To be an American, you have to sign on to being scared: “I pledge allegiance to living in fear.”
When you look below our self-congratulatory, feel-good surface, you find a society pockmarked by fear. This creepy feeling has persisted throughout our history to this very day. Fear of blacks. Fear of God. Fear of women. Fear of equality. Fear of communism. Fear of homosexuals. Fear of crime. Fear of the bomb. Fear of science. Fear of terrorists.
Seems like no one can run the country without scaring the hell out of us. Seems like the citizenry cannot live except in fear. There’s always some enemy that our politicians tell us to be scared of. But if you think our biggest fear is the fear that drives our national policy, you’re wrong.
We live our biggest fear in the workplace. That’s the hidden secret of American life. Fear of the boss. Fear of getting fired. In no other country on earth is the workplace so hierarchically fear-based, with supervisors supervising workers, and supervisors supervising supervisors, all the way to the top. It’s the system: everybody watches everybody else. There prevails an ongoing obsequious accommodation with a bright, smiling, cheery hypocrisy, that no one has the guts to expose.
We walk around being major suckups, 24/7. We kid ourselves we’re totally happy and fulfilled in our jobs, but we spend most of our working days in an unexpressed fear, so ingrained we’re hardly conscious of it. That is, until someone gets fired, when our fear jumps right up into our faces, and we avoid the fired person like the plague, because there but for the grace of our boss, go we. There, out of the door, walks the embodiment of our fear. That’s why we’re too scared to talk to the poor fellow. Fear is contagious.
There’s very little we can do about our fear, either. As any union official will tell you, the Bill of Rights stops at the factory gates. In 30 states it’s legal to get fired for being married, for being single, for being pregnant, for being you. You can sue if you get fired on gender and ethnic grounds — but not if you get fired for your politics, for example. A woman got fired during the election because she had a John Kerry bumper sticker. She didn’t proselytize for Kerry; all she did was have that sticker. Her boss wrote memos telling his workers they should vote for Bush. He could do what he wanted. Not her. If she were a Republican, a Democrat boss could as easily have fired her.
Article comments
1 - ss
Another good post.
The fear starts earlier and earlier. When I was a kid I attended a preschool that was all sports, art, and playing games, because my mom wanted her sons to think of school as fun. (Which lasted till about the 2nd grade, but, she tried)
Now people want their kid to go to the 'right' preschool. How anxious are these poor little bastards gonna grow up to be?
2 - Jon Sobel
A good essay, but do you claim living in fear to be particularly American? Seems to me most of what you describe applies to the human condition. I don't think the residents of Baghdad, London, or Swaziland would appreciate the suggestion that Americans live in more fear than they do.
3 - adam
Jon, good point. I guess I should have underlined the irony that the one nation who shouldn't be living in fear, America, in fact does -- just like most others. Damn, I should rewrite the piece to accord with your insight, but what the heck, what are comments for anyway? I'm not the first poster who'll be helped to write a better piece in the comments by commenters like you.
4 - LegendaryMonkey
Wow, that's powerful stuff. To address this to Americans, in particular, I would underline that real freedom is in the mind, but we are weighed down with the trappings of our society.
Makes you wonder if true freedom is really possible.
5 - bob johnson
You are both right and wrong, you may be right about living in fear, but consider the motivating factor! another word may be risk!
So take a risk be your own boss. Work the four day work-week if you can afford it. Live on less. Move to Europe, my nephew did.
You can say what you like, but your chances of sucess are better here in the U.S.A. than any where and if you don't agree, move.
The rest of us, have the right to be different than the rest of the world. Difference is good. Choises are good. I for one wouldn't have it anyother way, in fact I would prefer that states had more rights,to be different. More choises right. Good?
6 - Nancy
Fearmongering only works if people buy into it because they're too stupid & lazy to think for themselves. Marketers play up on this a lot, I've noticed; it's called Alarmist Advertising.
7 - gonzo marx
" the only thing we have to fear, is Fear, itself" FDR
amazing that we went from some of our greatest Moments as a Nation riding on the back of the sentiments embodied in those words, to the crippling fear engendered by the Cold War and possible nuclear Armageddon in the '50s
how much did Madison Avenue, with the lessons learned form both sides propaganda of WW2, enabled by the newfangled TV box that allowed imagery to replace the Logic of words and deal on a purely emotional level with it's passive audience, have to play in it all?
ah...i'll leave that Thesis for better minds than my own...
Excelsior!
8 - Nancy
I was going to quote that but was afraid to. ;)
9 - Natalie Davis
Interesting about workplace fear. Of course, a lot of people, esp. if they post under their real names, can't say so in fear that their boss might find their words and fire them as a result. When I worked for my last employer, I regularly wrote about how horrible the company was but feared to name the company or point to particular scary upper-management types out of that fear. Over time, I couldn't take it and quit. Now I live in destitution, but emotionally, I am so much healthier. At the same time, I still fear naming the inhumane, sweatshop-mentality company out of fear of being sued...
Then again, I live here and do not consider myself American in any way. Frankly, I fear most Americans...
10 - Dave Nalle
Odd, I find being an American leaves me uniquely fearless, because unlike the sheep who live in more strongly statist countries I have the right to defend my life, my family and my property.
Dave
11 - Natalie Davis
Lots of American sheep -- and I am not calling you a sheep, Mr. Nalle -- revel in that right. A lot of Americans do not think for themselves; they either go along to get along or mindlessly buy into the status quo and embrace the fears the government tells them they should have.
12 - WTF
Fear that dialing 911 will be in vain, and that owning a firearm might have been a good idea after all...and certainly available immediately.
Just throwing that out there for general consumption. An old friend once told me. "When you are out at night, you are what people fear most" since he was an ex-con (subsequently killed by another ex-con) I figured the mindset had merit and considering the source... it was a paradigm criminals worked from.
Armed with that knowledge. I just don't care about it anymore. I'm just as badassed as anyone else, got the skills and will not let myself be intimidated. Fire with fire.
Why worry? You're not going to live forever. Do you have a right to not live in fear? If you think so, then as a right, you're going to have to fight for it. A conundrum? For the dialetically challenged, perhaps. For those with no scruples about what it takes to survive, not really.