Overcoming Fear Culture and Fear Itself

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And the American public said yes we can.

On the whole, the world is healthier, safer, and more prosperous than ever before. And that, writes Sasha Abramsky in an October issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education, could be what makes us so anxious.

“After centuries of technological progress, we think we can glimpse the promised land. We can envision a world in which cancer is merely a coldlike nuisance, in which stem-cell research banishes Alzheimer’s,” Abramsky writes. “But the world today is far from a utopia. My guess is that we have become so fearful at least in part because we fear our intoxicating future’s being snatched away from us.”

If we are to lay definitive claim to that future, then the time to act is most certainly now. Not for decades has there been such an opportunity to reject the isolation and vulnerability to manipulation that contemporary fear has brought us.

“The global financial crisis now presents us with a threat that directly resonates with preexisting social and economic insecurities. In response to the crisis, a global language of fear is emerging,” writes Frank Furedi, the sociologist, in an October issue of New Statesman. Instead of processing the economic crisis as a threat to individuals, we’re talking about it as a disaster that affects the world community—a problem for all that we must address. These are frightening times, perhaps, but for the first time in years it seems our fears are coalescing into collective experience.

Individual fears may rack us with self-centered anxiety, but “people rarely respond to disaster with extreme panic, recklessness, and selfishness,” writes sociologist Lee Clarke in the Summer 2008 issue of Greater Good. It’s a bittersweet silver lining, but economic pains could provide just the sort of galvanizing force we need to recalibrate ourselves toward solidarity. (Or, as John Oliver might say, to become one scared shitless world.)

In this sense, Obama’s presidency couldn’t come at a more fortuitous time. “As powerful as fear is . . . it’s nowhere near as powerful as the combination of fear and hope,” Glenn Hurowitz points out in a December 2007 issue of the Nation. “The politicians we remember as fonts of hope, Lincoln and FDR in particular, were those who had no need to paint scary images with their language—fear had already gripped the land.”

For Obama to make good on the politics of hope, though, the American public must continue to demonstrate the resistance to fear they showed by electing him.

“The solution is ultimately a political one, but at the moment that is a bit premature,” says Furedi. “In the pre-political stage, solidarity needs to be aggressively celebrated and promoted.” Politicians can’t take a pass on the politics of fear until citizens stop demanding answers that soothe their distorted sense of safety. Companies will not stop marketing products based on fear out of the goodness of their hearts.

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