You want to protect us? Stop starting wars, stop bombing people in other countries

[Egalitarian Thug]

19. I think mainly it's just fear. If one is reasonably intelligent and well informed, you can't help

but to see so many of these things going on. In seeing these things a person will naturally start to question and once you question you are invariably confronted with really uncomfortable answers accompanied by the attendant losses. Loss of faith in people you trust, loss of the illusion of control and the belief that, even when we screw up, our intentions are good. Things like that.

Most of us like to think that the people in charge are better than we are, that they know more than we do, or at least that they have a clue about what they are doing. It is frightening to think that we really are on our own, that what happened to her actually could happen to me, that maybe no one is going to save us, or worse, that powerful people and the institutions they control don't even want to. Once you start down that path it quickly becomes impossible to un-see, so it's better to just not look.

That's one theory, anyway.


One thing I know for sure, trying to figure out why people do anything is usually pointless because most of the time they don't know themselves.