Episode #25: Politicians and the Doomsday Rhetoric of ‘What If’

If there was a theme song for the election rhetoric of 2020, it would be R.E.M.'s chart-topping song "It's the end of the world as we know it" from 1987.  We have been warned incessantly by both candidates that if they are not elected president, the world will come to an end in various creative ways.The truth is we suffer more in our imaginations than we often do in our reality. Politicians understand this phenomenon.One emotion stands out above all others. Fear. One way to overcome fear-mongering is to use an exercise from Stoicism called "The Premeditation of Evils" and if we use this, not only in filtering political rhetoric but in all aspects of decision making, we cut down the emotion of fear and arrive at a clearer vision of potential outcomes.  In the end, could the election of Donald Trump lead us to raise our right hand and scream "Sieg Heil" as America becomes a dictatorship? I doubt it. Or, could the election of Joe Biden mean I will be standing in a mile-long line outside Walmart to get my daily food ration like Cuba or Venezuela? I doubt that too. It's time to cut through all the doomsday rhetoric, rationally, like a Stoic philosopher, and then, we can arrive at reasonable conclusions in politics and all life decisions.Send us Fan MailFollow the Intellectual Freedom Podcast on Social Media: Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61581532813468 X : https://x.com/Int_Freedom_podLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/intellectual-freedom-podcast