27 March 2009

The irony of fear and hunger

PTSD sees danger everywhere. The health of PTSD sufferers becomes injured by the unrelenting excess of stress such hyper-vigilance produces in a body.

The right-wing 's insistence on seeing the nation's economics as based on unrelenting and insatiable scarcity, and on seeing the nation's politics as based on imminent, clear and present danger drives the society into a stressed-out state that is a kind of national PTSD.

What allows people to believe in their own safety and abundance is a faith in divine providence. A national PTSD is like the loss of faith in divine providence. Lose faith in divine providence and it makes people believe they need to feed themselves all the time; and it makes them spend their waking moments looking over their shoulders for the enemies lurking in the shadows. National PTSD results in a people that becomes obese and terrified.

A people that loses faith in divine providence develops the a yearning for strong leadership--a leadership that must be allowed, nay, even encouraged, to do whatever it takes to sustain the excess consumption and to secure their (what they perceive to be) vulnerable borders. To accomplish those objectives, the leaders encourage the people to violate the boundaries of the gifts of divine grace and bounty. The nation is driven to use up the creative fundament of the nation's productivity. That leads eventually to the exhaustion of the society and the ultimate collapse of its civilization and the values it promotes.

A nation that lives in a state of unrelenting fear and hunger will collapse under the weight of its own stresses and distresses.

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