Bush Administration Fear

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This paper explores the reasons behind the Bush administration’s use of fear and anxiety as tools to demand anything and everything from the American citizens. This paper shows why the effect of instilling fear in a population will reduce them to blind followers of their government, even if the demands of the government go against the wills of the people and go against their basic rights and freedoms. I will also show how this is achieved by the Bush administration. I will show that by threatening ostracization from the society, by making people believe that their lives are unsatisfying and by creating a general sense of panic, a society will render themselves as slaves to their leaders in order to attain the perfect life that they are so dearly…show more content…
Why would a group of people want to consciously and purposely create such a fearful aura? On page 68 of the book, “The Social Psychology of Politics”, Ottati and Isbell offer their insight on moods and how they play an important role in politics. These insights provide a plausible answer to these questions. The authors explain the importance of mood when forming opinions and beliefs about certain situations. They suggest that a happy person tends to pay less attention to details and information for fear that over-analysing the information may affect their happy state (Ottati and Isbell, 68). However, a sad person tends to deeply analyse information in the hope of enhancing or repairing their unhappy situation (Ibid.). Another important point made by the two authors is that people interpret their negative feelings as results of defects in their environment (Ibid.), which then motivates them to scrutinize everything around them. The population’s state of fear is an example of a negative mood which then leads to the population believing that there’s a defect in their environment. What follows is constant scrutiny of their environment and the people in it. And it’s this constant scrutiny that the government wants. The government wants the population to feel that there is something wrong with their lives and that there is something missing. They want this because the realization that something is wrong or missing leads the population to try and find the solution or the missing piece. And this is exactly where the government itself comes in. The government claims to have the answer to the worries and the government claims to hold the missing piece that the population, in this negative mood, so deeply wants. This answer and

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