FDR's sage advice rings true even today

SOCIAL STUDIES - Published Monday November 3rd, 2008

Everyone I know is afraid of the economic collapse.

Add global warming and the non-renewable fuel crisis and the truth is it looks like we are screwed.

Of course, when I was a teen the world was about to end any second with the USSR or U.S.A. keeping their finger on the button of nuclear destruction.

I am sure 50 years before that everyone thought Bismark or some other world leader was going to upset the applecart of security and we were all going to die.

Still, it is hard to come to terms with the fact that the world seems to be changing overnight again.

Although very few say it out loud, it does seem to me that the closest comparison for where we are today is the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Keeping this in mind I stumbled across some political speeches out of America from that era which seem to me to say everything that needs saying to us today.

In his 1941 State of the Union address, Franklin Delano Roosevelt talked about his idea of four universal human freedoms: First, the freedom of speech and of expression; second, the freedom of belief; third, the freedom from want; and, finally, fourth, the freedom from fear.

At the time, one clever newspaper journalist commented that these four freedoms are not created equal. Two of them are basic, original freedoms; the freedom from want, and the freedom from fear.

The other freedoms we enjoy really are only made possible by having enough to survive and being safe enough to speak. Then we can worry about what we believe and how we say it.
Which is to say that people who are hungry, who lack clean water, who lack shelter from the elements, who live daily with the fear that they will die too young from curable disease or military aggression, will always eagerly trade civil liberties for bread to eat and political freedom for safety. This helps to explain the rise of European fascism three quarters of a century ago and the rise of fundamentalist regimes in more recent times.

To put it in far more blunt terms, if you want for food to eat, the exercise of free speech is not all that important. And, if you live in a war torn region, with the perpetual threat of danger to life and limb, having the freedom to compose, say, poetry loses a lot of its value.

The Four Freedoms speech was a powerful address opposing American isolationism and calling on the citizens of the United States to accept, in Roosevelt's words, "personal sacrifice" in order to battle the illiberal forces of fascism that threatened the entire planet.

However, it was in a speech that FDR delivered eight years earlier, as the United States faced not the rise of fascism abroad but financial ruin at home, that he linked fear and economics, beginning his first inaugural address with those defiant words, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself -- nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance." Taking over a country with its economy in shambles, at the deepest pit of its greatest depression, Roosevelt named the fear that gripped the hearts of Americans.

The problem is, fear is a hard thing to overcome.

Psychologists will tell you it is a hard wired part of our ancient reptilian brains, and so whenever we get scared we act a whole lot like ancient cavemen and cavewomen.

Fear, the primal emotion, is such a powerful emotion. In extreme cases of sudden fear, our brains fill our bodies with powerful chemicals causing us to have a fight or flight reaction. In other cases, fear can paralyze us. People who live with chronic anxiety suffer from all manner of health ailments and can even manifest many of the symptoms of a heart attack, so great is the power of anxiety.

So how are you doing with all of the news these days? Is fear getting to you? I can come up with consequences from all of this that scare me; from job loss right through the loss of paid health care. Whether my daughters will know what an orange is when they grow up or whether in fact they will live under the ice.

Dan Savage, a cultural commentator, tried to write a book about greed and ended up talking about our addiction to fear. He spent several weeks visiting depressing river boat casinos in the American Midwest. In the essay he discovers that greed does not lead people to the casinos; rather, greed leads people to build casinos. He writes that life in North America is basically safe for a whole lot of people, and that this safety is monotonous, and that people go to casinos to add a contrived element of risk to their fairly safe lives. He points out that after September 11, business at the casinos was first non-existent and then sluggish for months on end. If you are already on edge, you don't need go to the casinos in order to stimulate your brain chemicals by risking and losing money in the slot machines.

I would like to suggest that there are a whole lot of people still trying to use fear to motivate us to make rash decisions. I have said it about advertising and now I say it about the current crisis.
Roosevelt offers the answers to the people of the United States in the midst of the depression; and we would do well to hear them now.

"Happiness lies not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort. The joy and moral stimulation of work no longer must be forgotten in the mad chase of evanescent profits. These dark days will be worth all they cost us if they teach us that our true destiny is not to be ministered unto but to minister to ourselves and to our fellow men."