How Fear and Outrage Are Sold for Profit

Re:How Fear and Outrage Are Sold for Profit by rosser on Tuesday July 25, 2017 @03:33PM (#14851127)

Where do trying to be "Jesus-like", relentlessness, or replacing one fixation with another come into it? That's the bias I'm talking about; you're making a leap from one extreme to another that's unsupported by anything in the discussion, or the referenced text.

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Re:How Fear and Outrage Are Sold for Profit by smokeyj on Tuesday July 25, 2017 @03:59PM (#14851354)

> The really important kind of freedom involves .. being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

Are we not reading the same thing? Is this sentence not the crux of the entire message? It seems to me - by the word choice used - that DFW finds sacrifice to be "petty and unsexy" - yet does it to a repetitive extent for the sake of real freedom. I'm making the observation that that also sounds like a type of worship. Maybe it's totally off base, but I don't see why the point is confusing. It's pretty simple actually.

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Re:How Fear and Outrage Are Sold for Profit by throw_away on Tuesday July 25, 2017 @04:27PM (#14851555)

I don't think the author denies that this is a form of worship. Immediately before the above excerpt, Wallace says:

"Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship -- be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles -- is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive."

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