GuidoWorld

In the last post I talked at length at some of the possible reasons why such a relatively large portion of the US populace suffers from bouts of depression. In this post I want to expand on the potential role fear and hatred play in the US depression boom.

Stress, isolation and uncertainty have long been considered triggers for depression. Likewise so are feelings of inadequacy and never feeling satiated.

We’ve already covered how critical and pervasive a message of never having enough is to the success of a consumer based society. Happy satisfied individuals do not have as much of a need to buy and consume things as a person feeling a sense of lack. Though a truly depressed person overwhelmed by existence can be a poor consumer, the modern medicated depressed person is able to function just enough to consume in an attempt to fill their voids and deflect them from their real demons and psychological woes.

In the last post we pointed out that a lot of energy is put forward to influence and manage US citizens in regards to their dual roles as consumers and voters. Those yearning for power and wealth realize that in a democratic and free market economy successful influence of public opinion is vital to reaching their goals.

While the message to consumers promotes and exploits feelings of lack and isolation, the message to voters is dominated by fear and hatred. The US has been an ascending empire for decades in which war and conflict are used to expand and fortify the US’s role as dominant superpower.

The creation of history’s largest middle class and impressive growth in the average persons standard of living have made it difficult to motivate citizens to support an aggressive foreign policy. Content individuals enjoying wealth and freedom generally do not support getting involved in others affairs or willingly send their children off to wars in distant lands.

One could make a case that the US has become the most belligerent and ambitious empire in the history of mankind. During my lifetime the US has seamlessly gone from one police action or military conflict to another without a break. Oftentimes simultaneously being engaged in active warfare on a number of fronts.

The public’s reluctance and resistance to supporting its governments being militarily engaged has been almost as consistent as the governments desire to engage in war. This has happened to such a degree that the government has felt a need to sell the public on supporting almost every military involvement over the last 90 years.

Ever since WWI the US government has identified a need to “sell” wars and military actions to the public. The Council on Public Information (CPI) was the first documented organized attempt to manipulate public opinion to overcome resistance to their war aspirations. The following paragraphs are from Wikipedia:

The purpose of the CPI was to influence American public opinion toward supporting U.S. participation in World War I via a prolonged propaganda campaign. Among those who participated in it were Wilson advisers Walter Lippmann and Edward Bernays, the latter of whom had remarked that “the essence of democratic society” was the “engineering of consent,” by which propaganda was the necessary method for democracies to promote and garner support for policy. The CPI at first used material that was based on fact, but spun it to present an upbeat picture of the American war effort. Very quickly, however, the CPI began churning out raw propaganda picturing Germans as evil monsters.

The committee used newsprint, posters, radio, telegraph, cable and movies to broadcast its message. He recruited about 75,000 “Four Minute Men,” volunteers who spoke about the war at social events for an ideal length of four minutes, considering that the average human attention span was judged at the time to be four minutes. They covered the draft, rationing, war bond drives, victory gardens and why America was fighting. It was estimated that by the end of the war, they had made more than 7.5 million speeches to 314 million people in 5,200 communities.[3] During its lifetime, the organization had over twenty bureaus and divisions, with commissioner’s offices in nine foreign countries.[4]

Both a Films Division and a News Division were established to help get out the war message. What was missing, Creel saw, was a way to reach those Americans who might not read newspapers, attend meetings or watch movies. For this task, Creel created the Division of Pictorial Publicity[5]. Charles Dana Gibson was America’s most popular illustrator – and an ardent supporter of the war. When Creel asked him to assemble a group of artists to help design posters for the government, Gibson was more than eager to help. Famous illustrators such as James Montgomery Flagg, Joseph Pennell, Louis D. Fancher, and N. C. Wyeth were brought together to produce some of World War I’s most lasting images.

Hollywood movie makers joined in on the propaganda by making movies such as The Claws of the Hun, The Prussian Cur, To Hell With The Kaiser, and The Kaiser, the Beast of Berlin. These titles illustrate the message the CPI tried to convey.

This raw propaganda included complete fabrications, such as images and stories of German soldiers killing babies and hoisting them on bayonets. CPI pamphlets warned citizens to be on the lookout for German spies. Dozens of “patriotic organizations,” with names like the American Protective League and the American Defense Society, sprang up. These groups spied, tapped telephones, and opened mail in an effort to ferret out “spies and traitors.” The targets of these groups was anyone who called for peace, questioned the Allies’ progress, or criticized the government’s policies. They were particularly hard on German Americans, some of whom lost their jobs, and were publicly humiliated by being forced to kiss the American flag, recite the Pledge of Allegiance, or buy war bonds.
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The US government’s involvement in researching and developing techniques designed to foster, influence and manage public opinion has been a constant over the last century. This desire to influence and control the human psyche has not been limited to fostering military support but has also branched into the areas of torture techniques and election campaigns.

In dozens of instances one see’s attempts to gain support of a proposed or desired military intervention through the focusing on a singular event. These events such as the sinking of the Lusitania, Pearl Harbor and the Gulf of Tonkin have been used to galvanize public support for aggressive military action and retaliation. In most cased the horror of these events were exploited to alter public opinion, yet in some cases the bulk of information suggests that some of these events were exaggerated or even staged in order to effectively gain public support.

Through the years the chief means used by the government to garner public support of its military force has been through fear, anger and hatred. It is not difficult to understand that a voter who feels that their freedom and very way of life is endangered will support a war.  Also, it makes sense that it is a citizens duty to support the good in its battle versus evil.

A good military depends on its forces to be able to kill opposing forces in combat. Teaching people to fear and hate their “enemy” is vital in training for the armed forces. In our dozens of wars we have had to train our armed forces and our populace to a lesser degree to hate and view a number of people’s as evil.

Since our military enterprises have brought us into conflict with hundreds of millions if not billions of people from hundreds of nations, our youth and general public have been trained and encouraged to hate and mistrust these various cultures and nations. Oftentimes previous allies become enemies and vice a versa, causing previous feelings to confuse or linger.  Trained hatred is often the same as any other prejudice and can be deep and long lasting, and not change as quickly as a governments foreign policy.

In an effort to justify some of its earliest actions the US had to make both American Indians and the black slaves into populaces deserving of maltreatment. The black slaves were viewed as animals whose lives were improved by leaving a primitive and savage world, and Indians were likewise, savages who refused to accept and adapt to our progressive and civilized life.

As the years passed the number of reliable and consistent allies has decreased. The tacit message has been the US versus the world. The US being the land of freedom and the wealthiest nation on the planet, is a threat to evil and the envy of all the world. Everywhere we turn we are confronted by evil and misguided people and ideologies.

Even our closest allies have fallen off the path. First we were battling the communists and dictators and all those opposed to freedom and democracy. Then some of the countries lost their way and became socialists and welfare states, making their populaces weak and dependent. Capitalism, we were told, was the only system capable of supporting freedom and sustaining economic and technological progress. Only the US had the strength and moral integrity to carve out and maintain a high standard of living honoring while rewarding the gifts and freedoms of the individual.
Each year the US is becoming more and more isolated, as the rest of the world becomes an increasing threat to our security and way of life. Unilateral action has become the norm rather than the exception.

We maintain a military presence in many nations throughout the world as our active armies go from one middle eastern nation to another.  We no longer are fighting a nation or even a political ideology but rather a concept. Terror is a synonym of fear. The war on terrorism is a war on anyone who can cause terror. The war on terrorism is the perfect war for a government who influences, manages and motivates its voting populace through the manufacture of fear.

First the US itself defies the traditional view of a nation or culture in that it has been around for just a couple hundred years and is a melting pot of other nations, tribes and cultures. One is an American basically though geography and little else. Almost all US citizens are or recently were members of cultures which we currently or recently despise, mistrust or view as our enemy.

A secondary definition of terrorism is “a method of resisting a government or of governing”. In this case anyone espousing any thought, belief or idea inconsistent with the official policy of the US government can be labeled a terrorism.

During the great Red Scare of the fifties many US citizens were demonized and considered a threat to the US by the very rumor that they were communists. The ability for the US government to once again use this fear tactic to control the actions of its own citizens is even more pronounced in, this current time period.

Terrorism, is even more vague than communism, and even an article such as this could be misinterpreted as an act of terrorism. In fact, it is almost impossible to imagine any article which asks questions or presents more than one viewpoint as being free from the potential label of terrorism.

Since terrorism can exist anywhere and at any time their can be no end to a war on terrorism, and the US is free to invade any piece of land on the earth. Since terrorism is literally a resistance to a specific form of governance than everyone on the planet who has a political opinion is a terrorist.

Anyone who supports a US policy could be defined as a terrorist to many other nations throughout the globe. Likewise, any person espousing a belief supporting any nation with an ideology different from the US could be considered a terrorist by the US government. Since no government on the planet completely agrees with the US and its policies, then there is no nation nor individual on the planet who cannot be viewed as a terrorist.

We are a nation of people being encouraged to mistrust, fear and hate millions of people throughout the globe and even inside our own nation. As consumers we are incessantly deceived and lied to, and as voters we are taught to fear and hate. Is it any wonder that we are a depressed people?

We are a people forever vigilant and on guard, and a people always in need of more things and objects in an endless attempt to fill the void or at least keep up. We are taught to seek goals and ends in areas that have no potential end point. In our world there will never be a final purchase or an end to terrorism. Yet, in both arenas our potential happiness and safety are dependent on a sense of their finality or completion.

In the modern world we are like children in a perpetual car ride plaintively asking “are we there yet” over and over again.

When viewed from this perspective it is easy to understand why so many American’s are depressed. In fact, it is hard to explain why the number of depressed individuals in the US is not higher.
Jim Guido

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