Suppression, 6

And all kinds of merchants of chaos anyhow deliberately aim at making you feel surrounded by a dangerous environment, in order to exploit your ensuing reactions, at your expense and to your detriment. A merchant of chaos may not be necessarily suppressive, but he or she is certainly unaware, unconcerned, incompetent or selfish enough to act so. Whatever the basic motives behind it, we’re in presence of a deliberate intention of exploiting others by specifically harming them for profit.

Just ponder over how many professions are on the verge of this, if not just plainly in it: politicians, media, life and psyche advisors from every view of the world and existence, the various forces wearing uniforms, any form of monopoly and oligopoly, big pharma, tobacco corporations and drug cartels are but the first and most conspicuous springing to mind; the exercise consists in figuring out how each candidate can and does leverage your weakness or legitimate aims in order to let you reach for their, or their accomplices, “services” or “favours”, the more so the more you are – or even just feel – unsafe, endangered, etc.

What lets you feel you need more politics and more politicians: peace, ease and serenity, or rather conflict, problems and anxiety? Politicians posture as knights rattling their sabers and gnashing their teeth at the dragons, which means that without the dragons they’re nothing, which in turn means dragons are likely to be made of paper−mâché and wires pulled by puppeteers, even though the fire they spit is authentic, witness our scorched backsides.
What lets you consume more media: sensational scary news or reassuring good news? One car accident or the millions of cars that happily reached their destinations in the meantime? A tree falling or a forest growing?
What lets you reach for solace to your problems in any given religion, philosophy or whatever ethics, more? The constructive uncomfortable notion that to master your fate you must actively cooperate with it to restore your responsibility, or the defeatist apathetic notion that your misfortunes are too big to overcome so all you’re left with is sympathy?