My password-manager company has hit me with ads for a premium service. For an eternal subscription they will protect me from new threats. These threats are less concrete and less understood by me than a grandmother's stories of the Bogeyman are, by a small child.
Why haven't I read a history book about the Bogeyman, something with Toynbee-like scope and imagination? Actually Wikipedia has a pretty good article about the Bogeyman. But it completely ignores the implications for religions and political systems.
Recall the quote from Mencken, "The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."
Today some people are fretting over the Orange Bad Man coming back to the White House. Fears over Global Warming are probably the best reincarnation of the Bogeyman. It makes perfect sense for governmental elites to try to scare citizens with Global Warming since they see the peasants as ignorant children who are prone to misbehavior. Hence it is necessary to frighten them into submission.
Ironically society has become safer and lifespans have lengthened. But we might be more fearful than our ancestors, who had more real things to fear.
Another irony is that some of the people who consider themselves progressive and liberated are the ones who are most prone to modern reincarnations of the Bogeyman. Just this week, there were several statements by Euro-crats that if Putin is allowed to beat Ukraine, he will come for the rest of Europe in a couple years.
How are the priests' warnings about Hell any less childish than grandmothers' stories to children about the Bogeyman?
Perennial or classic reincarnations of the Bogeyman:
The threat of invasion to England.
Commies in the 1950s, kept at bay by J. Edgar Hoover and Senator McCarthy.
Wearing those silly cheap cloth masks during the Covid era.
White supremacists, racists, and insurrectionists hiding under your bed.
The eternal need for one more jab from Big Pharma.
A Muslim terrorist, out to "gitchoo."
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| Goya's drawing of the Bogeyman, from britannica.com |
Comments
I think the tides might be shifting. All the planets lining up on the solstice. People aren't putting up with shit anymore. We're not buying what they're selling and it's starting to be obvious even to them. Happy Pagan Day! I think I'll put up my tree.