Abstract Fear

Nobody asked but …

 … the only thing we have to fear is… [abstract fear, fear that I inform you that you must have …] fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.

The above, slightly altered, admonishment, is from the opening of the first Inaugural Address of a POTUS — namely Franklin Delano Roosevelt.  The bracketed insertions are mine, to clarify what I think FDR meant in his first official talk to the nation he thought he owned.

On a recent episode of Chicago PD, a gang territory overlord bragged that he controlled that neighborhood by taking the dwellers’ souls.  I believe that POTUS’es and other politicians proceed by the same principle.  Souls are stolen by fostering fear.  For instance, what was so great about the “Great Depression?”  Politicians use words, abstractions which are intended to cast us into the abyss.  What, really, makes up the “War on Terror?”  What, in fact, is “fake news” other than a false label, wielded by the current POTUS to trick you into believing his lies.

Just because there are deceivers in the media, this does not attest to the veracity of the greater deceivers.

— Kilgore Forelle