{"id":4691,"date":"2019-12-02T17:27:00","date_gmt":"2019-12-02T17:27:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/?p=4691"},"modified":"2019-12-02T17:32:25","modified_gmt":"2019-12-02T17:32:25","slug":"word-of-the-day-existential","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/2019\/12\/02\/word-of-the-day-existential\/","title":{"rendered":"Word of the Day: Existential"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The Dictionary.com word of the day for today is existential \/ \u02cc\u025bg\u2009z\u026a\u02c8st\u025bn\u2009\u0283\u0259l, \u02cc\u025bk\u2009s\u026a- \/<\/em>. The little mark before st\u025bn<\/em> indicates that that syllable has the primary stress, and the little mark, under the line, before \u025bg<\/em> indicates a secondary stress. In case you haven\u2019t been paying attention to the campaign for the Democratic nomination to run for president in 2020, the word existential<\/em> has become quite popular. Elizabeth Warren (D MA) said in a recent candidates\u2019 debate, that global climate change \u201cis the existential threat. It is the one that threatens all life on this planet.\u201d Beto O\u2019Rourke (D TX), who has since dropped out of the race, said, “Our greatest existential threat is climate change.” According to CBS News, \u201cJoe Biden called out President Trump as an \u2018existential threat\u2019 to the U.S. in a campaign appearance in Iowa Tuesday\u201d (https:\/\/www.cbsnews.com\/news\/biden-trump-existential-threat-to-us\/<\/a>). In an interview, candidate Corey Booker said, \u201cYou know we see an existential crisis in this country when our suicide rates, opiate addiction, and having a life expectancy go down\u2013Life expectancy is going down for all Americans, it\u2019s going for white men\u2013the farmer suicide rate is as high as it\u2019s been since since [sic] the Great Depression\u201d (https:\/\/crooked.com\/podcast\/2020-cory-booker-on-radical-love-and-the-filibuster\/<\/a>). In responses to questions submitted by the New York Times, Andrew Yang said, \u201cAbsolutely. America needs to rejoin the rest of the world in formally recognizing the threat posed by climate change and work with all nations to combat this existential crisis\u201d (https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2019\/04\/18\/us\/politics\/climate-change-2020-democratic-candidates.html<\/a>). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So what does this word existential<\/em>\nmean? It has two meanings, according to www.dictionary.com<\/a>.\nThe first is \u201cof or related to existence.\u201d The second has to do with existentialism<\/em>, a philosophical position\nthat became popular in the 20th<\/sup> century, so we\u2019re going to ignore\nthat meaning. And what does existence<\/em>\nmean? Simply, the \u201cstate or fact of existing; being\u201d (https:\/\/www.dictionary.com\/browse\/existence?s=t<\/a>).\nIn other words, when a political candidate asserts that this or that thing is\nan \u201cexistential threat,\u201d they are saying that life as we know it could come to\nan end if we do not do something about immediately. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

So over 61 years ago, Linus Pauling, winner of two Nobel\nPrizes, presented a petition to the United Nations that was signed by over\n9,000 scientists around the world demanding an end to the testing of nuclear\nweapons. The first nuclear weapons test happened in 1945, right before the\nfirst two uses of nuclear weapons in human history, the bombings of Hiroshima\nand Nagasaki. Nuclear weapons were considered an existential threat to human\nkind, indeed to all life on Earth (except for cockroaches, which, we were told,\ncan survive even a nuclear holocaust). When I was a kid growing up in\nPennsylvania, we actually had drills to plan for nuclear war. The basement of\nmy the Sunday School building at my father\u2019s church, Salem Lutheran Church in\nBethlehem, PA, was designated an official fall-out shelter. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The reason that nuclear war was presented as an existential\nthreat was that the Soviet Union and the United States had enough nuclear\nweapons to destroy everything, even without the radiation that would follow a\nnuclear war. It was, in a sense, the military strategy of both countries.\nDonald Brennan, a policy analyst, coined the name of this strategy, \u201cMutually\nAssured Destruction\u201d (MAD). So on the one hand, had a nuclear war between the\ntwo superpowers ever taken place, there is a very good chance that life on\nEarth would have come to an end. On the other hand, the very fact that both\nsides knew a war would end in mutual destruction made such a war unthinkable,\nand as a result there has not been a world war since the dropping of the bomb\non Hiroshima.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So what about the claims that climate change or Donald Trump\nor the opioid crisis are existential threats? They\u2019re actually gross\nexaggerations. Climate change will happen gradually, and human beings are very\ngood at adapting to a wide variety of climatic conditions\u2014people live in\nSiberia and in the Sahara. Donald Trump has to deal with a House that opposes\neverything he does. The opioid crisis affects actually very few people\u201410 times\nmore people die from cigarettes every day, but nobody talks about the\nexistential threat of cigarettes. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

So we might ask why it is that these politicians use the\nterm existential<\/em>? Perhaps they feel\nthey need to raise the stakes, to scare people, so that people will give them\nmore power. People who want to gain power or want to maintain their power are\ngood at trying to scare people. When people are afraid, they want someone to\nreassure them, to tell them that they have the solution to the problem. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Personally, I believe that it is the politicians and other leaders, the people who desire to exercise power over other people, whether they are dictators, presidents, governors, or just college presidents, who are the real existential threat. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The image is the \u201cAftermath of the atomic bomb explosion over Hiroshima, August 6, 1945\u201d (https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Mutual_assured_destruction#\/media\/File:Hiroshima_aftermath.jpg<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Dictionary.com word of the day for today is existential \/ \u02cc\u025bg\u2009z\u026a\u02c8st\u025bn\u2009\u0283\u0259l, \u02cc\u025bk\u2009s\u026a- \/. The little mark before st\u025bn indicates that that syllable has the primary stress, and the little […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":4692,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4691","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-word-of-the-day","clearfix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4691","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4691"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4691\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4694,"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4691\/revisions\/4694"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4692"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4691"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4691"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4691"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}