The business of fear, according to Zygmunt Bauman

 "The consumer economy depends on the production of consumers and consumers who must be produced for the consumption of 'anti-fear' products must be frightened and terrified, as well as deluded that the dangers they fear so much may be forced to retreat and that they themselves are able to force them to do so, with the help paid out of their own pockets, of course, ” wrote sociologist Zygmunt Bauman.

In the modern landscape, where "the fight against fears has turned into a lifelong commitment, while the dangers triggered by these fears are seen as permanent and inseparable companions of human life", we must begin to analyze our fears with an extraordinary critical sense or, otherwise, we will end up becoming hostages, swallowed and manipulated by those shadow monsters that seem to appear everywhere.

In a hyper-connected society, fears multiply

In the past, news spread very slowly. Many times they were relegated to the place where the facts had occurred. Today, with the Internet, we know immediately what happened on the other side of the world. Immediacy and hyper-connectedness are positive, but they also contain a trap. The trap of seeing dangers everywhere. Feeling permanently insecure. Always waiting for what happened on the other side of the world to be replicated in our environment.

In this way we sink into what Bauman called "a prolonged and impossible to win battle against the potentially crippling effect of fears against the real and presumed dangers that frighten us". We fear not only the real dangers that threaten us in daily life, but also more widespread and distant dangers that may never arise.

In the throes of that feeling of apprehension that condemns us to a permanent state of alarm in which we feel we cannot let our guard down for a minute, we have no choice but to immerse ourselves in a "continuous search and perpetual test of stratagems and resources that allow to avert, even temporarily, the imminence of dangers; or better still, that they make it easier for us to move the worry to a corner of our consciousness in order to forget it for the rest of the time ”.

For this we resort to all kinds of tricks. However, there is the contradiction that “the more abundant they are, the more ineffective and less decisive their effects are”. Because in reality the strategies we apply to banish our fears have only a very limited effect: they hide the fears for a while, until the next news reactivates them.

When fear is widespread, uncertain and extends to virtually any sphere of our life, it becomes a difficult enemy to beat. Then that's when it turns into the "fear business".

Caught in the labyrinth of unlikely fears

We know the future will be different, even if we don't really know how or to what extent. We also know that at any moment the fragile continuity between the present and the future that makes us feel so secure can break.

The uncertainty of the future makes us "worry only about those consequences that we can try to get rid of". We focus only on the risks we can predict and calculate. And these risks are often the ones that the media point out ad nauseam.

As Milan Kundera said, “the scenario of our life is shrouded in a fog - not in total darkness - in which we see nothing and are unable to move. In the fog we are free, but this is the freedom of those in the dark ”.

We can see a few meters ahead of us and react to what we have in front of our nose, but we don't see further. So let's try to predict the closest and known dangers. But the biggest and most dangerous, probably the ones that could harm us the most, we don't see them. In this way we end up marginalizing the main reasons for concern.

“Focus on what we can do something about, we no longer have time to think about things we couldn't do anything about, even if we wanted to. This helps us to preserve our sanity, to remove nightmares and insomnia. What it cannot achieve, however, is to make us feel safer, ” writes Bauman.

So we end up chasing non-existent monsters, devoting all our efforts and energy to protecting ourselves from unlikely risks, while our mind wears out in a battle lost in advance. And as we sink into those liquid fears, our rational mind disconnects. Because when the ancient brain takes over there is a full-blown emotional hijacking that prevents us from clearly seeing what is happening and from understanding that most of the fears that haunt us are irrational or the result of a derived fear .

In this state it is easier to sell us solutions to "protect us" from those fears, solutions that are not limited to the commercial level but that go far beyond the alarm system that we install at home to feel safe or drugs for anxiety or insomnia that we they allow us to forget our anguish for a while, but rather “ they appear to us under the guise of protection or safeguarding of communities”, to maintain a status quo that conveniently keeps us within the narrow limits of fear.

And so we fall into the cycle of liquid fear that Bauman refers to, a fear that is everywhere, properly nourished, but impossible to eradicate because it feeds itself. Unless we do an act of conscience and understand that these fears are irrational and their risks are so small that we can free ourselves from them to fully live the only life we ​​have.

Source:

Bauman, Z. (2010) Miedo líquido. Barcelona: Editorial Paidós.

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