Responses to Chris Hardie's Blog "Hero Woship"

In Chris Hardie’s blog on “Hero Worship” he makes the argument that there are certain platforms - like supporting our troops and public service safety workers – that are upheld in society as good, righteous, and necessary causes. He goes on to imply that these platforms have become worshipped platforms and therefore no one speaks against them, especially in terms of reducing funding for either military or civil servicemen. Hardie goes on to say that the spending of tax payers’ dollars is largely driven by fear and wonders whether we can question how far we let fear direct our spending : “ Can we ask ourselves what we might spend money on if we weren't driven by fear - fear of not being re-elected, fear of being accountable to our mistakes, fear of that which we cannot control or that which is not familiar.” His argument implies that the decisions our politicians make are largely driven by getting re-elected, and that getting re-elected means capitalizing on certain platforms that are popular – or worshipped – by mainstream society. The deeper implication is that capitalizing on a platform, such as public service safety workers, means that one must convince society that there is not just a need, but a desperate need for public safety workers because society is in danger, society is not safe. In other words, Hardie is calling out policy makers for creating a sense of fear in society, a fear that will motivate them not only to allow them to spend our tax dollars as they choose, cutting funding to public parks and education in favor of public safety costs (that may not be necessary) but also to be re-elected. They are the individuals who create the fear in the first place, then promise to assuage the fear and protect the people.
Another way of interpreting Hardie’s series of questions, though, is that he is pointing a critical finger not at politicians, but at us, the people electing politicians. What does it say about American culture that we are so susceptible to fear? What does it say about us that an appeal to our pathos – our emotional response to a message– overwhelms any appeal to our desire for logos – an accurate representation of the actual situation? Could it be that in fact our “pathos” reaction is taking over or could it be that we interpret our emotional reactions as logical reactions? When it comes to policy makers, we are often led to believe that they are “in the know” and that we should trust them. That’s why we elected them, right? But by regarding them as the “informed” we could be directly abdicating our responsibility to be informed ourselves. This would imply that we elect certain politicians out of fear, then we are actually making an uniformed decision. If politicians do indeed create a sense of fear in order to appear to be heroes, our fault in the matter is that we are not well informed. If we were well informed, appeals to our pathos would not be as influential.
The whole question about the way we spend our tax dollars on public policy individuals seems to be one of what is necessary? The question itself should appeal to our logos, but politicians seem all too ready to appeal to our pathos, and we are all too ready to let them. Hardie’s blog raises the question of how much our worship of public safety workers is actually motivated by fear? This is an uncomfortable question because we do need our public safety workers, and our tax dollars should go toward their salaries and facility needs. But more than that, the question is an uncomfortable one because it forces us to question how informed we’ve made ourselves and the extent to which we are abdicating responsibility for how our tax dollars are spent with fear as our excuse.