According to Freire, a Culture of Silence cultivates Fear when people remain ignorant of their ability to look "critically at the world in a dialogical encounter with others" (14-15). A Fear of Freedom thus become the result, but freedom in this sense is quite perverse: freedom is confused with the maintenance of the status quo (18)... where "the oppressed are afraid to embrace freedom; the oppressors are afraid of losing the "freedom" to oppress" (28). For both of them, they face the challenge of overcoming "prescription." True freedom for the oppressed means "rejecting this internalization of inferiority, replacing it with autonomy and responsibility" (29).
But it's more complicated than this:
They are at one and the same time themselves and the oppressor whose consciousness they have internalized. The conflict lies in the choice between being wholly themselves or being divided; between rejecting the oppressor within or not rejecting them; between human solidarity or alienation; between following prescriptions or having choices; between being spectators or actors; between acting or having the illusion of acting through the action of the oppressors; between speaking out or being silent, castrated in their power to create and re-create, in their power to transform the world. This is the tragic dilemma of the oppressed which their education must take into account. (Freire 30)To break this Silence and liberate themselves from this Fear of Freedom would mean letting go of "old paternalistic" [teacher-student] relationship, and being pro-active in order to start naming their world empowered by this new awareness of selves.
American educator and citizen Palmer also noticed this "old paternalistic" relationship. According to him academic culture "distrusts personal truths... mostly honoring an 'objective' way of knowing... [where] objective facts are regarded as pure, while subjective feelings are suspect and sullied" (18).
Academic Culture, says Palmer, illustrates the Culture of Fear pervasive in the U.S. Fear is created through the practice of a disconnected life:
We are distanced by a grading system that separates teachers from students, by departments that fragment fields of knowledge, by competition that makes students and teachers alike wary of their peers, and by a bureaucracy that puts faculty and administration at odds... Fear is what distances us from our colleagues, our students, our subjects, ourselves... Fear is a standard management tool... it is the fear of losing my job or my image or my status if I do not pay homage to institutional powers. (Palmer 36)This Fear can be summed up in "the fear of having a live encounter with alien 'otherness'... we fear encounters in which the other ... tell us what we may not wish to hear. We want those encounters on our own terms, so that we can CONTROL their outcomes, so that they will not threaten our view of world and self" (emphasis mine, Palmer 37). Palmer continues that this fearful encounter is "actually a sequence of fears that begin in the fear of diversity... fear of the conflict that will ensue when divergent truths meet... fear of conflict... fear of losing identity [and sense of self]" (38).
Campomanes shares insights about Fear induced by identity confusion specifically of the U.S. during its rise as a world superpower. The example Campomanes brings up is the often ignored Philippines-American War ( the result of the Spanish American War ). The Philippines-American War is often ignored and downplayed because this war tarnishes the reputation of the U.S. as harbinger of freedom and democracy. Most U.S. politicians et. al. rationalized that the Philippine government who fought the Spaniards weren't "civilized" enough to established sovereignty. The "humane" thing to do was colonized the Filipinos and teach them "civility." This very act has caused conflict with U.S. identity:
First, the constitutional crisis that shaped up and intensified also cleaved to an undeniable tenuousness of U.S. sovereignty claims over the Philippines from the perspective of international law, a crisis of legitimacy which the Treaty of Paris did not resolve and, in fact, clearly foregrounded. Second, the unpreparedness of the U.S. Army and War Department in war footing itself became an issue, sharpened by the grim turns that the Philippine war was taking and would take with the two years after this war was repeatedly declared by campaigning U.S. generals to be a quick and easy one for the U.S. armed forces. As army and war atrocities mounted and the increasingly genocidal tenor of the war became quickly evident, two problems became endemic: troop discipline breakdown and sagging national morale, especially as the Filipinos resorted to guerilla warfare by November 1899, after losing in set piece and conventional battles in which they suffered from decisive disadvantages. (139-140)Before Vietnam, there was the Philippines-American War. While other U.S. historians would argue that the Philippines-American War was an "aberration" (employing the "The Great Aberration Thesis" ), other historians would argue otherwise: the very structure of U.S. foundation and democracy is bourgeois and imperialist. Palmer also notices a similar pattern, perhaps questioning the aberration theory. He notes the complexity of Fear pervasive in U.S. culture:
Our multi-layered fear of the live encounter is not simply a personal emotion that teachers and students bring into the classroom one by one. It is also a cultural trait at work in every area of our common life. We practice a politcs of fear in which candidates are elected by playing on voters' anxieties about race and class. We do business in an econmy of fear where "getting and spending" are driven by consumer worries about keeping up with the neighbors. We subscribe to religions of fear that exploit our dread of death and damnation. (49)Like Freire's Culture of Silence, Palmer finds a reason how such a Culture of Silence can be created in the U.S.: "people who have reason to fear those in power have learned that there is safety in not speaking (45):"
Since the1960s... implicitly and explicitly, young people (students in the U.S.) are told that they have no experience worth having, no voice worth speaking, no future of any note, no significant role to play... the behaviors generated by fear- silence, withdrawal, cynicism- often mimic those that come with ignorance, so it is not always easy... behind their fearful silence, our students want to find their voices, speak their voices, have their voices heard. (Palmer 46)
In conclusion Fear is pervasive in the U.S.. These 3 scholars give us evidence, and most likely, this is just the tip of the iceberg. In spite of all of these FACTS, there is hope (diba?). Palmer agreeing with Freire and Campomanes' critical AWARENESS to eliminate the Culture of Silence and Fear of Freedom, says it best when he encourages us to embrace the promise of diversity, of creative conflict, and of 'losing' in order to 'win': "Otherness, taken seriously, always invites transformation, calling us not only to new facts and theories and values but also to new ways of living our lives" (39).
Let's talk about it for starters, diba? Let's play!
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