Driving Question

“How has fear been used as a political, defensive, and cultural tool to shape our society?”

What is fear? 

Is it an emotion? A feeling? Or is it a tool? A secret power for you (and others) to use? Perhaps it’s a motivator, that strange tingly sensation that’s always lingering at the back of your mind. 

“PSST … AVA. DO YOUR BLOG POST!” It whispers at 6pm, Monday night. 

You could say fear is an integral part of my life… or rather, everyone’s life. At least, if fear didn’t exist, my social confidence would skyrocket and I’d dance on TikTok for a living. There’s no escaping the absolute terror of watching your mom cut your curtain bangs, and tease that she accidentally gave you the Dora Bangs™

…And that’s hoping you end up resembling Dora. Knowing me, I’d look more like Vector from Despicable Me. 

Anyways, where was I? There was a point to this. 

Oh right, FEAR.

In our latest Humanities endeavour, we returned to the Manhattan Project, and what’s more terrifying than an atomic bomb? A single explosive that has the power to wipe out almost the entire city of Hiroshima? 

I really shouldn’t have asked, because it turns out it’s THE LITERAL END OF HUMANITY ITSELF.

That’s right, in this project, we dived deep into the Cold War. Since “FEAR” and “THE COLD WAR” are such broad topics, we got to create our own, individual driving questions! 

I’d considered myself quite knowledgeable about this topic… well, as knowledgeable as you can be from watching 10+ JFK assassination documentaries as a kid… Seriously, it’s a crazy topic. Or, maybe, between this and my obsession with the Titanic (and not the movie), I was just a really weird kid. 

Anyways, I decided to choose something I hadn’t known much about, and that was “McCarthyism” (aka the Red Scare of the 1950s.) 

This was my personal driving question: 

“How does fear breed distrust in communities?”

I kinda also chose it, because it tied along with my witch-hunting podcast episode from last year: 

(Please go watch it, I’m begging you. I literally talked for 30 minutes straight – not even counting the hours worth of outtakes-, which is a consecutive record for me.)

Now that we’ve got that out of the way, it’s time to rewind back to the beginning of this project… way back to before I knew what a Zettlekasten was…

(I’M KIDDING, DON’T KILL ME PLEASE.) 

Usually, when you get assigned a book for Spring Break, you tend to (unjustly) despise it before you even start reading. But with “Hiroshima” by John Hersey, I was intrigued. The novel was about the lives of 6 of Hiroshima’s “Hibakushas” and how the atomic bomb affected their lives. 

I was intrigued by the idea of narrative journalism, and how this “Hersey” achieved “new journalism” decades before it was prevalent in American news. It was also interesting how John himself was dealing with representation, and how he, as a white man (who grew up in Tianjin, China), dealt with such a sensitive topic respectfully. 

I found the book to be insightful. The writing style was descriptive, but also let the reader interpret the important parts. The message was subtle, opting for a “show not tell” policy rather than having a specific moral.

It was also really heavy. The whole thing was horrifying. I found myself unable to go on at parts, just because of how emotionally weighing it was.

I think it was an incredibly successful novel, because it was successful in its goal to humanize the events of Hiroshima and its victims.  As the author of “Fallout,” a novel which analyzes the success of Hersey’s Hiroshima, said, “The only way you would not use nuclear weapons is if you see the ‘other’ as human.” (Lesley M.M. Blume)

Also here is a theme analysis we did on the novel. It’s not my finest of work and I honestly forgot to include it in here until after I wrote the entire blog post, hence the weird placement. I was playing around with writing style, and it ended up being really awkward sounding. Anyways, voila, enjoy:

What is also horrifying is that while I was reading this novel, I was also writing notes wrong. 

I mean, “wrong” may not be the best word in this scenario, as Ms. Willemse once said, “There is no wrong way of taking notes, only more effective ways.” 

According to this old, but smart guy, Niklas Luhmann (another addition to the old white men I need to raise from the dead to answer my questions…), there are three kinds of notes: 

The Fleeting notes, which are made in the moment to help you understand a text, and are basically unprocessed thoughts. 

The Literature notes, which is a summary of a piece of media, that you are able to understand and return to in the future. 

And the Permanent notes, which are “big brained” ideas that come from you and are not necessarily tied to one text in particular. 

The main idea is creating a separate brain that can hold knowledge for you… (free of AI, so that you don’t have to worry about the long-term ethicality of potentially creating something that has a 10-20% chance of rising up and destroying humanity.) 

So, obviously, we had to start our own Zettlekasten. 

Here is a culmination of ALL the Zettlekasten notes I created for this project (including more thoughts on Hiroshima): 

Throughout this project, we analyzed several books, articles, and documentaries/films. Some we were assigned as a class, and the rest was me searching the internet for morsels of knowledge.

However, since we don’t want to be here all day (or rather, I don’t want to contribute to my “artist shrimp posture” by leaning over my iPad for 24 hours), I’m not going to go into each and every one of my sources.

I almost also forgot to mention that we did ✨Socratic Seminars✨ with the knowledge from our sources. How could I forget something so traumatizing?

Ok. Ok. It wasn’t that bad, but I’m notoriously bad at the art of conversation. You may not be able to tell from my fabulous internet blogging wizard persona, but I’m a bit of a socially inept introvert irl. I found these seminars to be a good challenge to get my voice out there. Sure, I wasn’t able to get all my points out and managed to fumble the ones that I did, but I did it! Yay me! 

And now we’re all caught up and you’re ready to hear about my project…

For this project, we had the opportunity to pick what we wanted to make to represent our learning. Being the creative person I am, I was pretty excited about this.

If you remember from that one time I made a WWI comic, I really like graphic novels. I also find zines to be pretty interesting, and I’ve wanted to make one for a while. Why not do it for homework? 

I originally wanted to make a little comic/zine about the personal effects of McCarthyism in a community. However, things didn’t go exactly how I wanted them to. 

The past month has been a little rough. With me being sick for two weeks and some life stuff, I didn’t have the time I thought I did. So, I had to pivot a little bit. 

I still stuck with the zine idea. However, instead of a graphic novel/story, I went more into a factual deep dive into the history of the Red Scare (and how demagogues took advantage of fear.) 

I think it’s still a good product, and I put a lot of effort into it. But, given the special parameters, I’m more disappointed that I didn’t take the opportunity to do something more creative. 

Anyways, here it is: 

What I found really interesting is the word “demagogue” (meaning, “a political leader who seeks support by appealing to the desires and prejudices of ordinary people rather than by using rational argument”) 

I hadn’t heard of this term before, and I was surprised that there was a word for this. The amount of historical/present figures that could go under this umbrella is astonishing. In one of my Zettlekasten entries, I talked about how demagogues and democracy go hand and hand. It’s fascinating how the whole system works, and the role fear has in it all. 

Returning to the driving questions (both mine, and the main one)… 

Everyone is afraid. Fear is a natural response that has kept humanity alive for several millennia. However, it can also be a tool to incite division and hatred. When acted upon, it makes us loose our trust with one another. And when we doubt the truth, reality itself is unstable. We usually see this in times of hardship (like the introduction of atomic weapons and the atmosphere of the Cold War), where the people are collectively afraid. 

In history, there are several examples of this. In ancient Athens, Cleon rallied the people to gain military power himself. During the witch trials, neighbours were posed against each other, believing that the other was indeed a witch. The committee of Un-American Activities looked for communists where there were none, and McCarthy took advantage of the uncertainty of Americans. Today, social media uses echo chambers to radicalize opinion over fact. 

With high global tensions, the world is once again facing a similar intensity as the Cold War. It’s important to recognize our own internal fear, but also use it as a tool for “good.” Use it as a motivator to go out and seek the truth yourself, while understanding the perspectives of different people. 

Fear shouldn’t be something that divides us, but rather, something that unites us in our shared humanity. 

In a world with nuclear weapons, demagogues, and TikTok, the future is almost always uncertain. However, in understanding the past, we find the guide to building a better one. 

Huzzah! Another blog post finished! It only took four hours. Actually, that’s not too bad compared to the last one. Time to finally close all 200+ tabs that I used for this project 🥲

See y’all later!