"Fear has lost its relationship to experience" Archives
"Fear has lost its relationship to experience"
Fear has lost its relationship to experience. When confronted with a specific threat such as the plague or an act of war, fear can serve as an emotion that guides us in a sensible direction. However, when fear is promoted as promiscuously as it is today, it breeds an unfocused sense of anxiety that can attach itself to anything. In such circumstances fear can disorient and distract us from our very own experiences. That is why fear has acquired connotations that are entirely negative.
"The market in fear: Politics has become a contest between different brands of doom-mongering," by Frank Furedi, Spiked, September 26, 2005
So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt, First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1933
October 13, 2005 01:59 PM
