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Episode 2: Garmonbozia

Weird Studies

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The Mass Psychology of Fear in the Cold War

The best articulation of it I've ever read is in Norman Mailer's essay, The White Negro. He wrote this thing to try and wrestle to the ground like this nameless fear that he felt and that he knew was reflected in everybody he knew. And so if in the midst of civilization that civilization founded upon the Faustian urge to dominate nature by mastering time, mastered the lengths of social cause and effect, our psyche was subjected itself to the intolerable anxiety that death being causeless, life was causeless as well. "We have been forced to live with this oppressed knowledge that we might still be doomed to die"

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