Monday, May 21, 2007
the culture of fear
In the 80's we were indoctrinated with fear of the impending nuclear holocaust. I remember seeing a musical composed and performed by passionate Soviet youths. They traveled the world performing their catchy songs and desperately pleading for change and action. The state of affairs now is quite different, and nuclear war with Russia no longer seems an immanent threat. But to what extent was this goal achieved by filling the minds of children with fear? And now, a new "threat" and a new program of indoctrination. Shouldn't we be giving our children skills rather than propaganda? In a society where even the highest echelons of government lack the ability to separate information from disinformation, surely this is the skill we need to impart to our children to "build a better tomorrow"? The culture of fear is likewise a culture of rash and irrational action.
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4 comments:
The question you must ask yourself is: Was the threat of a nuclear strike by the Soviets reasonable, and if so, to what extent should the government inform, warn, and prepare the public?
True, but I want to draw a distinction between informing the public of reasonable dangers and indoctrinating children. Plus, of course, after the fall of the iron curtain it become clear that the US had not treated the evidence for Soviet military development reasonably ~ in the sense that the evidence was filtered through preconceived notions. There was indeed a danger, but its nature and magnitude were grossly misinterpreted. The analysis of evidence for WMDs in Iraq suffered from a similar filtration through preconceived notions, and this type of phenomena continues to be a problem for intelligence agencies in general. Knowing, as we do, that bias is a rampant problem in dealing with information in our culture, it seems rational to shield our children from this bias and focus on teaching them the skills to identify and transcend bias, rather than treating them as little blank slates to be force-fed our prefered propaganda of the moment.
Uh, you may be right on Iraq but not the Soviets who, by the way, had ICBMs. Their economy was crumbling, and the U.S. hastened that collapsed and ended the Cold War. That's good in my book and in no way like the Iraq War.
"There was indeed a danger, but its nature and magnitude were grossly misinterpreted" ~ I stand by this statement; the Soviets certainly did have all kinds of nuclear weapons, etc., but the sophistication of their technology was grossly overrated by US intelligence before the fall of the iron curtain. This is well known. [c.f. "By the early 1980s, the Soviet armed forces were the largest in the world by many measures—in terms of the numbers and types of weapons they possessed, in the number of troops in their ranks, and in the sheer size of their military-industrial base.[39] However, the quantitative advantages held by the Soviet military often concealed areas where the Eastern bloc dramatically lagged behind the West. This led many U.S. observers to vastly overestimate Soviet power."] Furthermore, their willingness to use said technology may also have been overrated. In the case of nuclear weapons, obviously, it only takes a lone crazy; however, measures of the sort advocated by passionate, propaganda-filled youths of the time would have done nothing to stem this threat.
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