The Children of Evolution: Euclides da Cunha and Positivist Discourse in Late Nineteenth-Century Brazil by Barber, Justin D. at AbeBooks.co.uk - ISBN 10: 1470183250 - ISBN 13: 9781470183257 - CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform - 2009 - Softcover
The Political Economy of Fear Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince
, 1513
All animals experience fear human beings, perhaps, most of all. Any animal incapable of fear would have been hard pressed to survive, regardless of its size, speed, or other attributes. Fear alerts us to dangers that threaten our well-being and sometimes our very lives. Sensing fear, we respond by running away, by hiding, or by preparing to ward off the danger.
To disregard fear is to place ourselves in possibly mortal jeopardy. Even the man who acts heroically on the battlefield, if he is honest, admits that he is scared. To tell people not to be afraid is to give them advice that they cannot take. Our evolved physiological makeup disposes us to fear all sorts of actual and potential threats, even those that exist only in our imagination.
The Political Economy of Fear
April 16th 2021, 2:20 pm
By keeping the population in a state of artificially heightened apprehension, the government-cum-media prepares the ground for planting specific measures of taxation, regulation, surveillance, reporting, and other invasions of the people s wealth, privacy, and freedoms
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All animals experience fear human beings, perhaps, most of all. Any animal incapable of fear would have been hard pressed to survive, regardless of its size, speed, or other attributes.
Fear alerts us to dangers that threaten our well-being and sometimes our very lives. Sensing fear, we respond by running away, by hiding, or by preparing to ward off the danger.
Sat, 27 Mar 2021 06:05 UTC We are survival machines-robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. This is Richard Dawkins in
The Selfish Gene. His selfish gene theory, he remarked in 1989, has become textbook orthodoxy, because it is merely a logical outgrowth of orthodox Neo-Darwinism, but expressed as a novel image.
The image is misleading. Dawkins doesn t literally believe that genes are selfish entities with a will to replicate themselves. If they were, they would be like animating souls. In the Darwinian world where Dawkins lives, genes are not souls, but merely molecules ruled by the determinist laws of chemistry. And they are the result of a series of chemical accidents over millions of years, starting from the first self-replicating protein.