In the context of upcoming elections (2022 bi-elections) and a Presidential election in 2024-- "Fear" gets front and center in this somewhat nonpartisan political speech... at a time of great crisis in America today because of the danger of losing "democracy" and the "soul of America." Biden is all out giving one of his better speeches.
He clearly distinguishes the extremists (white supremacists, Trumpian MAGA) from mainstream Republicans. The extremists, left or right, however, he assigns as people generally with an agenda of "political violence" attempting to destroy the process of "democracy" and these he claims are people who have become cynical and pessimistic, have lost hope and rather seed division in the nation--polarization. This Biden is fighting against. His extremist opponents (and I would say not just extremists nor his opponents) are in his words "they spread fear and lies."
He is saying, implicitly, in classic binary language, the culture of fear breeders are over there, and all us good folks are over here. It's nice political language but it is so non-true. I've studied the culture of fear for decades and the left and right and all inbetween are all very good at spreading the culture of fear (and, each carries their own kind of spread of violence in that name sake--whether they admit it or not). This makes it very hard for the intelligent citizen of a nation to sort through what direction of support do they want to give, where they want to vote, what to believe and where to find their allies (?). This is challenging times.
My point, is that I offer new (and ancient) wise teachings on fear and fearlessness--I offer "fear inquiry" and there's so much we have to learn about fear itself and our relationship to it if we are going to be able to wisely negotiate this climate and culture of fear that's ramping up once again in the new election cycle--but also ramping up because of the Anthropocene era of mass extinction, pandemics, collapsing systems and global warming crises... the scale of this is going to exacerbate the Fear Problematique to a level beyond what most humans can manage--that is, if we are not upgrading their fear education at the same time. SO, that is my priority! The Fearlessness Movement ning is one place to get that education, so is my new book "The Philosophy of Fearism: A Primer" (2022) and my youtube videos, etc.
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