The Key to Making Cultural and Political Change: No Fear, Only Love!
Generating fear of each other allows people with an agenda that is not concerned with what is best for you to prey on your anxieties and manipulate you. Let's beat the fearmonger agenda with love.
Each of us is on a different journey. Along the way, there are many great unknowns. The fear, confusion and anxiety that may bring is understandable. It is human.
Fortunately, it’s also human to not be driven into our actions by fear, confusion and anxiety. Instead, I propose that we learn to drive our actions by love. In fact, I have a mantra for Revolution Today that I hope each of you can make a small part of your daily life: No Fear, Only Love.
The appeal to fear is as old as persuasion. But instead of convincing the audience on the merits of an argument, the appeal to fear targets our anxieties and worries. It works because as a species and as individuals we often are not good at actually judging potential outcomes and predicting results.
For example, turn on the local nightly news or follow the Nextdoor app and it’s hard to not hear stories of violence and terror. The problem is that the one data point can too easily be extracted to a trend that does not actually exist. And we know this!
Fox News and other outlets take these one off stories and tell their audiences, which might include you reader, that the one off is what’s happening everywhere, everyday. The only issue is that it’s not. In fact, across the United States we are safer today from all felony and misdemeanor crimes than we’ve ever been, and definitely since the 1950s when government at all levels started to record this data.
The fearmongers push us even further apart by playing on our fear of the other. Who is the other you might ask? Well, it’s anyone different from you, which is always super convenient. Maybe the human across from you is the other because of their skin color, religion or place of birth. Or maybe they are the other because they simply don’t conform.
The truth is, though, that none of us is an other. Or at least we don’t have to be if we were to drop our completely irrational fears and replace them with love for another. Listen, I can tell you that every single American is going to wake up today, eat and drink, and go to the bathroom. If they’re lucky, they might enjoy a little lovemaking. And then every single American is going to go sleep.
The luckiest of us will wake up the next day. That’s our common blessing. We should elevate that common blessing to quash the fear of other and replace it with celebrating each and every one of us.
Revolution Today is about change, which means action. So how can you turn No Fear, Only Love into action?
Well, if you think the world around you is not safe and you think people who are different from you are to be feared, you can work on yourself. You can open your eyes to the fact that your as safe as you’ve ever been in the United States. You can open your heart to the fact that differences are to be celebrated and our similarities are what bind us. I’m here to help you work on this.
If you already live No Fear, Only Love, then spread it. Confront fear when you see it. Guide and reassure that the work can be done to leave the fear of the other behind and to find the dignity in the other that each of us has as our human birthright. Shine your love as an example. It will be rewarded.
We can change our culture. We can guarantee Maximum Liberty for all. We can love one another.