Lincoln and the Politics of Fear

To those who read this blog, my apologies if I have kept you waiting. They say reading too much is a writer’s crutch, the almost conscious attempt at avoiding writing has become an unfortunate byproduct of having read some great work. Good literature does that to you, it makes you abstain till you have found something truly riveting to say.

While you’re wondering what could I have possibly to add to the liberal praise critics better than me have bestowed on the movie. While all of those happen to be true I’d like to talk about the sequence where Lincoln takes Robert out for a visit to a hospital in an attempt to convince him not to go enlist. The sequence is beautifully shot as Robert cocky and sure tells his father he has been to plenty of army hospitals having witnessed surgeries and how another will not change or affect his resolve to enlist. The sequence that follows is beautifully edited notice how i say edited and not shot. Michael Kahn does a fantastic job as he makes you follow a trail of blood that ends in the dumping of severed limbs quite unceremoniously into a ditch. He then shows you a shot of Robert’s hands quivering as he tries to rolls himself a cigarette. But the true clincher is the end of this sequence is now an ever more so defiant Robert tells his father who towers above him in the scene that “he has to enlist, or he’d be ashamed of himself for the rest of his life”. That’s when you realize that what they’ve just shown you on film is the true approach of humankind towards fear, or the philosophy of fear if you will.

What we fear scares us till the point of identification, what scares us more than a person/ thing/ situation is our inability to comprehend it or its consequences more so than the event or the act itself. Fear is amorphous form, the vapor that precedes the storm the danger music that begins before the curtain is unveiled. So it is with Robert too until now he has been scared of the war, of what might happen to him should he enlist, his mind has presented to him various scenarios of varying effect each designed to handicap him from taking action. When he sees the hospital and the pile of severed limbs his fear has taken a form, it has become crystallized, the ability to prepare one’s self to respond to fear seems to be an automatic function as soon as that form takes shape. We see Robert now telling his father he must fight for he will never respect himself if he does not. Which is what he’s trying to tell you that now he knows what he’s in for it would be mere cowardice on his part to go through with it. Fear and cowardice bear that very distinction some might call it a minor semantic difference but it is much more. Fear is crippling, cowardice is simply the inability to take action.

But what I find fascinating in this story is the way we respond to fear, the sudden surge of confidence and courage we feel once we know who we’re up against even though the odds remain the same. Is it that the mind fools itself in giving us a fighting chance knowing fairly well the situation still remains as hopeless as it was before. Why is it so important for us to know, to see to define the boundaries of the source of our emotion? Why cannot we defeat fear on the principle of it?

I remember having read somewhere about a magician describing his craft. He has said that my job as a magician is to present the mind with a conundrum, the true illusion is created by the mind itself as it knows not the science behind it. The best example here of course would be religion but lets not make it so easy. Would we then characterize the emotion of fear as an emotional response to not knowing? but why should it cripple us so? Is it fear or is it cowardice that attacks our Ego, as logical thinking beings is the fact that we cannot comprehend our greatest source of insecurity, “not knowing why, we cannot know” is therefore a fit corollary.

What we do end up concluding therefore is that while fear is rational, fear is sane, fear is to be respected, cowardice is universally loathed, knowledge has its price, an almost moralistic impulse to conquer the ‘known’ not the ‘unknown’ is considered totally heroic, even though the odds of survival in both scenarios remain the same. While you could be considered a hero even though you’re afraid, you might be the smartest man alive and never take chances, but unless you make that suicidal leap and achieve martyrdom you’re a coward. Wonder who figured out the politics of that.

I wonder if showing Robert the army hospital was one of Lincoln’s smarter moves for it had the exact opposite effect, while earlier he was dissuading his son, after that he had put him in a bind. Robert could not, not go to war after that, it was a matter of his ego. But then Lincoln was freeing a nation, I bet he had a lot on his mind.

Tagged: ego, Emotion, Fear, illusion, Lincoln, Michael Kahn, Mind, politics, poltics, society, unknown