One Fear to Rule Them All

This summer marks the 70^th anniversary of the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as the beginning of an era of nuclear fears that dominated the childhoods of people of my generation. We were raised in fear. I can remember civil defense drills when we marched single-file out of our classroom and stood against the lockers in the hallways; training for what to do when the bomb dropped. My husband Arthur, who was born six weeks after the bombs dropped on Japan, remembers marching from the school to a train depot; he never knew where they’d have been taken if war had started. Our parents were just as terrified by the nuclear brinkmanship our leaders were engaged in.

I was reminded of this when I read a column by Fareed Zakaria in today’s Washington Post, about the opposition to President Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran. Zakaria paints Obama as an optimist resisting a sea of pessimists. As an example of a pessimist he quotes John McCain saying, last year, that the world is “in greater turmoil than at any time in my lifetime” (which includes World War II and the Cold War).

Zakaria then goes on to show how a pessimistic attitude has been a common American reaction to events for decades now:

In an essay in 1989, Harvard scholar Samuel Huntington noted that the United States was experiencing its fifth wave of that kind of pessimism since the 1950s.

First, he explained, Sputnik shocked the United States, and by the early 1960s, the country was convinced that the Soviet Union was on a path to overtake it economically, technologically and militarily. When the oil shocks of the 1970s hit, people saw the Middle East’s petro states as the world’s new power brokers. By the end of the 1970s, with the Soviet Union modernizing its nuclear arsenal and on the march — from Afghanistan to Central America — scores of commentators prophesied that Moscow was winning the Cold War. And when Huntington wrote his essay, conventional wisdom was that an invincible Japan would soon become the world’s No. 1 economic power.

None of these came to pass. The pessimists were wrong. The optimists, who saw the unique power and vitality of America as strengths that would enable us to overcome obstacles, were right.

Nowadays the pessimists are warning about a nuclear Iran being an existential threat to the United States. That’s as absurd as George W. Bush’s warnings about Iraq in 2003, and yet people still believe it. Just as absurd is the belief that ‘The Terrorists’ are an existential threat, yet our country’s policies are built around the need to overcome this ‘threat’ at all costs.

Yesterday I talked with two people, in completely separate conversations, who are both convinced that the economy is about to go into free-fall and the dollar will soon be worthless. “The only thing left of value will be gold,” they both nervously told me. Needless to say, they were both extremely pessimistic about the future of this country.

There’s power in fear. Fear makes people passive. They are less likely to challenge their leaders. Fear causes people to shrink their expectations of life so that all that matters is survival. When a citizenry is afraid, they will only ask their government for protection. They won’t ask for a decent life, educational opportunities, good roads, decent health care, etc. When there is an existential threat, these priorities pale in comparison to the importance of survival. Spending half of the federal budget on defense looks like a bargain, not a theft.

Power is the Best Aphrodisiac

Today Rep. Anthony Weiner joined the long list of philandering male politicians who have been caught (the list of the ones who haven't been caught is probably even longer).

Last week I saw a documentary about ex-Governor Eliot Spitzer. I remember thinking after his ritual press conference with suffering wife at his side, "What was he thinking? Didn't he know they were after him, those Wall Street financiers whom he had investigated?" Just like I had thought about Bill Clinton, "What was he thinking? Didn't he know the Republicans were after him with everything they had?"

What occurred to me while watching the Spitzer film was that I was expecting rational behavior from these men. I was acting as if they had free will, as if they were sane creatures capable of choosing the best option for their life.

I have written a manuscript, "We Are ALL Innocent by Reason of Insanity," which argues not only that we do not have free will, but that our "choices" are made in a part of our mind which is not conscious. Our rational minds come along after decisions and actions have been made, spinning stories that explain why we think the things we think and do the things we do.

What is true about men, I think, is that power acts upon them as a strong aphrodisiac, which then stimulates some kind of reaction, most likely chemical, that greatly boosts their sex drive. They are not rational agents choosing to engage in risky sex, they are victims of a physiological response that naturally occurs when men gain power.

Of course, women are attracted to powerful men from an aphrodisiac reaction of their own, so the two reinforce each other.

Perhaps by recognizing this as a real, organic, and physical process that men are prone to, we could envision some way to prevent these politicians from self-destruction.

Or we could change our societal attitudes toward sex and say "So what?" when we hear of another politician engaging in sex outside his marriage.

As an aside, one of the things I found creepy about George W. Bush was that it was impossible to imagine him ever being embroiled in a sex scandal. What was wrong with him that he was so sexless?