Despite all my rage, I am still just a rat in a cage

The other night, I watched a documentary about the period between the two world wars that devastated so many countries and how they acted in the intervening period. The differences between European countries trying to recover from the carnage and the United States were on an economic thrill ride. The United States, in particular, was experiencing unprecedented prosperity. However, this prosperity would soon be overshadowed by the Great Depression.

Many issues caused the Great Depression, and I won't attempt to explain all of them; that is the job of forensic economics experts. However, it's crucial to understand that the lessons from this era are still relevant to our society in the 21st century. Understanding the causes of the Great Depression is not just a historical exercise but a key to shaping our economic and social policies.

The main lesson I learned from the documentary was that fear and panic helped cause the Great Depression and greed. Let's focus on institutional fear and panic, which led to erroneous decisions at the wrong times.

America has always had an ingrained sense of fear masked by an overcompensating sense of optimism and pride. The inherited fear was always a part of the English heritage, the overwhelming cultural influence. The English settlers overwhelmed the French, Dutch, and Swedish settlers, who also came to the New World for a better life. The Native Americans were treated even worse, robbed of their lands, and pushed into crisis by the English.

The fear didn't stop there. Catholics were looked down upon because the English had their state-supported church. Enslaved people were imported to do manual labor. Still, they received no rights at all because the English covered up their collective guilt by claiming that they were "educating and enlightening the inferior races." The English practiced this bullshit theory all over the world.

Therefore, Americans have always needed a sense of "others" to protect the fantasy identity that the English provided to us more than 350 years ago. Even today, a large segment of Americans resist change and a more open and tolerant society because they still believe in the fairy tales that they were told as children about some natural American superiority.

Rather than covering the well-documented episodes in American history involving fear and panic, I will use one that most people either forgot or never heard of but that provides a fascinating look at Americans' psychology as it relates to the mass media. 

On October 30, 1938, the late Orson Welles produced a radio version of the H. G. Wells novel War of the Worlds, written approximately 40 years earlier. The broadcast announced that what would happen was a retelling of the story, but most people either tuned in late or forgot the mention of a fiction drama.

In 1938, America was already well aware of the troubles brewing in Europe as that continent headed towards a war that would eventually involve the USA. Most people wanted nothing more than to be left alone in their little artificial world with no problems, at least that they were aware of. America was slowly recovering from the Great Depression, and they didn't want to disturb a slowly emerging sense of optimism like a fragile new flower.

Radio became a fixture in many American homes during the 1930s, and people grew accustomed to radio as a news and entertainment source. They had no idea this was also the advent of the mass media and the corporate orchestration of events and policies in America. They realized that this could easily be accomplished by controlling the information and entertainment Americans received because they already controlled the radio networks, stations, and newspapers; it was easy. This was the birth of the mass media control mechanism that afflicts us today.

Do you ever get tired of seeing the "Breaking News" scroll at the bottom of the screen? I certainly do, but I recognize that this is just another means of instilling fear about some manufactured crisis that is designed to do nothing more than distract us and keep us in a heightened state of anxiety. 

Government policies used to manipulate people are very finely tuned instruments of control. Propaganda is nothing new. It has existed for centuries. Religion is the first and most effective propaganda tool because it has been around the longest and has the deepest roots in society. Those greedy for power realized that they needed to follow religion's example in reaching the population and often sought the endorsement of religion along the way.

Prejudices play right into the control mechanisms. It is much easier to convince someone that a person or group classified as "other" represents a threat to the population's safety and security or the state. Religion, of course, plays a role in this manipulation through the use of institutional fear. 

The American populace seems very susceptible to manipulation; whether this is based on cultural conditioning or from a sense of superiority is the question. The frightening parallel is that of Germany in the 1930s when a madman convinced a highly civilized and sophisticated population to follow him to ruin willingly. The similarities to what I see today are frightening and should raise alarms, but people are too occupied with other things to notice what is happening around them. A supposedly free press succumbs to the siren song of ratings and profits, and suddenly, we no longer have a media that informs us; we have a press that indoctrinates us. We look at the rest of the world and wonder why they seem so "uninformed" when we are led by the ring through our collective noses by the media.

When a society exists on the concepts of "breaking news," or infoporn, the people become numb to the cumulative effects that this environment has on them. Why is Alec Baldwin reported on constantly while Trump gets away with everything? The constant attempts to instill fear and panic eventually result in a blase attitude toward current events and a lack of participation in our democracy, which is precisely the result that Nazis wanted in the first place. It is the concept of death by a thousand paper cuts rather than a violent upheaval.

Civil liberties and freedoms are being eroded right before our eyes, but until they affect someone personally, they don't seem to care. The "others" don't deserve equality before the law or in society because the sheeple are told so. Ultimately, all our rights will be taken away, and people will finally question what happened.

I already mentioned the example of Nazi Germany. Too many people won't want to make that comparison because they find it unpleasant. Truth can be harsh sometimes, and we must examine what is happening today to what happened in 1930s Germany. The Nazos never obtained a ruling majority, but they manipulated and created fake crises to justify their taking power. The Reichstag building was burned to the ground by the Nazis so they could justify targeting others who disagreed with them by blaming them for the fire. An ailing President granted emergency powers to Hitler, and the rest is history. Compare that to January 6, 2021, and the similarities show themselves. Trump and the Republicans wanted to grab power, but that time they failed, just like an earlier attempt from the Nazis in 1923 which resulted in Hitler being sentenced to prison for initiating a riot in Munich. Just like Hitler, Trump, but he was released early for "good behavior." The only difference so far is that Trump hasn't been sent to prison, which is the last thing that should happen to him, but he is reappearing on the scene as a convicted criminal attempting to take power through the electoral process.

The only way to overcome institutionalized fear is to be informed and not just take opinions and conspiracy theories for facts. The best example I can think of is when you ask two people about the weather. One person says it is raining, and the other assays it is sunny. It is up to YOU to stick your head out the window, see what is accurate, and then let the wrong person know it. Facts are facts. Opinions and conspiracy theories are NOT facts.

READ: don't just listen; research people who sound stupid, and you're going to find that they are, in fact, ridiculous. That should convince you to disregard anything they say. Reading means you get the time to process what someone is saying mentally; it takes more time and effort than watching the TV or any online "expert" with a microphone.

The role of education is to introduce children to the skill of critical thinking. Reciting statements made by someone that are not, for example, a mathematical fact requires that children learn to discern what is and is not logical and ask questions. Blind acceptance leads to tyranny, which is precisely what we want to avoid. If parents are too busy to talk with their children instead of talking at them, then they are less than adequate parents.