Words Poorly Used #69 — Fear

Now I learn today, through Jason Stapleton, that some European politico is playing the Fear Card.  I paraphrase, “If this refugee crisis continues it will mean the collapse of the European Union!”  My first reaction?  Please don’t throw us in that briar patch.  There are two basic human tendencies, buried in our genetics, fear leading to fight or flight, and the need by politicians to induce such fear in the hearts of any other human within the pol’s ambit.  So this European personage is shopping this combo slippery-slope/strawman dodge in search of a hidden agenda item.  There are approximately 733 million Europeans awaiting this tsunami of 4 million (?) Syrian refugees (pardon the UN link).  So that is just over 1/2 a refugee for each thousand Europeans.  Do we have a bit of overreaction here?  The fear response is not based on a fact of danger, it is elicited by the appearance of potential danger..  Just today, while reading The Girl in the Spider’s Web, I observed that the author, David Lagercranz, was able to push my fear button with nothing more than fictional craft, just as if I were a child afraid of the dark.  Without the truth that fear needs no connection to reality, children would sleep well and there would be no more plays, movies, or novels in the thriller genre.

kilgore