You see in times of crisis that extremist forces, populist forces, have a better ground to oversimplify things and to manipulate feelings. Feelings of fear.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Extremists and populist movements are exploiting people's fear of those who are not like us. We can see the consequences in the form of terrorism and racially motivated violence.
Whenever you have a crisis, you're always going to have the extremists taking advantage of the situation.
Few things trigger fear and misconception more than economic tribulation, and nothing prompts elected officials to react with more simplistic populism.
Our world is utterly saturated with fear. We fear being attacked by religious extremists, both foreign and domestic. We fear the loss of political rights, a loss of privacy, or a loss of freedom. We fear being injured, robbed or attacked, being judged by others, or neglected, or left unloved.
We mostly feel fearful because we feel powerless. We feel powerless, I contend, because of a style of thinking that splits information in two poles that makes us lose all the operative information we need to solve the problem.
Populism is dangerous.
Political extremism involves two prime ingredients: an excessively simple diagnosis of the world's ills, and a conviction that there are identifiable villains back of it all.
Crisis and pressure help foster change - that's why I'm not so pessimistic towards crises.
Feelings are more dangerous than ideas, because they aren't susceptible to rational evaluation. They grow quietly, spreading underground, and erupt suddenly, all over the place.
Fear is a great motivator. Look at what 9-11 has accomplished - My god. It's slammed the economy, It's - I can't even begin to detail all it's actually done, other than bring down the buildings and hit the Pentagon. It's stunned the entire nation.
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