How Fear Works

Those concerned with the corrosive effects of the politicization of fear need to dig deeper. The political use of fear is sustained in a cultural terrain, where avoiding risk and acting with caution is equated with responsible behaviour. The ascendancy of safety as a stand-alone value that trumps all others is rarely contested. Critics of the politics of fear are often unaware of or ignore the foundation that sustains the object of their hostility.

The most effective way of countering the perspective of fear is through acquainting society with values that offer people the meaning and hope they need to effectively engage with uncertainty.

The contrast between the values that help direct society towards a confident future and the culture of fear is highlighted in the table below.
Confidence towards the Future
Culture of Fear
Valuation of experimentation
Valuation of safe space
Trust in human potential
Misanthropy
Courage to judge
Non-judgementalism
Prudence
Safety
Uncertainty as opportunity
Uncertainty as a problem
Openness to risk taking
Risk aversion
Probabilistic thinking
Worst-case thinking
Human agency
Deference to Fate
Moral autonomy
Vulnerability
Openness towards the future
Policing of uncertainty

Hannah Arendt has gone so far as to argue that courage does not only provide society with hope but also underwrites society’s capacity to exercise freedom. Arendt noted that ‘courage liberates men from their worry about life for the freedom of the world’. She cited approvingly Winston Churchill’s claim that courage is ‘the first of human qualities, because it is the quality which guarantees all the others.’ Courage helps individuals and society not to be overwhelmed by their fears.31

The culture of fear does not simply make us unnecessarily apprehensive and scared; it also restrains people from exercising their agency and realizing their potential, as well as encroaching on and curbing our freedom. The antithesis of fear and freedom has been widely recognized by thinkers from the Enlightenment onwards. Back in January 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt described Freedom from Fear as one of the fundamental freedoms in his famous ‘Four Freedoms Speech’.28 In that statement, Roosevelt used the term freedom from fear to refer to a world where people did not worry about the threat of war and physical aggression. Roosevelt was not a utopian and he grasped that fear as such was a fact of life that could not be abolished through passing a law.
Today the challenge of achieving freedom from fear requires that the cultural norms and values that underpin the perspective of fear should be contested and their influence overcome. Decades of misguided socialization of people means that the anti-humanist values that underwrite the culture of fear will not be undermined overnight. But their authority can be restrained and in some instances their toxic influence can be neutralized. It is not easy for individuals to transcend the fatalistic zeitgeist of our time, but through refusing to play the passive role assigned to them they can find their personal quest for freedom to be a rewarding experience.

The fatalistic sensibility of our era echoes the anti-humanist themes that periodically plague modern society. These themes are expressed through a mutually reinforcing anti-humanist triad that promotes misanthropy, the dethronement of authority of knowledge and an impoverished sense of human subjectivity. The narrative of misanthropy instructs people to distrust both themselves and other people, and to be particularly wary of strangers. It also holds humanity responsible for the threats facing the planet and goes so far as to identify people as the problem. The dethronement of the authority of knowledge conveys the idea that human reasoning is over-rated and is unlikely to be able to solve the problems caused by people. This downbeat version of the status of human reasoning and knowledge continually highlights a sense of limits. Finally, the pessimistic account of humanity and its capacity to reason reinforces a loss of faith in the power of human agency. This impoverished sense of subjectivity is constantly refracted through the present-day version of personhood and its characterization of vulnerability as the defining feature of the human condition. Confronting this anti-humanist depiction of the world and the fatalistic attitudes it promotes is the precondition for undermining the commanding influence of the perspective of fear.

Back in the eighteenth century, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant posed the question, ‘What is Enlightenment?’ Kant argued that Enlightenment comes about when people overcome their fear of reasoning for themselves. What stood in the way of Enlightenment, he claimed, was ‘lack of resolution or the courage’ to use one’s understanding of the world. That is why he asserted that the motto of the Enlightenment was Sapere Aude, which means: ‘Have the courage to use your understanding’.27 Possessing the courage to know has always required an act of will. For Kant, courage and the development of human reasoning went hand in hand. The act of daring to know requires the ‘freedom to make public use of one’s reason in all matters’, noted Kant. This German philosopher often used the metaphor of ‘throwing off the yoke of immaturity’ to signify the importance of growing up. His conception of personhood is one that uses ‘one’s own understanding’ without relying on the ‘guidance of another’. The spirit of daring that he counsels is essential if people are to gain the habit of moral independence.
Kant’s exploration of the human condition led him to conclude that the obstacles that stood in the way of Enlightenment were ones that were ‘self-incurred’ by people. His project of creating a climate that would assist humanity to emerge from its ‘self-incurred immaturity’ was motivated by the belief that individuals possessed the potential to rise to the occasion. The motto of Sapere Aude has special relevance for those who seek to diminish the influence of the culture of fear. Today’s ‘self-incurred’ and immature version of personhood is also in need of a radical fix. Through focusing on the potential of people to assume a degree of control over their life, the limitations that the culture of fear has imposed on human development can be contested. Having the courage of our understandings helps assist society to embark on the road to Enlightenment. It also allows society to interpret its experience through the perspective of knowledge and reason rather than of fear.

It is worth reminding ourselves that throughout history the valuation of freedom, democracy and debate went hand in hand with the positive idealization of risk taking and the refusal to defer to Fate. It is widely believed that the term risk has its origins in the seventeenth-century Italian term, riscare, which means ‘to dare’.14 For its time, the culture of the Italian Renaissance possessed an unusually positive attitude to risk taking and daring. Unlike today, when society regards risk as something ‘one is exposed to against one’s will’, the word riscare was connected to the idea of a risk ‘one chooses to take’.15 This active orientation towards uncertainty was in many cases linked to a positive endorsement of the value of public life. An affirmation of the making of choices represented a radical departure from the fatalistic sensibility of the medieval era.

‘If there are issues on which the populace at large should be trusted to vote, something as complicated and economically sophisticated as EU membership is definitely not one of them,’ argued the biologist Richard Dawkins.11 As far as he was concerned, complicated issues are way beyond the intellectual capacities of ordinary people, and allowing a vote on these matters therefore violates the natural order of things. Current critiques of populism employ a strident language to dehumanize their targets, illustrated by Hillary Clinton’s reference to Trump supporters as a ‘basket of deplorables’ during the 2016 American Presidential Elections. In this case people were not regarded as simply misguided political opponents, but as a lower form of human life. This sentiment was vividly captured by the title of an article by Dean Obeidallah in the Daily Beast: ‘Donald Trump Can’t Merely Be Defeated – He and His Deplorables Must Be Crushed’.12

When the Romans coined the phrase ‘Fortune favours the brave’, they expressed a powerful belief in people’s potential to exercise their will and shape their future. With the ascendancy of the Enlightenment and the commanding influence of science and knowledge, belief in humanity’s creative and transformative potential flourished. Today, such ideas have lost much of their authority. Though society relies on science and knowledge far more than in previous times, these are less celebrated and affirmed than in the nineteenth or twentieth centuries.
Contemporary society attaches little significance to its intellectual and cultural legacy. Some historians claim that the people of Europe have become psychically distanced from the past to such an extent that they no longer need history to cultivate their identity or to make sense of who they are. ‘Clearly Europeans have a sense of themselves as survivors of a history they have left far behind them; they do not see history as their origin or the foundation on which they stand,’ argued the historian Christian Meier. He added:
History is not something they desire to carry on (in a better way if possible). Hence they feel no gratitude to their forebears for what they achieved with so much labor; on the contrary, they are fixated on all the things they don’t understand (and are making an effort to understand), such as wars, injustice, discrimination against women, slavery, and the like. They feel uncoupled from their history, the seriousness of which they are, generally speaking, less and less able to imagine.9