The Fear Factor

     For the past month or so I have been ploughing through Hannah Arendt’s seminal 500-page work, The Origins of Totalitarianism, completed in 1960.  Arendt is generally regarded as one of the intellectual titans of the late 20th century, and the work in question still is regarded as a masterpiece of socio-political analysis.  The history she unpacks is fascinating, but the parallels between her description of the rise of Nazism in 1930’s Germany and the ascendancy of MAGA in our own country are deeply disturbing. Let me cite just one of several relevant passages:

…(there is a) terrible, demoralizing fascination in the possibility that gigantic lies and monstrous falsehoods can eventually be established as unquestioned facts…and that the difference between truth and falsehood may cease to be objective and become a mere matter of power and cleverness, or pressure and infinite repetition. Not Hitler’s skill in the art of lying but the fact that he was able to organize the masses into a collective unit to back up his lies with impressive magnificence, exerted the fascination.

    The lies propagated by Donald Trump and his enablers are, often as not, strategically designed to induce fear in a susceptible citizenry. Just the other day, Trump imagined how satisfying it would be to see his vociferous Republican critic, Liz Cheney, standing before a firing squad, nine muzzles pointed at her head. The former president’s apologists have casually dismissed this “fantasy” as typical Trumpian hyperbole – nothing to be taken too seriously.  But since the current election cycle began, he has issued no fewer than 100 explicit threats against his political adversaries.  Many influential figures in pre-World War II Germany insisted that Adolph Hitler’s dark, unhinged rhetoric shouldn’t be taken at face value either, and look at what happened.

     In recent weeks at least some contemporary commentators have also highlighted the crucial role fear plays in the MAGA-dominated Republican party’s appeals to the voting public.  As Mark Danner, who holds joint appointments at UC-Berkeley and Bard College, recently observed:  

Every (Trump) rally turns on the overwhelming fear of the outsider dominating the present and ‘poisoning the blood of the country….’  His showmanship of threat will increasingly be directed at voters who can be motivated only by fear of what’s coming – coming from the outside, coming from the future.  Fear, the most lucrative political emotion, is Trump’s superpower.

     “Autocracies,” the Russian expatriate Masha Gessen wrote shortly after Trump’s election in 2017, “thrive on and engender fear, ignorance and – their combined product – conspiracy theories.”  This describes to a “T” the direction in which we are headed, I’m afraid, with the hearty approval of nearly half of this country’s adult population. 

    I have to admit that as fearful as Trump’s partisans are of the “enemy within” and those people from “shithole countries” pouring across our borders, I am just as fearful of what a Republican takeover of our national government would mean for the world’s longest standing yet fragile democracy.

    But I also realize how counter-productive it is to be ruled by fear.  In the first place, there’s health to be considered.  Back in the 1960’s Walter Kennedy, a British physician, coined the term “nocebo” to describe the negative effect fear has on one’s mental and physical well-being.  Whereas the more familiar Latinate word “placebo” means “I will please,” “nocebo” connotes “I will harm.”  The epidemic of toxic anxiety experienced by Americans as the election approaches would seem to support Kennedy’s thesis. 

    But that’s only one of the problems with fear. Anticipating Franklin D. Roosevelt’s memorable World War II comment – “We have nothing to fear but fear itself” – the 16th century essayist Michel Montaigne admitted that “The thing in the world I am most afraid of is fear, because a fearful man has lost his freedom…and freedom, which requires constant courage, remains the supreme good.”  In our own case, it could be argued that those who have been swept up in the fears Trump propagates have indeed forfeited their freedom – the freedom to follow their own minds, to exercise informed and independent judgement.

    The contrast between our own fearful mindset and that of the late Alexei Navalny couldn’t be more stark.  Navalny, as you may recall, was the courageous Russian opposition leader who was first poisoned by Vladimir Putin’s henchmen, then imprisoned in brutal arctic gulag where he died last February. He kept a diary during his two years of confinement, knowing full well that the chances of ever securing his liberty were vanishingly slim. Nevertheless, Navalny never succumbed to despair. “The only thing we should fear,” he wrote, “is that we will surrender our homeland to be plundered by a gang of liars, thieves, and hypocrites.  That we will surrender, without a fight, voluntarily, our own future and the future of our children.”

    Something to keep in mind in the struggle against the forces or fear and autocracy here at home.  As he lay dying, the great Irish poet Seamus Heaney made a similar appeal: Noli Timere,” he wrote his wife – “Don’t be afraid.”  In these troubled and troubling times, it’s a useful thought to embrace.