Here is what I perceive: proper thought should be endlessly articulated, in the sense of joints. It needs to be endlessly particulated, in the sense of particles. It needs to be malleable, in the sense that it can be impressed on the topic at hand, and come away with a reasonably complete composite picture, like an imprint in sand.
What fear does is disarticulate, and departiculate thinking. The more fear, the less joints. Imagine trying to live life with knees that would not flex, elbows that would not bend. You would walk funny, and many things you can do now you would be unable to do.
This is what that sort of thinking looks like. If 1 part in 100 of something is bad, then the whole thing is bad. Only perfection is acceptable, and since nothing is perfect, you have to reject everything. Burn everything down. Only then will perfection emerge. This is literally what some of these people think.
I had someone try and convince me the other day that because race riots happened in Tulsa, Oklahoma 100 years ago, that black people can’t get ahead now. Should anyone really be confronted with such a fatuous, obviously stupid argument, much less be forced to respond to it?
These kids in the streets: this is how they think. As far as I can tell, fear–deep, profound, existential fear–must underlie all this idiocy. Anxiety is the coin of the realm, and in such a realm, ideational disease is necessarily rampant.