The Politics of Fear

I just watched the first part of The Power of Nightmares (The Rise of the Politics of Fear) by the BBC (official site).

"In the past our politicians offered us dreams of a better world. Now they promise to protect us from nightmares. The most frightening of these is the threat of an international terror network. But just as the dreams were not true, neither are these nightmares."

In the first part the film explores the roots of the neo-cons in the US (later allied with fundamentalist Christians) and the islamic fundamentalists in the Middle East. Also it explains the story of how neocons, who believed Strauss' idea of inventing to unite the masses a myth of a grand Good vs. Evil struggle were caught up themselves believing that myth.

Horrible stuff. It's not a revelation, at least not to me personally, but it makes you think about this stuff, rethink it again, pay attention instead of ignoring it or pushing these problems aside. How can the world be so wrong? How comes that instead of creating a global society of happy and friendly people we descend into this horrible nonsense? Sad.

• discussion at Kuro5hin.
• Torrents at the Information clearing-house site.

There are so many eye-opening books and films (this one is just the latest example) that I feel like I can't stop learning for a moment. How can I live a productive, honest, correct and generally good and righteous life if I don't understand important things about the world? I don't feel like dragging along mindlessly occupying myself only with simple problems of everyday life. But then, when I learn something new, there is another problem - how to share it with the world, how to wake everyone up to the reality? It's not a very comfortable feeling when you realise you can't do it. But still, I must continue learning even if only for myself.