Fear And Consumption

Leden: "For anyone who was impressed and amazed by the elegance and insight provided by Marilyn Manson in Bowling For Columbine amid a sea of ignorant, dangerous opinions, you might be interested in this article. For those of you who haven’t seen Bowling yet (go and watch it!), Marilyn Manson’s basic argument was that the US government kept the population of America in a perpetual state of fear because fear fed consumption. And consumption as we all know fuels the economy.

Keep the people afraid and they’ll keep buying.

For this and other reasons, one of the most important political and social statements I’ve made in recent times is to reject fear."

Comments

[Mattz]

I believe our world is being played for a
fool.

[Adam]

Everybody plays the fool sometimes.

[dropout]

We are not being played for the fool, we are showing who we are. The society and politics is just a manifestation of a larger system that arises because of the smaller subsystems. At the core of the subsystems is the individual consciousness of the person.

You can't reject fear, it is impossible. What you can do is to experience the fear and in that moment you give yourself time to realize it is just a reaction that can pass. When you reject, that in itself causes fear.

The amygdala is triggered before cognition and starts the fear response along the fastest neuropathways of the system. Through intense and long training, or brain injury, you can reroute the pathway through the thalamus to the frontal cortex. The response is still there but less. Very few people, have this ability.

So what you get is a constant attack on the system. Watching the news, movies, etc is the brain equivalent to a denial of service attack is to a website. You then move from fear to a lesser anxiety of worry. This stressor continues to "deny service" to the brains higher functions and ultimately starts destroying the system. Behaviors such as agression, sex, hording, addiction arise as an effort to counteract the attacks but they just make it worse. Leading to a downward spiral of fear, anger, anxiety, depression, etc etc disease and death.

Being the economist dropout turned something else, I do agree that this fear creates the behavior of consumption and that only disgusts me in that it is obvious what comes next. The fact that few people realize this is just, well, the way it is.

Fear is a given, allowing it to create the three poisons of greed, anger and delusion is optional, but you have to work at it and work through it.

[Adam]

Very sober analysis, dropout. (Oh, how I've missed your analysis! :)

[maremaris]

I attend Sheridan College & we just watched Bowling for Columbine ........ The movie was very intense and the discussion in our class is more about our awareness of the events in our nation. but i really wanted to say thank you because without movies like Bowling for Columbine i think many of us would still be in the dark