Nothing To Fear But Fear Itself

I was reading an article this morning about how the midterms took away the bogeyman that the conservatives were using to strike fear into the hearts of their constituents. Namely the convoy of displaced people from Central America wending its way toward the southern border. Evidently they weren't able to make the threat convincing enough to stop everybody from voting against them. As far as I'm concerned, that is a marvelous thing.

It's a good thing because politicians and demagogues use fear as a stick to beat people over the head with. It keeps people in line, especially if they're already a little afraid of everything. Fear of the "other" is a perennial favorite in the bogeyman stakes. Foreigners, women, people of color, gay people, transgender people. All of them get used to instill fear and that fear is used as a tool. Firstly to keep us fighting among ourselves and sow mistrust and secondly to keep us from fraternizing across the lines they've drawn for us.

There's a term for this, and it's a very old one. "Divide and rule". Keep people from ever coming together or even wanting to come together and you can keep them in isolated pockets which are easier to control than a much bigger group that feels solidarity. It's part of why things like integration are so strongly resisted and why labor unions were so dangerous to the people in power. They encouraged fraternization which they absolutely did not want. Mingling leads to friendship or at the very least we get used to having different people around us until they are no longer considered threatening. The practice of institutionalized segregation in the form of "redlining" or "sundown towns" was another way they did this. It kept people in their own part of town, the better to harass them because they were all in the same place, and if they were in another place they made the people who lived there nervous. It reinforced the fear.

I suspect that it's why the internet is becoming more segregated and restrictive too. It's because it enables people to get to know people who are different from them and learn that regular people everywhere are pretty much the same. It teaches us that they care about their kids just like we do, and they go to work and they have bills. They have weddings and funerals and their kids go to school. We have a lot more in common than we're led to believe. But if we understood all of that and made friends of them then it would be so much harder to convince us to start a war against them or hate them at all. It would be undesirable for the people who profit from war in one way or another.

The fraternization was what fascinated me so much about the internet in the first place, because it did remove fear. It taught me about the world and the lives of people in faraway places. Personally I think we should be doing much more fraternizing simply because it undermines the people who want us to be afraid of each other. We should get to know each other and figure out what we all want, because once we do that we can change the direction things are going in and break out of the narrative of divide and rule.

Divide and Rule