Austerity, fear and bubblethink

Chris Dillow writes that Austerity, fear and bubblethink is ideologically driven.

When intelligent men say something very stupid, ideology is at work. But what is the ideology here?

Part of the answer is that Tim has been sucked into mediamacro bubblethink - a world in which talk of the "national credit card" is taken seriously rather than scorned as sub-literate cretinism. It might be no accident that one of the few prominent politicians to see things as they really are works outside the Westminster bubble.

But perhaps there's something else. As Nick Barlow said the other day, politicians no longer offer any hope. (This might be because of the triumph of neoliberal scepticism about the possibility of successful collective action). What they can do, though, is trade on fear — as Cameron did to the BCC on Tuesday. As Frank Furedi has written, "governments use fear to sustain their authority."

The problem is that, so accustomed has the ruling class become to using fear rather than hope, that they now use it even when it justifies policies which are the exact opposite of those they are advocating.

Emphasis Mine

The aim of the ideological superstructure is to keep the current ruling class in power. Fear is one of the means that they use. Fear of different cultures, fear of homosexuals, fear of strangers, fear of the other sex. As long as these fears exist, we are taught to rely on the ruling class to protect us from these ‘bad people’.