Open Thread - 11-08-24 - PTSD Nation
Well, it's over. For now.
What we witnessed in this 2024 election was a master class in voter manipulation. I often wonder how they do it. How they can produce an almost cult like following for two of the most flawed politicians in recent memory. How is it that so many voters can be lead by their noses to the voting booth in a fevered pitch of anxiety?
In my opinion it is done by instilling fear in the minds of the voters. Fear of the other, fear of what the opposition party may have in store if elected, fear of civil war, riots, detention camps. Fear, fear, fear. It was a constant barrage of fear, to make one yearn for a savior that will lead one to the electoral promised land.
Fear is the arrow, and the media is the bow. Those that benefit from our fear are the archers and our minds are the target.
If so, then why does fear work so well on so many people?
Is it possible that we all have at least a little touch of PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder), with some more than others, and some full blown? From the time of birth we're bombarded with fear inducing stimuli, that over a course of a lifetime could very well cause an accumulated case of PTSD. Let's face it, we grow up in and live in a violent society and a violent world. We think of ourselves as civilized but sometimes I wonder.
The causes of PTSD are myriad:
What can cause PTSD?
The situations we find traumatic can vary from person to person. There are many different harmful or life-threatening events that might cause someone to develop PTSD. For example:
- being involved in a car crash
- being raped or sexually assaulted
- being abused, harassed or bullied - including racism, sexism, homophobia, biphobia or transphobia, and other types of abuse targeting your identity
- being kidnapped, held hostage or any event in which you fear for your life
- experiencing violence, including military combat, a terrorist attack, or any violent assault
- seeing other people hurt or killed, including in the course of your job (sometimes called secondary trauma)
- doing a job where you repeatedly see or hear distressing things, such as working in the emergency services or armed forces
- surviving a natural disaster, such as flooding, earthquakes or pandemics, such as the coronavirus pandemic
- traumatic childbirth as a mother, or as a partner witnessing a traumatic birth
- losing someone close to you in particularly upsetting circumstances
- being sectioned or getting treatment in a mental health ward
- being diagnosed with a life-threatening condition.
Is it much of a stretch then to say that a society as a whole can be afflicted with PTSD. And because of that become highly susceptible to fear based stimuli? Fear that triggers a fight or flight response. For example, in this election, fear triggers some to fight, by voting to defeat the "other", and some to flight, by flight I mean give up.
Fear works. Until it's understood and met head on, and defeated.
Levon Helm: Take Me To The River
3:59
Comments
Good morning Free Rangers...
We'll never be truly free until we cast fear from our minds.
PTSD
fun acronyms
post trump success disappointment
or
pre teen sexual deviance
or
pretend truth severs derision
thanks for the the OT!
It's a real thing...
you can see it in the many stress induced videos that have flooded the innertoobs the last few days. Some people are losing it.
Yeah, many are faked by attention seeking narcissists, but many are sincere. How did they get so emotionally involved to the point of breaking from reality?
Their lizard brains, where fear resides, have been stimulated by a technique that's been refined by centuries of practice by the ruling class.
Yeah it is real
I try to make lite of it
but the breakdown exhibited
by the spouse was very telling
leaving me feeling raw
people who do not have a
pressure relief mechanism
in place (like C99%) are more
subject to psyche eruptions
normal people can only absorb
a certain amount of mental stress
before an eruption occurs
fear?
For most of my life, I have been a politics junky, frequently talking with friends and acquaintances about the next election. As I have lost interest in voting since 2016, I have found it impossible to talk politics with members of either the Blue or the Red cult as politics itself became a perpetual exercise of fear and loathing. Things like the Vietnam War and race relations of course led to extremely bitter feelings, but the dispute was always about the policy in question -- and very few people made the leap from disagreement to loathing. Now the cable news networks pump out hostility to The Other Guys who are no longer mistaken or misguided but are now "deplorable" or "garbage."
Along the same lines, among the few iconoclastic friends who share my non-voting habit, I am constantly hearing the expression, "That is scary," in discussion of the governmental fuckup of the hour. My wife also uses that word often to describe the political outrage of the day.
Death from Covid, Russian ambitions to rule the world, Donald Fucking Trump and his fascist throng of hooligans, global warming and Israel-hating terrorists are just a few examples of the scary reality of this horrible decade.
It is easy to understand how my friends and relatives get so scared of what fresh hell tomorrow may bring. Fear is pushed as realism non stop in this depraved transitional era.
I cried when I wrote this song. Sue me if I play too long.
Yup...
I think it's fear of tomorrow
For too many, change has mostly meant being worse off. From toilet paper to health care to housing....anything we need can become out of reach. What we took for granted being able to afford, we can't, even with 2 incomes. Our kids struggle, and if they don't many of their friends do, and that sets up fear. Car prices, loans, credit cards....everything seems designed to entrap you. But in the ends Americans blame themselves for their failures, with help from those that entrap you.
Also thanks for the OT.
Inflation is but one tool...
in the quiver of the archers, albeit a big one. It's a tool of wealth transference to those that can never have enough.
There's a pattern. A period of good times for the underclass is offset by inflation which wipes the board of excess wealth into the pockets of those that can never have enough. History shows it happening time and time again.
And you're right:
Thank you, Snode.
Good morning JtC. In addition to everything else I see a very
ironic fear of losing shit you don't really have, which is crazy, but, ignoring that:
1)
Welcome to California! You'll get over it, trust me.
2)
Huh? LIFE is a life threatening condition. Nobody gets out of here alive.
a) He not busy being born is busy dying - Robert Zimmerman
b) One needs to adopt "A resolute acceptance of death" - Miyamoto Musashi
As they say, Life Goes On, the only other option isn't relevant if one stops to think about it (at least, not until it is). You are here. It is now. There is an ancient argument that this is the best of all possible worlds, and, true or not, it is, at the moment, the only one immediately available to each of us. PTSD is one of many defense/survival mechanisms and one needs to track it down and figure out how to use it, or abandon it through some process of awareness based overcoming. What HAS happened, to cause it, is done and gone. and what IS happening is bad enough perhaps, but also all you got so get with it.
be well and have a good one
That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --