too complex and changing far too rapidly for any central authority to attempt to keep up with management and regulation), there is still one major danger that seriously threatens our potential for growth and freedom.

September 11^th symbolizes this great danger to liberty and progress as we move through the 21^st century: Fear. The events themselves are violently twisted and demented, but in overall magnitude of lives lost and damage done deliberately (which is an important distinction, as compared to automobile deaths for example, which are much more grotesque but are a result of error rather than deliberation) they themselves pale in comparison with the deliberate fiscal and human costs of the subsequent Iraq and Afghanistan incursions.

At the writing of this blog entry, the Iraq war/occupation had cost American tax payers over $450 billion, with 3,774 dead and 27,767 brutally mangled, by official counts (www.antiwar.com). Infrastructure damage to Iraq can't even be calculated in any meaningful way, nor have such estimates been attempted, but conservative estimates put the civilian deaths at somewhere between 71,000 and 78,000 (IraqBodyCount.org), though some studies (i.e. The Lancet/John Hopkins University study) claim almost 10 times as many deaths.

All of this made possible by political exploitation of people's irrational fears and ignorance of the long chain of cause and effect which had lead to the events of September 11^th. No one really asked “why?”. The best interests of American citizens, to withdraw our foreign military bases and end out meddling in unstable regions, were never considered. On the right, Neoconservatives have done especially well at hijacking the catastrophe and using a campaign of fear to further their “big government conservative” agenda. The spineless left has adopted the same tactics to protect their political office from seeming “soft” on defense. Once again the two-faces of American politics failed the American people, but did a good job of scaring them shitless and leading them down the war path.

This same kind of fear is emboldening an ever growing consensus that we are undergoing an anthropomorphically generated global climate change, with impending disastrous consequences, and that immediate governmental action must be taken to prevent it. Michael Crichton recently dealt with this idea in a marvelously enjoyable novel called “State of Fear”, in which he presents a plethora of sourced scientific data which runs contrary to the conventional wisdom on global warming. It is a fascinating topic which I will devote a future post to, but for the purposes of this entry I wish only to draw the parallels between the use of irrational fear and hysteria instead of solid and consistent information, logic and reasoning to explore the theory of global warming and the justifications for an invasion of an non-threatening foreign nation.

I foresee the 21^st century as a struggle between the freedom that promises prosperity and the fear that threatens to strangle it. But perhaps the same could be said about the entirety of human history. I just hope freedom wins this time around.