the neil effect

Besides terrorizing my cat, and scattering football players with his amazing defensive skills, the dude came after me last night! I thought it was great. 🙂 He reminded me that US ignorance of the rest of the world population’s actual experiences living day-to-day is racism. Period. It could have been the end of conversation.
It wasn’t, however, because I concede the point. There are situations when the nuance of naivete/deliberation matters a great deal, but if we’re going to establish a baseline definition the material fact of privilege is that it shields one from needing to know. So we moved on to some other topics with more room for intellectual exploration, including Nietzche.
The point I was trying to make with Satya – that I circled around for awhile, getting lost in my own preamble (!)- is Nietzsche’s assertion that we (human beings) NEED fear in order to truly live. I am not opposed to this thesis, but I’m not sure I agree with the terms with which it seems Nietzsche limits fear’s range. I’ll have to look closer at his actual language (as translated, since I don’t know German), to see if there’s a way to tease out the implication I perceived of a limited domain of what he might consider “legitimate” fear.