Fear, Itself, Ourselves: The Fear Complex
john posted in other on August 23rd, 2011
I am afraid of too much safety, and of too much fear.
I am afraid that the financial supports of high-tech Western civilization are crumbling.
I am afraid that we lack vision.
I am not afraid of Muslim terrorism, not because it is benign, but because it is ridiculous and hardly credible, a barking mouse in a world of landslides and volcanoes.
Alex Gourevitch writes in the Chronicle of Higher Education ( referred by Bruce Schneier ) about the Fear Complex:
Quoted from An Era in Ideas: Fear
August 7, 2011
FearBy Alex Gourevitch
In Edward Bellamy’s classic 19th-century novel, Looking Backward, a young man named Julian West falls asleep in 1887 and awakens in 2000.
….
One major element is that we do not even know what to reach for, what it is that our fears prevent us from achieving. In Looking Backward, the utopian vision of America in 2000 had a foothold in the real. There was in Bellamy’s time a universal yearning, buried by the crushing poverty and extremes of industrial capitalism, for something like the shared purpose and human freedom that the book portrayed. A society based on free and equal relationships and cooperative ideals seemed possible.
We, on the other hand, have trouble imagining that kind of society. We’re told that utopia leads to dystopia; that we should fear our hopes. Fear itself has changed, from an obstacle to a diversion. For Bellamy, fear was repressive, because it prevented the expression and realization of higher ideals. In the war on terror, eliminating fear has become an end in itself. Of course, we can all agree we want to be safe. But that is a dodge, a way of avoiding the harder discussion about what it means to live free and equal lives.
The great lie of the war on terror is not that we can sacrifice a little liberty for greater security. It is that fear can be eliminated, and that all we need to do to improve our society is defeat terrorism, rather than look at the other causes of our social, economic, and political anxiety. That is the great seduction of fear: It allows us to do nothing. It is easier to find new threats than new possibilities.
A decade after 9/11, we look backward and find ourselves in all-too-familiar surroundings. We have, in fact, accomplished very little. We have yet to do any of the serious thinking that might carry us beyond the banal, stifling quest for security. That kind of thinking would require us to have a different relationship to fear: a willingness to accept it, even cause it.
Radical demands for justice are dangerous—they inspire fear in those committed to the injustices of the present.
Alex Gourevitch is a postdoctoral research associate at the Political Theory Project at Brown University. He is an editor of Current Moment, a blog.
Gourevitch sounds a bit of a Utopian himself, and probably he and I disagree on what’s possible. I don’t think we have space or time or energy to spend on quixotic crusades for justice – at best these get bogged down in legal minutia and at worst they produce the heavy-handed nanny state the conservatives complain about. In any case, there are much bigger problems on the horizon. Egalitarianism and fair distribution of wealth are products of rich, educated society, and we are falling back in both measures. Instead, we are confronted with the population and energy-use bomb predicted back in the 1970′s. Understanding that we aren’t very good at predicting the timing of resource shortages, it’s perfectly clear that the raw numbers are inescapable. Sometime, at some population, there is an outside limit on energy use, and economic growth. Like dieting, there are only two answers: be fewer and use less.
Lowering the population radically, while it ages demographically, while we run out of cheap energy, and find that we can’t fund economic growth with cheap credit any more, is a huge undertaking and there is no sign at all that will be accomplished in an orderly way. In fact the military seems a more likely tool than planning, science, and policy.
But yeah, fear has been used to distract the US populace, safety has been the dangling carrot, and it’s all a sham.
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