The Politics of Fear

While trolling through various market reports trying to get a grip on the state of the economy and determine what if anything I should do to my portfolio I came across a very interesting article in the most unlikely of places.

I guess I am the embodiment of my comment yesterday on the distinction between politics and economics as every day I spend the first few hours of the day analysing market reports and trying to maximise the capitalist maxim that "money works", and then spend the next couple of hours looking at the political landscape.

Being a capitalist does not automatically qualify me as an uncaring ignoramus in everything else I do however. Unfortunately, being a capitalist does appear to qualify many people in precisely this manner, making them extremely susceptible to the politics of fear.

The ideologues from the right depend on this ignorance. They focus on the fear that haunts the wealthy-will they be able to maintain their privileged position. They focus on the fear of the middle-class, who are striving to become part of the wealthy and terrified that they will become (economically) lower-class. And they focus on the fear of the economically poor-will they ever get the chance to be part of the American Dream.

Which takes me back to the article I read this morning in MarketWatch. The title was "Why should you care about palliative care?".

The article begins with the question, "What, exactly, is a 'death panel?'. Now MarketWatch does not normally concern itself with questions on Health Care unless it is from an economics perspective and the impact it will have on the market in general and specifically the health care industry.

So it was almost bizarre to find an article in a financial report rationally dismantling one of the "fear" myths propagated by the right in their crusade against the Health Care program. The other major "fear" myth was the cost associated with the program, which plays on our preoccupation with taxation, but that is not my focus today.

The article's goal was to debunk the myth of death panels and to discuss our fear of death, and how our medical system has become more concerned with "ridding their patients body of the disease" then "to really focus on the bigger picture of that person's life".

It is actually both horrifying and terrifying that the politics of fear can take a concept such as palliative care, essentially a question of a patients quality of life and a support system to deal with the inevitable in a dignified manner can be twisted into a "death panel".

It is the first step to "NewSpeak".