Approximate reading time: 3 minutes
Every time we think about a society beyond the stereotypes that common sense throws up, the differences that constitute it come to mind: the abyss between rich and poor, its racial walls, the religious underworlds opposed to each other, the puzzle of its local cultures, the wounds of its history, the labyrinth of its social violence. We rarely reflect on an elementary question: if a society appears as the accumulation of its differences and antipodes, what then unites it? Not the language (every current society contains within it a Tower of Babel); nor culture (not coincidentally we speak of the multi or multicultural condition); nor the customs, which sometimes divide an area of the city from the one adjacent to it; even less the old national feeling (today a zone of exaltation confined almost exclusively to football stadiums). Perhaps, very occasionally, intervention wars or, in the face of natural disasters, an ephemeral empathy.
More than three and a half centuries ago, in 1651, Hobbes suggested an answer that is, to this day, difficult to refute: ultimately, what truly unifies a society is fear. The reason is simple and complex at the same time: the only thing that traps us without being able to escape its walls, without even being able to look over them, are the feelings of fear and uncertainty. If everyone harbors their own individual fears, only they represent an intimate and radical reality that concerns everyone equally.
No matter class or social rank, trade or vocation, gender or racial identity, there is undoubtedly something in which we understand each other. Fear/fears transgress any obstacle, desecrate any value, cross any fence. They can be intimate and physiological, such as hypertension, phobias or diabetic syndrome. There are social ones, such as the possibility of dismissal or impoverishment. Love and work are surrounded by fear. Pandemics spread it until the last breath. And school failure hangs like a sword of Damocles over millions of children and young people. Even for a sociologist like Niklas Luhmann, so skilled at imagining the lesser evil as an alternative to any evil, fear is the only condition first that constitutes society.
In The Culture of Fear (The culture of fear), and bestseller published in 1999, Barrey Glasner was amazed at the statistics that American surveys showed on the subject. Strictly speaking, the WASP They are afraid of all those threats that will rarely come true for the majority of the population: crime, permanent drug addiction, teenage mothers, school massacres, social minorities, plane crashes and the like. Hence, his research adopts the direction of exploring political discourses and the “system of anxieties” engendered by the mass media. A direction that is logical, although it does not lead to the central question: the existential condition of fear.
Heinz Bude’s text, “The Society of Fear”, leads us, however, to reflect on this essential substrate: thinking about the fears that define not only the decisions we make, but also the labyrinth of subjectivity in which the human being is immersed. individual today. To communicate with each other, society develops a remarkable semantics of fear: who is suitable and who does not advance; what are the boundaries of risk and what prefigures its misfortunes (individual and collective); how to decipher the motives of the rise and those of the descent; What dangers lurk and how we protect ourselves. Bude writes: “By circulating concepts of fear, society takes the pulse of itself.”
In 1932, in the run-up to Hitler’s rise, Theodor Geiger published a classic text on the matter: “The social stratification of the German people”, a study that describes a world dominated by the desperation of the unemployed (a result of the crisis of 1929). , the hatred against Bolsheviks, Jews and great fortunes of a bankrupt petty bourgeoisie and the anguish of business elites forced to close enormous and emblematic companies. Fears capable of leading an entire population to unimaginable risks – such as the fire caused by fascism.
It would not be until the 1950s that the welfare state, according to Budo, would lead to a type of society focused precisely on reducing fears. The social market economy in which it was forged would open that strange parenthesis that lasted until the 70s, the only European period in which there was a certain tranquility. His premises are well known: relative stability at work, full employment policy, minimal inflation, rising expectations, the nation as a place of intellectual and emotional consolidation.
The neoliberal turn of the 1980s put an end to all that. Today the mobility locks have been almost completely closed. Having a job is a condition in daily danger. Crime or migration are the bets for those who want to get ahead. There is fear of committing, of challenging authorities made invisible by digital systems, of opting for another path. The return of the extreme right is not coincidental. As in the 1930s, it is committed to inflaming uncertainty, but now only to make lives already trapped in the conviction that it is only possible to survive more insular.
Por Ilan Semo
