Is It Fear of Uprisings or Altruistic Punishment?

What is most important for us to understand is that we, as a people, are most conditioned to fear when populations reclaim their social agency and collective power and rise up against the unjust policies of the state. Here, I am speaking of protests that are generally aimed against economic and social policies of repression that are directly tied to the interests of the powerful ruling class. As much as US rhetorics would like to pretend we are a classless nation, such protests are forms of class struggle.

No historical transformation has ever been possible without the consolidation of the passion or Eros, as George Katsiaficas reminds us, of the people on the streets, collectively directed with their reason toward their pursuit of justice. But we are also taught that to enter collectively into this state of uprising is dangerous, for, in many instances, it may result in violence with impunity by the state, in an effort to regain control of public life.

In Western societies with a heavy cultural emphasis on dispassionate reason and unrelenting individualism, such values function to distort the inherent communality that even neuroscientists now conclude is actually hardwired in human beings for our collective survival. However, Westerners, who often have so much less to lose as compared to the people of Bahrain, for instance, tend to be even more fearful of collective action, given their deeply conditioned cultural belief that cool individual reason is superior to passionate collective action. This misguided notion is reinforced by the fact that mass action with stirred emotions is only considered legitimate in the exercise of war, not democratic life.

Again, all this works well to temper mass action, particularly in the West. Hence, it may not be easy for many to trust the uprisings in Wisconsin and around the world today, given deep, unexamined insecurities and fears, intensified by a lack of faith in the people and an accompanying anxiety that things could get or be worse. That said, it should not be surprising that the more disconnected a person or class may feel from the passion that stirs the collective action of disenfranchised masses, the more concern they are bound to express for their individual well-being.

To breathe the true air of freedom and democracy you need independent media lungs. Staffed with journalists and political observers not beholden to the status quo.
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