More on fear

Tariq Ramadan, in NPQ, on The Global Ideology of Fear:

...In the new regime of fear and suspicion, to understand the Other is to justify him; to seek out his reasons is to agree with him. A curious—and dangerous—reductionism transforms reality into a series of discreet, disconnected facts, and the Other into a series of acts without cause, without history or historic depth, without reason and rationality. Emotion does not understand but rather appreciates or condemns; one’s “feelings” determine everything.

...We may well live in the communication age, but human beings seem to be increasingly less informed. We have witnessed the multiplication of “communication superhighways” that diffuse a dizzying excess of information in real time, saturating the intelligence and making it impossible to place facts in perspective. The communication age is an age of non-information. We are passive receptors of reality and of facts; it is as if we have no grasp on how they come to be. Swept away by our emotions; trapped in binary, reductive logical structures; and lost in the rising tide of “as it happens” events and politics, it has become impossible for us to see, to understand or even to hear the Other.

In short, the ideology of fear has produced a devastating deafness: The Other’s world and the reasons he behaves as he does are inaudible; to attempt to hear them more clearly is to reveal one’s own ill-being, or, at worst, the vilest of treacheries. Between “us” and “them” a virtual wall has been thrown up, marking out the borderlines of our new identities and connections, protected within, threatened from without.

The upkeep and feeding of the “ideology of fear” has become a political weapon, particularly as part of the opportunistic strategies of the great economic powers of the day. Far from true political debate and shielded from objective criticism of the consequences of the world economic order, they perpetuate a state of fear and vulnerability. This in turn grants a license for security policies of the most dangerous and discriminatory kind—exceptional measures that are most inimical to freedom (particularly with regard to human and citizen’s rights) and often include extremist, racist concepts. The ideology of fear confirms the definitive, intrinsic guilt of the Other and the overriding necessity to protect oneself by increased security precautions or by force of arms—a condition made to order for the multinational arms industry....