Fear-1952 / Fear-2005

I believe Paul Tillich's thoughts below, accurately describe our current reactive right-wing culture to a tee. It's an interesting glimpse of historic & philosophical proof that we currently exist within a paradigm of McCarthyism II.

And this sequel is NOT a very good movie either. It's even worse than "the original" that Tillich certainly knew.

"There is a moment in which the self-affirmation of the average man becomes neurotic: when changes of the reality to which he is adjusted threaten the fragmentary courage with which he has mastered the accustomed objects of fear. If this happens - and it often happens in critical periods of history - the self-affirmation becomes pathological. The dangers connected with the change, the unknown character of the things to come, the darkness of the future make the average man a fanatical defender of the established order. He defends it as compulsively as the neurotic defends the castle of his imaginary world. He loses his comparative openness to reality, he experiences an unknown depth of anxiety. But if he is not able to take this anxiety into his self-affirmation his anxiety turns into neurosis."

-Paul Tillich (1952), "The Courage To Be", pp. 69-70.