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I of my own knowledge…
Fear and Public Policy
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by Frank DeMarco |
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It might be said that we live in an age defined by political fear. The baby boomers among us grew up in an age dominated by fear of communism and fear of nuclear devastation. The Cold War had no sooner ended than a new threat was perceived, and then the September 11, 2001, attacks gave the upper hand to anyone willing and able to play on people's insecurity and bewilderment.
The results are not pretty. Our political rights were given away in the dark. We may regain them -- it remains to be seen -- but at least for the moment they are gone. Under the influence of fear, the people who are supposed to represent us at the federal level rolled over to forces that are always ready to usurp new powers, but are rarely in so favorable a position as they found themselves then.
There are only two forces in the universe, so we are told by A Course in Miracles: love and fear. Love attracts, unites, and makes possible constructive interaction. Fear repels, divides, and makes constructive interaction nearly impossible. In the long run, societies that are able to operate out of love show resilience, interdependence, optimism, creativity, and hope. Those that are forced to operate out of fear become increasingly brittle, alienated, pessimistic, stagnant, and hopeless. How else can it be?
Working from fear makes terrible public policy, because it makes it impossible to see anything straight. Rather than illustrate this from our present position, let us look to history. You don't have to go any farther back than the American experience with slavery, civil war, and reconstruction to see how deadly, and how deadly stupid, the effects can be when people allow all their actions to be guided by their fears rather than their better natures.
We will skip the question of who was to blame for the fact that slavery was established in the colonies and was maintained after the American revolution. No informed person could maintain that this was the fault of Southerners alone. It wasn't. There would be plenty of blame to go around. Northern ship-owners and manufacturers and commercial centers, for instance, were involved up to their necks. Instead, let's look at the question of why slavery, being in place, was not removed. The answer, in a word, was fear.
To understand this, we need go no further than one of the region’s most enlightened citizens, Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson, although a major slaveholder, was opposed to slavery and attempted to have it abolished, in one instance failing only by a single vote in the Virginia legislature. But even Jefferson feared emancipation, famously saying of slaveholding societies that they had the wolf by the ears and feared to let it go.
(Jefferson’s failed attempt must be seen as one of the great “if-onlys” of American history. Had Virginia, with its vast prestige, abolished slavery, probably that would have been the death knell of the peculiar institution. Even if not, it is impossible to imagine the remaining slave states attempting to establish a Confederacy with Virginia numbered among the free states.)
Southern society was haunted by the fear of servile insurrection -- that is, they feared that if the black population were once liberated, it would turn upon the white inhabitants in an orgy of rape, murder and destruction, such as had occurred in Haiti at the beginning of the 19th century.
We, situated at the far side of so much further history, know that no such post-emancipation insurrection was ever attempted. Freed slaves turned out not to want to kill people, but to live their own lives. But pre-Civil War Southerners living with their uncomfortable guilt found themselves increasingly bound by the logic of the situation defined by their fears.
Of course there were economic reasons -- strong ones -- behind the continuation of slavery. But economic reasons might have argued against it, as well. The deciding factor that prevented Virginia from industrializing like New England, or becoming a commercial center like New York, or attracting large numbers of white immigrants like Pennsylvania, was the continued existence of slavery, and slavery continued because of fear.
So fearful were Southern statesmen of the possible results of emancipation that in the half-century after the War of 1812 their attitude went from a shamefaced defense of slavery to a positive (if ludicrous) assertion that slavery was a good. They went from being ardent American nationalists to being willing to destroy the Union rather than allow any interference with the continual expansion of slavery that had come to be seen as necessary for the continued existence of slavery. And since the continued existence of slavery had come to be seen as the only alternative to massacre, opposition to slavery came to mean (to their minds) willingness or eagerness to see white Southerners slaughtered.
Even Abraham Lincoln himself, no defender of slavery if no abolitionist, for the longest time assumed that a free white and free black population could not coexist peacefully. For as long as possible, and slightly beyond that, he promoted the idea of colonization -- that is, deportation of America's black population to Africa -- as the logical follow-up to emancipation. Only the self-evident physical impossibility of shipping four million people across the Atlantic finally destroyed this idea.
So it could be argued that the Civil War came because Southerners feared that the rest of the Union was going to interfere with its peculiar institution. And, in turn, its peculiar institution had survived because white legislators feared massacre on the strength of an invalid analogy drawn from a foreign if nearby society.
And then -- after 600,000 men died in a civil war caused by fears engendered by the existence of slavery, continued because of fears -- reconstruction of the South was carried through in a spirit of vengeance and suspicion rooted in the fears of other men. Northern radical Republicans feared that the South would resume its prewar dominance of the legislative body. They feared that the slaveholding aristocracy that had made the war would continue its dominance of Southern society, and thus would render the abolition of slavery meaningless in practical terms. They feared that the presidency, having grown in power and importance during the war, would become a dictatorship. They even feared that the South intended to resume the military struggle.
Operating from all those fears, the radicals did more harm to the national fabric than secession had. Worse than that, operating under the cover of these fears, cold-blooded thieves took control of the federal government and began milking it for all it was worth -- and it was worth a lot. The Gilded Age did not come out of nowhere and nothing. It came directly out of the opportunities for corruption created by the seizure of the federal government in the name of protecting the Republic from unreconstructed Southerners.
One could easily make a good argument that the American republic never recovered from the effects of the fear that prolonged the existence of slavery, and the fear that created the Civil War, and the fear that gave cover to the selling of the Republic. So many seemingly unconnected facts reveal their connection when seen in the proper light. The oppression of Western farmers, the conversion of free independent laborers into wage earners barely getting by, the encouragement of the immigration of uncounted millions of poor Europeans to serve as competitive labor, the stranglehold upon government enjoyed by manufacturing interests until the onset of the Great Depression and the New Deal -- it all links up, and it all stemmed from people’s fears.
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Frank DeMarco,
Author
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Frank DeMarco holds an M.A. in History from the University of Iowa and a B.A. in History from George Washington University.
His work as co-founder and (for 15 years) chief editor of Hampton Roads Publishing Company brought him into close association with many brilliant and insightful minds, including psychics, remote viewers, channelers and mystics, and showed him the human side of extraordinary abilities.
In 1992, his psychic abilities opened up at a Gateway Voyage at The Monroe Institute in central Virginia. Since then he has been engaged in first-hand exploration of the nature and limits of all things psychic, especially including such areas as healing and guidance, direct access to knowledge, communication with past lives, and the integration of the spiritual dimension into everyday life.
His autobiographical work Muddy Tracks: Exploring an Unsuspected Reality describes the first stages of his discovery of the key to expanded awareness, and offers pointers for those just beginning their quest. In his weblog, www.frankdemarco.
wordpress.com, he shares the journey and the results of continuing explorations. His blog, “I of my own knowledge…” investigates what individuals can know first-hand about the purpose and conduct of life.
Contact info
blog: http://frankdemarco.
wordpress.com/
email:
muddytracks@
earthlink.net
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