First I would like to apologize for the late blogging, I been sick over the vacation and wrote this while sitting in the waiting room
The Roots of Fear article was written in Newsweek December 2007 issue by Sharon Begley.
In Sharon Begley's shocking and intriguing article The Root of Fear, she examines and explains the disturbing yet politically well crafted ways politicians use fear to do two things: 1 sway the voters and 2 gain the upper hand over their campaign opponents.
This is nothing new to the political world says Begley in fact she quotes form the 18 century theorist "no passion so effectively robs the the mind of all its powers like feelings and/or logical reasoning than the passion of fear." the passion of fear that has been embedded in our brains since the evolution of man is a way to guide and control the unconscious mind. Furthermore, Ms. Begley continues to point out the most important aspect of fear and its evolutionary progress is that over time, the human brain has not only evolved to fear the unconscious mind but also fear the conscious mind which is willing to act upon and exploits the fear of humans for personal gain. Such conscious acts and exploits of fear like suicide airplane bombers, or being robbed by gun or knifes are only a few examples.
Finally, Begley says that the image of fear is essential to any politicians campaign whether they use fear in extreme measures to shock or scare the voters into voting for them or use fear subtly like global warming (the fear of the unknown) to persuade voters into voting for them. Either way, Begley believes it is the root of fear that guides and controls the human minds and/or actions.
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5 comments:
This sounds like a very interesting article. I agree that politicians do try to use persuasion a lot to get the voters on their sides. Fear is a good appeal to get voters to listen to you. It seems the use of rhetoric is the best way to get people to listen to what you have to say.
this is a great article joseph!
this is very true. politics is based alot on evoking emotions into people, mostly for their votes. it is true that the most commonly evoked emotion is fear, but they use sympathy too :D:D
awesome article, very captivating...in my opinion, politicians are all corrupted, and yes they all do lie cheat and steal, which now seems like a good job...hahaha....but yeah, appeal to fear is something that even though we don´t notic most of the time, we are guided by it, just like when a prview of a movie appears, and something scary is about to happed, and it gets cut off, we soemtimes get mad, cause we want to know what that object was, i mean curiosity killed the cat right? awesome article dude
THis article is right, politicians have to appeal to voters because they are trying to get their votes. I feel a good politician is one that has strong persuasive skills.
Keep up the good work Joseph! Ms. G
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