A Philosophy Of Fear By Lars Svendsen

A Review by David Edwards

Lars Svendsen's 2008 book, a philosophical analysis of fear, was

written at the end of the Bush presidency, when US foreign policy
had inflicted its ideological "war on terror" onto the world for 7 years.

In that time since the infamous attacks on US home soil of 9/11, the
US had launched two wars of aggression against Afghanistan and
Iraq, to devastating effect. These full-scale incursions of
America's "coalition of the willing", fully destabilised both countries,
and forcefully shattered Iraq into the chaotic state we find it in today.

The driving force behind such actions was fear on a cultural scale.
Specifically the fear that further attacks on the scale of 9/11 could be
perpetrated again by an invisible enemy of unfathomable number,
presenting a threat to the very way of life of Western civilisation at
large. To combat these terrorists, the public of the developed world
accepted sweeping restrictions on their freedom, in the name of
protecting the very same freedom. This huge irony, of course, is not
lost on the author of this compelling book, and it is this cultural
manipulation of fear to maintain power that is its central theme.

"... the exaggeration of the danger of terrorism has given fear

proportions the terrorists could never have achieved on their own. A
state that legitimises itself and ensures the obedience of its citizens
by the use of fear is not basically creating a democracy, since the
strategy of fear undermines the liberty that is the core of democracy."

So how does one define Fear? Of course the logical starting point is
to identify fear as an emotion, and a potentially powerful one at that.
Fear, in many situations can be a direct motivator for action, and it
has interplay between a catalyst to fight when channelled into anger
(i.e. a direct action to protect oneself) and an impetus to flight when
focused towards hope (i.e. the hope of self preservation). The main
factor of fear is that it focuses its concentration on an external object
or situation, onto which the drive of the emotion is projected, so one
is usually afraid of something.

"Fear always has an intentional object. It is always directed at

something. ... What distinguishes fear from anger, sorrow or joy is not
the object in itself but the interpretation of it. ... For fear to announce
itself, the threat must be perceived as being serious."
So ultimately fear is a choice of perception, in that the world is what
you choose to make of it; and whether an externalised object is
perceived as a threat to be fearful of, is highly subjective.

For example, many people find a thrill in riding rollercoasters,

whereas I personally am afraid of doing so, due to a combination of
fear of heights, and the unpleasant feeling of leaving ones stomach
behind you, which also manifests itself in me personally when
experiencing turbulence in an aeroplane. I am not generally afraid of
flying, but turbulence serves to remind me simultaneously of the
vulnerability of essentially being in a metal tube at great altitude, and
adds the discomfort I experience on rollercoasters into the mix of
emotions at play, whilst pondering the possibility of an imminently
impending death. This is of course, the very vital component of fear,
a potential risk to ones safety.

"Fear always contains a protention, a future projection, concerning

pain, injury or death."

Even though I am aware of the statistical safety of air travel,

compared with say, the relative statistical safety risk of travel by car,
in those moments of fear in pockets of air turbulence, the genuine
irrational fear of my own safety can emotionally control me. Such is
the nature of fear, and can be easily applied to the cultural fears
which pervade Western society.

"Fear contributes to keeping us alive. But fear can also become

dysfunctional. It does so when a disparity arises between fear an
object, or when it cause us to 'lose our heads'."

So even on a cultural level, and applied to society at large, this

central aspect of fear can be applied. Whether it's fear of the spectre
of terrorism, climate change, crime, immigration, the illuminati, war,
or the overnight end of our civilisation; the theme is the same
whether it is an abstraction fashioned into the object of fear, we are
as a culture endemically afraid of some disastrous circumstance or
event threatening the status quo of our everyday lives. The usual
reaction to such threats is a cry for action, "This is outrageous, and
something must be done!" It is usually at this point, that mistakes
tend to get made, for example the oxymoronic idea of restricting
freedoms to protect our liberties from the abstract "terrorist threat".
"As Aristotle points out, we make errors when we fear the wrong
things, in the wrong ways or at the wrong times."

Contrary to popular opinion, this time in which we currently find

ourselves existing is an age of relentless manipulation. Advertising,
television, education, print media, online media, tablet devices,
smartphones, etc. are all vehicles to shape opinions, and it via these
myriad forms that existential threats are propagated, exaggerated
and inflated in our mind-scape.

"fear is one of the most important power factors that exists, and the
person that can control its direction in a society has gained
considerable power over that society."

Ideological threats have long been used to keep the public under
control. Now that the Cold War and its ever present threat of nuclear
annihilation have run their course, it seems that governments and
their media mouthpieces are forever attempting to drum up new ways
for the public to be kept afraid, and to increase funding for programs
to seemingly combat the object to which this public fear has been
directed towards.

"Political fear does not arise in a vacuum - it is created and

maintained. Its function is to promote various political practices.
Strong interests of a political and economic nature have considerably
inflated the danger of terror. In the US, the states are granted funding
to combat terrorism, that is based, among other things, on the
number of terrorist targets in that state. This, of course, creates an
incentive to report as many such targets as possible, in order to get
more funding."

This political mechanism is frequently, as stated above, usually the

result of a public demand for some kind of action to combat the
threat, the best example being terrorism. The fear of said threat can
also become inflated as government action to combat it, ends up
promoting it. In the example of terrorism, government programs to
combat it can end up promoting it, which in turn creates a feedback
loop where the public becomes even more afraid of terrorism.

"Here a danger lurks for every government: that it complies with the
fear of its citizens. The authorities are constantly on guard when the
fear of a phenomenon grows. The reason for this is that this fear also
undermines the legitimacy of the state, since this legitimacy rests
quite fundamentally on the ability of the state to protect its citizens.
This protection not only applies to its ability to prevent citizens from
being exposed to violence from other citizens, military forces from
another state or terrorists but also to illnesses and various
phenomena that can constitute a health risk. If the state does not
seem to be able to provide its citizens with this protection, it leads
potentially to a destabilising of the state. So the state must make it
clear that it is combatting that which causes the fear. The problem is
that this can cause the fear to escalate, since the state has to
legitimise its acts by referring to the danger that creates the fear. In
order to bolster its legitimacy, these dangers will often be over-
dramatised. Fear has once more gained high status as a basis of
political theory."

Of course this process of fear propagation is not solely the work of

politicians, oligarchs and systems of control. In many instances, we
are feeding the fear of these threats to each other through emotional
and cultural hysteria.

"a perception of fear that to a great extent can be described as a

culturally conditioned habit."

This cultural propagation of an emotion has more effect than the fear
of external threats to our well being; it can infect a culture with the
collective identity of victimhood, where any consideration of risk is
overwhelmingly associated negatively, and any growth towards
progress through positive risk taking becomes severely stunted.

"In a culture of victims and fear, the concept of progress is an

impossibility. The most one can get oneself to believe is that it is
perhaps possible to prevent everything from getting even worse. If
one does not experience the feeling of having a grip on existence
and lacks confidence in being able to make the world a better place,
the future is not all that enticing."

A culture of mass victimhood can lead to a pervading societal

obsession with the implication of negative risk, which in turn leads to
all consuming mania and hysteria. This in term hampers a society's
ability to progress in a self-deterministic fashion, overly relying on
legislation to "protect" them from being negatively impacted from this
fear of negative risk.

"The perspective of fear and risk needs victims - without actual or

potential victims it loses force. The increase in focus on fear therefore
coincides with a corresponding increase in the number of victims."
In the example of the "precautionary principle" of risk management
strategy, where every risk has to be endlessly analysed to determine
where to assign the potential blame for the theoretical risk posed, the
assessment frequently leads to the condemnation of a positive risk,
and the overall project is abandoned as no-one wished to take
responsibility.

"a danger does not capture our attention before someone is found
who can be blamed for it."

When there is someone to blame the fear surrounding a task or issue

amplifies and anger is projected towards the source of blame, again
diverting responsibility away, as ownership of a problem leads to no
solution. I feel that this reflects the attitude of an almost adolescent
society, and my reading of the author’s thoughts would indicate that
he shares some of my sentiment on the matter.

"A basic characteristic of the risk society is that no-one is out of

danger - absolutely everyone can be affected, no matter where he or
she lives or his or her social status. ..."

As with many aspects of acting from a state of fear, the dangers of

immersion in a society obsessed with the negative connotations of
risk is that the choices presented can often be the wrong ones. In the
context of the war on terror, this manifests in the notion of restricting
individual freedoms in the hopes of protecting them.

"To be exposed to a risk is synonymous with being exposed to a

moral injustice."

To not overplay the example of terrorism, and in keeping with the

ideology of a risk society, I would also like to mention the
encroaching regulation on society presented in sustainability
agendas, which have sprung up in the inflated dangers presented to
the public in the narrative of anthropogenic global warming. The
same would also apply to health and safety legislation, which as I
stated above, is a direct response to the blame factor inherent within
a risk-based society, and as a result of the broad application of the
precautionary principle.

"... in our attempts to deal with the risk around us, we often choose
means that are worse than the problem they are meant to combat.
The word 'risk' comes from the Italian risicare, which means 'to dare'.
So risk is connected with making a choice. A risk is something one
chooses to take. The question is how much risk we are willing to
expose ourselves to, both as individuals and as a society. The
answer would seem to be : as little as possible. In present-day
discourse, a risk is not something one chooses but rather something
one is exposed to against one's will. Today, there are few people
who remember that the expression 'risk' could originally have both a
negative and a positive meaning, since to take a risk also includes a
positive possibility. Today, the concept of risk is almost exclusively
negatively charged, with a few exceptions - such as on the stock
market and in extreme sport. To a great extent, 'risk' has become
synonymous with 'danger'."

A culture that wholly gives itself over to the adverse attitudes towards
risk is a society which largely becomes devoid of personal
responsibility, and gives itself over to an all pervasive low level
ideology of fear, where almost everything can be construed as a
threat to the individual and society at large.

"The fear that is pre-dominant in our culture is ... what could be

referred to as a low-intensity fear, a fear that surrounds us and forms
a backdrop of our experiences and interpretations of the world."

However, fear at a low level can, in many instances, bring a desired

degree of social cohesion. Laws, for example, and the fear of
punishment for breaking them can serve as a deterrent to maintain
the expected behavioural norms of living acceptably within a society.

Fear can be the glue which holds the oaths of a social contract in a
culture together, but the balance has to be struck between a fear of
breaking commonly agreed norms and rules and the descent into
forms of all consuming cultural repression through fear.

Although of course, mob rule in this fashion can become problematic

and lead to acts of individual persecution for unreasonable infractions
deemed so by an irrational majority. This is where authority can
become a useful tool, a sovereign ruler, or ruling council can be a
useful tool to project a cultures fear onto, and in turn this position of
assumed responsibility can be used as a hierarchical tool to
disseminate the responsibility of ascribing and maintaining the
desired (and reasonable) cultural norms onto a society. The trust
involved on the part of the masses is to accept that such governance
will not resort to tyranny, and in this light provides an illustration of
the positive aspects of cultural risk taking. Of course one could also
argue that such an act of trust is also illustrative of the immaturity of a
society that does not wish to take self-responsibility, but I digress.

The surveillance state, which has gained so much traction in the war
on terror, works on Bentham's panopticon model, a model for a
prison where normalised order is maintained out of the paranoid fear
of potentially being watched all the time by everyone. In the same
manner, our streets are watched by closed circuit television, which is
archived to be studied later in case of an "incident", and it is the act
merely having a camera pointed at a location (whether it is on or off)
which generally regulates public behaviour out of the fear of being
watched, or caught if we are doing something 'untoward'. At the
same time, this can provide comfort from potential danger, with the
feeling that someone is watching over us at all times,. Of course this
frequently swings back to fear, even if doing nothing wrong, in two
ways, why are "they" watching me? Or why are "they" watching this
location? In a similar fashion our virtual lives are monitored by
monstrous agencies such as GCHQ in Britain and the NSA in the
USA.

In effect, these "deterrents" lead to a society fearfully policing itself.

This has extended into our language, with fear based censorship and
thought policing of political correctness.

I feel that this has been grown out of a very human trait, centred on
the fear of being hounded for saying the wrong thing. I also feel that
this demonstrates the totalitarianism inherent in
such "liberal" attitudes. This self-policing of thought has a tendency to
inhibit emotional growth, exemplified by the millennial mind-set and
their unrealistic infatuation with the notion of equality.

"We make every effort to eliminate all risks from children's lives. Our
dread of children being harmed in some way or other leads, it would
seem, to our robbing them of important experiences. ... they should
preferably not learn that the world is first and foremost to be met with
fear. A development has taken place from considering fear as an
emotion children ought to learn to overcome to considering fear as a
natural part of their lives."

This is a generation raised in a climate where mediocrity is

normalised, where everyone is rewarded for simply "taking part". This
discourages excellence, even demonises achievement as something
to be feared, as it is always equated to success at the expense of
others and is rigorously kept in check. Here we are back to the
stunted growth of victimhood, and we end up with a generation of
young adults who immaturely lose their minds when presented with a
differing political viewpoint to their own, as witnessed in the "social
justice" phenomenon sweeping universities currently in the United
States.

"To be a victim is to be relieved of responsibility for the situation in

which one finds oneself. For victim status to be completely legitimate,
another requirement is that the person affected is 'innocent'. The
most 'innocent' among us are therefore the best victim candidates -
and what is more innocent than a child: The child is therefore
portrayed as being subject to an increasing number of dangers."

Of course this infantilisation of a whole generations attitudes towards

relating to the world, with endless cries of "trigger warnings",
demands for "safe spaces", and repeated appeals of "privilege
checking", and projecting authority and hierarchy as inherently evil,
springs from leading lives of luxury.

This luxury in turn generates boredom, as secure lives and a

prevailing societal philosophy of fear, amplified by media and
entertainment, causes the projection of fear onto a variety of
phantom risks.

"Our fear is the problem that comes with our luxury: we live such
secure lives that we can worry about innumerable dangers that have
practically no chance of making an impact on our lives."

As a society and a culture, we have so much time on our hands, and

this seems to lead to the fact that we now actively look for things to
be afraid of, and this highlights the addictive nature of fear.
Entertainment has even become permeated by it, as audiences can
now living vicariously, experiencing fear as a thrill, wholly detached
from its reality, but nevertheless applying the experience to their own
lives in abstract fashion.

This translates very easily to the manner in which the news media
operates, as the portrayal of threats is sold to the consuming public in
a direct manner, which bypasses critical cognitive processes.
Disasters are framed as a direct menace to the viewer’s atomised
experience of everyday life.
"people most often have a quite hazy understanding of probability,
focusing more on the worst conceivable outcome than on what is
most likely. Highly statistical differences have little effect on people's
conception of risk. No matter how improbable they are, disaster
scenarios always create fear. ...

...In general, people get to know about various dangers via the
media, and the mass media cultivate 'dramatic' scenarios. News is
also entertainment that has to captivate, so attempts are often made
to establish a relationship between the viewer and the news being
communicated. Ideally, the news item should have a direct
relevance to the viewer's own life. Single events are presented
within a framework that would seem to represent a social problem,
something that can affect 'us all', or at least a large part of the
population."

It is quite obvious that the bored public is increasingly controlled

through narratives which now promote or justify themselves through
the fear of fear, as pundits and politicians now reference the "politics
of fear" to further their agendas. This is an abstraction, which echoes
Franklin D Roosevelt's famous line from his inaugural address of
1933:

"the only thing we have to fear is...fear itself"