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Fearing Others

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Clarissa

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Somebody tell me this is a lie:

Professors at the University of California at Berkeley

have been officially warned against saying such things as “America is the land of opportunity.” Why? Because this is considered to be an act of “micro-aggression” against minorities and women.

Back in the 1980s – early 1990s I watched a lot of American movies. Video salons and independent movie channels suddenly became all the rage. They’d run American movies with their horrible bootleg translations, and all the kids would use any opportunity to watch them. I still can hear the voices of the men who created the voice overs.

What I found especially curious is how obsessively these movies (again, these were all from the 1980s and very early 1990s) promoted the idea that any human contact is potentially fraught with horrible danger. We were experiencing enormous social upheaval and a huge spike in street crime as the government withdrew from policing almost entirely, yet we had nothing like this terror of other human beings that I was seeing in these movies.

Now I’m living inside the culture that produced those movies, yet I’m still impressed with the strength of the “terror of others” that inspires inventions like “micro-aggressions”, etc.

3 responses to “Fearing Others”

  1. cliff arroyo Avatar
    cliff arroyo

    I’m thinking it’s the dark side/cost of massive individuality. People who are part of social networks (even if they’re pretty screwed up) generally assume that someone in their network has their back. They might be stuck with their network but in theory they can count on it (even if a person can’t actually count on their real network).

    When you have no strong family or extended family ties there’s a feeling of freedom (I could be in Italy this time tomorrow and no one can stop me) and a feeling of threat (no one’s going to care much if something happens to me).

    This is the whole premise of Westerns – all alone in the universe with no one to count on but your trigger finger. Even if westerns are almost entirely dead that ethos lives on.

    It was also the premise of film noir – haunted loners reaching out to each other and then realizing that what they don’t know can hurt them.

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  2. Shakti Avatar
    Shakti

    What I found especially curious is how obsessively these movies (again, these were all from the 1980s and very early 1990s) promoted the idea that any human contact is potentially fraught with horrible danger. We were experiencing enormous social upheaval and a huge spike in street crime as the government withdrew from policing almost entirely, yet we had nothing like this terror of other human beings that I was seeing in these movies.

    This terror of other human beings is the driver of much of US politics. It feels especially prominent starting 15 years ago, but it’s been there for a long time. Have you read The Terror Dream? It has an interesting theory that this fearfulness arises from constant fear of attacks during centuries of wars with Native Americans.

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    1. cliff arroyo Avatar
      cliff arroyo

      “It has an interesting theory that this fearfulness arises from constant fear of attacks during centuries of wars with Native Americans”

      That certainly is a contributing factor, but a lot of the frontier experience is about removing yourself (along with your family) from the reach of any day to day government as well (including police forces). Native Americans whose lands are being encroached upon would be a very big danger and other drifters who want to get away from the long arm of the law would be another.

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A conservative literary critic and college professor

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