The voice of fear

Here we are again. Another batch of terrorist attacks in Europe, this time in Belgium, followed by a storm of empty words and emptier actions in the media. Politicians of every color and denomination, so-called leaders and not-so-famous people, a lot of noise and zero solutions. What you hear is the voice of fear.

Be Self or Be Pro – a false choice

William Caxton showing specimen of his printings to the King

Everything changes but the human mind. This could be a good title for this post and also a way to start thinking a bit about a false debate that’s running under the lines in the social media scene. Since the very start of the self-publishing modern era I’ve read thousands of post and status about how silly was the choice for an author to put himself/herself out in the market alone, away from the organization of the publishing houses. That was the very voice of fear, in my opinion. Fear about a market that was changing, for the first time since the 1800’s.

The Wheels of Rage and Hate (no, it’s not a fantasy novel)

War, rage, pain (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

So the hunt for the terrorists in France is over. The bad guys got a number of bullets each and the most part of their hostages survived the experience. Thanks to the French special forces and to the huge number of policemen and military personnel involved. But it’s not over. By any means, it will be never over. Not in France, nor in any other country. It’s time to tell the truth, to think about the subject “terrorism” with a broader focus and the will to solve some problem here and there.

Fear of the Dark

The title of this post came from an old Iron Maiden song (an all-time favorite for me) but I’m not here today to write about music, the focus is about fear itself. A peculiar kind of fear, the one about money. Like it or not, these are tough times for everybody and even in our so-called “first world” we’re experiencing fear big time. Last year here in Italy we got as much as one million job losses (more than 13% plus than 2012), a huge number everywhere but in a country with about 60 million people and about 27 million potential workers is a big chunk of reality to be swallowed.

So here comes the fear. Fear of a future that could be darker than expected, fear to lose our jobs, fear of being caught in a financial meat-grinder and to become another statistic in a gloomy chart titled “poverty”. We fear to be forced to pull down our lifestyle, we fear to be pushed to the extreme limits of dignity, we shake to the news of every chapter-11 procedures that surfaces on the media. Fear can be dangerous of course. Dangerous enough to force the most scared of us to commit suicide, or to kill the loved ones before doing the same.

This kind of fear appears everyday on the media, in order to give some blood to a famelic audience, always on the ready for the next gore show. What they do not show is the real deal, the numbers that certifies the end of the capitalistic era. The few voices that are yelling this message are kept apart, as far as they can from the public view. This use of fear is the base to build empires in politics, in the financial markets, a drive for power for the ones who are so crazy to resurrect the dead ideologies of the ‘900. You see them in Greece or in Bulgaria, you can look them straight in the eyes in Hungary. It’s using fear to dominate other fears.

Remember Weimar. It’s not so far away.