GORDON F. D. WILSON: I Fear so I Vote

Fear, the most powerful emotion, works directly and indirectly to influence our decisions, actions, behaviour, and interaction with each other.

This emotion is pervasive within global society and at the root of shifting political fortunes and redefining our geopolitical matrix. Fear is the tap root that feeds our most basic instincts and, when successfully exploited, can shift rationality into irrational action.

I used fear as a driver within the subplot of my novel, One Weekend in May, because it is multi-layered, affects all aspects of our lives, and is at the heart of the human condition.

In the novel, the protagonist, Ken Graham, writes that “Every species has survival as its prime objective, but in doing so, it seeks to survive with those of its own kind first, those with whom it holds a symbiotic relationship second, and those who do not threaten the prime objective last. It will systematically eliminate all species that do not fit within those three parameters. . . because it benefits us to do so.”

Of course, most of us experience fear in a far less dramatic fashion than species survival. Triggers that cause us to respond to our fears, however, solicit no less a commitment to protect us from what we perceive to be the threat.

Both sides of the right/left political divide have, in recent years, tried to tap into people’s basic fears, and high on a very long list, is losing the source of, or a reduction in, the income needed to feed, protect, and provide our families.

“It’s the economy, stupid,” Clinton political strategist James Carville famously said in 1992. But the politics of fear have come a long way since then.

Immigration has become a hot topic.

“They took our jobs,” the satirical South Park animation "Goobacks" warned in 2006, but the 2024 warning went several steps further: “They’re eating our cats and dogs.”.

These fear tactics work with a large percentage of the population because they are designed to assign blame for real problems, like job loss, that impact real families.

It is hard enough for the average family to face down and get through real life-related problems without taking on the burden of those imagined, unlikely, or false altogether.

Discussions on immigration, legal or illegal, too often get tangled up within the context of human rights, and all too frequently, domestic populations misunderstand or are ignorant of the associated facts.

That said, most Western countries have a growing population of immigrants who are not choosing citizenship when granted residency. This non-citizen population does burden governments that are forced to provide services.

Ignorance is Fear’s bedmate, and their progeny freely grows within an ill-informed, already divided, and fearful society ripe for exploitation by those for whom social division equals election.

We reach the proverbial tipping point when the perceived threat extends to an attack on the family itself. It’s as though the voter has an unwritten code, like the fictional Mafia code in a Mario Puzo novel, that all’s fair until you mess directly with my family.

The perception is that families are under attack by those accused of state-sanctioned social engineering, of trying to corrupt our children through a revised educational curriculum that not only challenges the previously accepted binary gender equation but introduces children as young as seven and eight years of age to the idea of non-binary gender and identity choice.

Whether or not those accusations are true, the perception within the majority in many Western countries is that they are, and all politicians learn, like the Democrats just did in the US, that working public opinion is like working fresh poured cement; once it sets against you, you’re done.

That’s not to say there wasn’t, and isn’t still, considerable fear of what a Trump presidency will bring, but the US voters survived four years of chaos before, so it came down to which of the two options was feared least.

To accommodate various societal considerations and norms, the prescription over the last four years has been to highlight diversity in standards for employment and in mainstream discourse, theatre, television, and film production in the hopes that doing so will "normalize" diversity.

But there is a very real difference between social tolerance and social acceptance. People want to know where society is headed and upon which accepted principles that journey will be made.

To be successful, fear must be removed from the equation, and trust needs to be re-established. That can only happen when ignorance is replaced by fact-based information free of political agendas and to find ways in which the diversities within our social framework can, at the very least, be accepted as non-threatening and at best mutually beneficial.

Gordon Wilson is a writer and business consultant who served as an elected MLA from 1991 -2001.  During that time, he held several cabinet posts including Minister of Forests, Aboriginal Affairs and Minister of Finance. He has consulted widely matters pertaining to the Canadian resource economy, and the Canadian Constitution. He lives on a small sheep farm in Powell River.