Benjamin Chayes, Fear no

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No one needs problems more desperately than

politicians, because – otherwise – what would we need
them for? But it seems that our reliance on
instantaneous solutions may be mentally preparing us
to have expectations from politics that we formerly
would have called totalitarian.

@Jane woke up to an important day. She had woken up

as she always would: right before the lights would flip on,
but a feeling that had been with her – somewhere
towards her abdomen – for the past 18 months was more
intense than she ever could recall. She had enough time,
right enough time, to wash first, but she was in such a
hurry that she had finished all #HygieneObs well before
the water finished. She was pretty sure she was not
supposed to feel this way, but as the #DeliveryWindow
drew nearer, it was impossible not to remember the
moment when she had finally received notice from the
@Admin to tell her that her #ApplicationToConceive had
been approved and that her life was going to change
definitively. And though she knew very well that joy was
not what asked from her, she could not help imagine how
at some point in the future she would smile, and her
#EntrustedInfant would smile back.

She had been responsible enough after, not to disturb the

@Community. She had made sure to let all the @Experts
know there was going to be an important change at her
#Unit, without any of the #DisruptEms that would flash
down the screen once in a while. They never got echoed,
so you’d have to spot them as they sailed across, but
maybe they were #InsignificantGlitches anyway. She’d
gotten a decent amount of #Echo, especially from
@ExpertHank who appeared to know a lot about
#ChildCare; she hadn’t expected that, as in the past he
had given much useful advice about #BestChoices for
#ReferendumRound6894. Some @Experts were simply
too smart, @Jane thought. She wouldn’t find all those
answers on her own – never! And imagine the trouble she
almost got into even the other day. Nearly bumping into
#NeighborsUnknown, just because she was thinking of
her upcoming #TimeToConceive; she had no reason to
worry, as @ExpertLouise had told her. Those were things
of the past, when anybody would be out there, not just
#EssentialWorkers, risking their lives in the unknown.
There were no more #Grounds to have insecurities since
the #DayTheyEndedFear.

###

We may actually start to understand, and exercise

power over our environment. And as our effective
control over the world around us continues to
increase, our awareness of anything that manages to
escape it feels ever more intolerable.

This is what I may have imagined some twenty years ago.

An acquaintance was sharing an experience and I was too
preoccupied with my own aversion to hear the repeatedly
old. So instead, I focused on what seemed novel and
hopelessly revolutionary. Those were the days of early
ventures on the world wide web, and man’s most urgent
needs found immediate application through the offering
of particular services. My friend, now, was telling us
about his latest adventure in internet-assisted dating and
while I was struggling to imagine entering my numerically
defined preferences into an interface that would find a
digital, and therefore uncontestable, match, he recounted
how he had summed up his evaluation to this match-
made-in-the-cloud personally. A pig in a poke. That’s
what he had told her. He was filing complaint. And for the
moment he was giving us the full run-down of his
purchase. And instead of having – he had been had. As I
said above, I was much too irked by the idea of
outsourcing my own judgment to a computer platform to
realize his frustration was far from novel. Life is a series
of problems to be solved, of obstacles to be steered
around. And progress is managing to render this process
easier, allowing you more of the satisfaction resulting
from mastering these situations. But frustration remains,
as much as we would like to forget. If only we had known
– known that the next simplification would not to neither
completion nor perfection, would not fulfill our life’s
purpose – we would have spared ourselves the trouble.
And most of all: we would have spared ourselves that
feeling of insecurity.

Faith may be the best remedy we have against insecurity.

Faith that everything will turn out alright. Faith we will find
a solution. Faith we might find an explanation. Faith, even,
that there must be a reason for this. And for all of it. We
have developed an endless number of variations to
exercise and demonstrate our faith throughout history,
using an enormous range of symbolisms, artifacts, or
props. Sticks, statuettes, mounds, hills, menhirs,
cathedrals; we bowed on bare knees, tore hearts from
bodies, burned effigies, people, and said our prayers – we
curse, look up at the sky, commemorate, hoist the flag
and lower it, sing the anthem, cheer the athletes on, cast
our ballot, play the lottery, wear our favorite tie, reset our
modem, restart our computer, program our thermostat.
We memorize the most recent news report. We pledge
our faith in science. We grab for our remote control. And
trust the tiniest squeeze of our thumb will change our
world.

Meaning is the mantra we sing to ourselves to quell

our fear. But our fear of what? Doesn’t living a safe
and to an extent fulfilling life carry enough meaning to
carry on?

I know. There are many distinctions we could and should

make between the various behaviors I listed above. But I
am asking your attention presently for what they have in
common: what desire we express through every single
one of them. We hope to understand, and where we do
not, to believe an order exists that has meaning for us
once we do. Perhaps to find a world where we know our
own purpose, so we can find our way, even if surrounded
by the obstacles we cannot make sense of. We may get
to feel stronger over time. We may actually start to
understand, and exercise power over our environment.
And as our effective control over the world around us
continues to increase, our awareness of anything that
manages to escape it feels ever more intolerable.

There’s a principle I hold to be the secret behind many of

man’s ventures, whether in child rearing, in adventures of
discovery, in scientific research, in perfecting the recipe
for sumptuous chocolate cake: if we knew what we were
in for beforehand, we most likely would never start. Our
blindness to unforeseen consequences is a blessing
comparable to the foolishness of the snake who subjects
a calf to his raging hunger, only to realize after a little
while that he cannot stop eating, by which time it hopes it
has the worst behind it. Both the snake and I, of course,
is sure to forget the worst once all is over and we roll up
in the sun to digest the fruit of our unrelenting appetite
for success. And this applies where our own hardships
are concerned – if it regards other people’s exertions, or
deprivations from the past, the span of our memory
reaches even less far. And so the idea that poverty until
about a century ago was the lot of the great majority of
people around the world is a truth that has drifted so far
away from us as to have become almost unimaginable.
Shall we talk about hunger?

Risk management has become a liability now that the

peril is gone.

Not only has hunger declined as a daily phenomenon

over the past century, famines have decreased, too, in
the past century only occurring on a large scale in
countries like the Soviet Union, China, and Bangladesh,
and more recently only in North Korea. Being hungry at
least part of the time was the rule for most of our
existence as a species. That (the possible) lack of food
continues to condition our behavior, therefore, should not
surprise us. Abundance is a situation many of us struggle
with as soon as society offers us anything beyond the
bare minimum. Knowing you will still have more than
enough food on the table tomorrow and the next day, as
well as one month from now, evidently is not an incentive
that is stronger than the call of millennia of genetical
instructions telling us to stock up on nutrients. We call
obesity a welfare disease, but what it really is a
manifestation of, is how our evolutionary hardwiring
overrules our intellectual luggage. In the following I hope
to show that there are more mechanisms conditioning our
conduct in a similar manner, whereby we can perceive
not merely a dissociation of incentives from the various
sources described, but we may well be caught in a self-
propelling process, provoking us into a state of hysteria
for reasons that are effectively becoming of diminishing
existential import.

The ironic truth is that, by increasing our control, there

seems to be an endlessly growing list of dreams that
deserve to be meddled this way or that. There never is
a limit to our expectations once our last desire was
satisfied.

Some professionals refer to it as negativity bias, some

call it click-baiting, still others simply claim the end of
time is about to enter into effect, this time for real. In any
event, globalization has proven to apply to the sphere of
disaster as well. Crises and emergencies are mined the
world over and though at times it makes perfect sense to
report on an accident from the other side of the world –
say, if it regards the type of plane you may board
tomorrow – on other occasions the steering error of a day
laborer in a far-away country takes on the prominence
formerly only accorded to the vicissitudes touching on
our closest ones. Our negativity bias, the tendency to
always focus on the negative aspects of any situation,
can be seen most blatantly in the way we consume news.
That news still is taken to mean bad news is something
worthy to ponder if we consider that life for most people
– primarily in the West, but by now this applies to the
great majority of people – no longer revolves around
emergencies, death, and famine. One could argue this is
logical, inasmuch as it is matters falling outside the norm
that draw attention, but at the same time it hints at an
experiential dissociation. This dissociation occurs not so
much because the anecdotal evidence of the consumer
of the news – from his own surroundings – is juxtaposed
with anecdotal material from a different place so as to
provide a window on a different world. What is deemed
deservant of narration is invested with meaning.

Our modern lives are filled with tools that we use

without ever understanding the way they function,
whether it regards opening a faucet, operating a
computer, or driving a car. As these thoughtless
miracles accompany our daily lives, there seems hope
for hope left.

Meaning is not an explanation, but as close as we may

get. Meaning is where we seek to attribute a role to
events and to ourselves where we cannot find a final
cause. Meaning is inventing agency behind the facts of
life, when you know you would change them, if such
powers were at your disposal. Meaning is hope. Meaning
is the mantra we sing to ourselves to quell our fear. But
our fear of what? Doesn’t living a safe and to an extent
fulfilling life carry enough meaning to carry on? Isn’t the
fact that the newspaper reports car accidents from
across the globe a sign that we essentially live out of
harm’s way? A remarkable discrepancy continues to exist
between people’s impression of rampant crime, while
figures throughout the West indicate that it has been
receding for decades. Natural disasters do happen, but
we monitor earthquakes, tsunamis, tornados and the likes
to a degree that the worst can be avoided. Wars are still
being fought but at nowhere near the levels that were
common during the past century. A meagre harvest in
one country can be silently compensated for from the
harvest in another part of the world. At the same time,
phenomena that have accompanied our (pre-)history for
thousands of years are looked upon with new-found
dread, as if they hold exactly the type of lesson we were
looking for. Migration and climate change are examples of
such appeals to eschatology; these are not issues that
are presented to us as situations that need thought to
find solutions, but rather as definitive forks in the road of
civilization itself. We are being gauged – they tell us – and
meaning is attributed: not for ourselves, of course, but for
the particular collective we are expected to pledge
allegiance to.

We all carry some of these choices around through our

personal lives – overtly or less so – by wearing the right
carnation on a certain day, for instance, by maintaining
the subscription for a particular publication we stopped
reading a decade ago, by leaving a particular book on our
coffee table, by quoting research results we have
absolutely no clue of how they came about. The
interesting thing is that as the world at large has become
more inclusive and therefore varied and at the same time
more secular, any single, pronounced faith no longer has
ascendancy. It is ‘science’ that has generally taken over
that role as point of absolute orientation for mankind to
base its decisions on. The truth, of course, is rather more
subtle. Science, as such, does not exist. There is a
scientific method which may or may not be applied, but
when science is referred to in any public or political
debate, it tends to mean there is a single and uniform
truth that should be adhered to undisputedly. Numbers
always come in handy to create the suggestion of the
scientific objectivity that has become an overt standard
but measuring something does not amount to the
uncovering of the causal relationship underneath it. This
applies most decidedly to the statistical data the many
models are based on that are presented to us as
guidelines that should inform our future behavior. The
mantra of numbers is sung to accompany our decision-
making.
So just about when mankind was hammering the last
nails in poverty’s coffin, one of the last strongholds
of dirigiste economy serves us apples and oranges à la
Piketty, a soup of correlations purporting to demonstrate
that the problem wasn’t poverty, after all, but inequality.
Publication of yet another of his volumes on inequality
occurred just about when Maduro started ruling
Venezuela by decree, as a further aid to equally
distributed poverty among all Venezuelans besides those
in power. The weight of Piketty’s lengthy studies is not
carried by great attention for causation and empirical
evidence, but by loads of statistics. A similar
phenomenon can be perceived in the corpus of
‘environmental science’ which has mushroomed since
just about the moment the Berlin Wall fell. Even as the
environment of London is more livable than it has been
for the past couple of centuries, we can swim again in
many a river, Europe has become a lot greener over the
past century, and private organizations are active all over
the world to protect and save the variety of flora and
fauna for our posterity. Again, in the absence of
conclusive understanding of the causal mechanisms
driving climate change historically, mathematical models
are used not only to grasp correlations that may lead to
an unambiguous hypothesis that can explain climate
change in terms of geologic time and not as an isolated
timeframe that coincidentally starts at the starting shot of
the Industrial Revolution. Of course, plenty of scientists
do investigate the issue in such terms, but this is not the
kind of thorough and intricate study that is deemed to
guide us for decision-making, that is assumed to carry
meaning for us. In the meantime, the mathematical
models are used to extrapolate from a specific section of
historical data to another set of inexorable results. We
have seen the same type of mathematical modeling
during the Covid pandemic, of course, aggravated – or
rendered even more futile, if you wish – by the insertion
of inherently invalid data, for the simple reason that
incompatible samples were combined, incomplete
information was used, unreliable tests were applied,
etcetera, etcetera. The inadequacy of this approach has
perhaps been most noteworthy where it regarded
medical findings.

I am not a physician, but perhaps that allows me to make

an observation that is overdue as we, ignorant masses,
are called upon to follow the indications of experts with a
certain degree of blindness, as – of course – experts we
are not. The uncomforting fact I am referring to is the
circumstance that a major part of medical research has
the form of statistical analysis. Where causal
relationships are not clear, (double) blind testing
uncovers correlations for us that may or may not be
causal. So even if we know that incidence of Covid
among the obese and among those with a vitamin D
deficiency is more frequent, we still have no idea of the
process underlying the infectious fate that may await us
were we not to lose those pounds in excess or not to
correct the lack of sunlight. What we do take away is a
factor of risk.

Our tendency to accumulate excess calories in itself is a

mechanism of risk management. Most of us know now
how much food we will be able to consume in the coming
week – you probably even know for the whole month.
During most of our evolution as a species we were
nowhere near such a luxurious position. The beauty of
evolution was we were provided with a mechanism that
allowed us to deal with that daily dearth. We should not
be surprised that the present period of unprecedented
abundance is accompanied by the proliferation of
obesity. Risk management has become a liability now that
the peril is gone. But I believe there is another survival
mechanism we see struggling against our better interest
during this pandemic as well. I have called it mental
obesity for the reason described above, though I think its
workings are more intricate and similar to an auto-
immune disorder than our evolutionary drive to store
caloric reserves. As a manner of introducing the idea I will
pose you a question. What kind of society invents the
not-so venerable activity of bungee jumping? What
function, what value does fear-seeking have? Some of it
we can surely explain away with reference to thriller
movies, the biological tendency of the teenager (of mind
if not of body) to act upon his own sense of immortality
by seeking more dangerous pass-times. Personally, of
course, I suspect something more is going on.
And that is where I find myself back again, reflecting on
how our ever-more efficient means of survival may have
encouraged our love of entertaining the dream we have
had for so long, that of conjuring up the spirits that make
things right. The ironic truth is that, by increasing our
control, there seems to be an endlessly growing list of
dreams that deserve to be meddled this way or that.
There never is a limit to our expectations once our last
desire was satisfied. But there’s more. Global child
mortality has dropped from over 40% in 1800 to less than
5% in 2015. When we talk about love and care, especially
towards children, what we may not realize is the extent to
which those are acquired, even embattled, values that
are the crown to these historical efforts. The rhetorical,
and slightly tasteless, question to ask would be whether
you would venture to love if you ran a risk of one out of
two to lose your child. But the general point I am making –
and another worthy example would certainly be the vastly
different incidence of the maimed and disabled in society
– is that sensitivity is an acquired luxury. Our sense of
vulnerability may have always been there, but imagine
how vastly different it makes itself felt between a
situation where deadly threats are the quotidian standard
and circumstances where an emergency can be defined
in terms of limited internet access, or the discontinuation
of a TV show. Our sensitivity to peril was an essential trait
evolutionarily, considering our lack of physical strength
and our directedness, not towards overpowering our
environment, but to adapting it as well as ourselves. Now
that those threats are close to gone, could it be the same
mechanism renders us inversely more susceptible to any
threat relative to what we have become accustomed to?

So in this timorous new world where we are finally able to

fully appreciate the preciousness of life, we are
surrounded by amenities we depend on, even if our
actual application of them does not exceed by far the way
our forebears would have handled their wand. One can
argue that the behavior is teleologically the same. Our
modern lives are filled with tools that we use without ever
understanding the way they function, whether it regards
opening a faucet, operating a computer, or driving a car.
As these thoughtless miracles accompany our daily lives,
there seems hope for hope left. We faithfully count on
creations we do not understand, and we are required to
interact with knowledge itself in a similar manner,
especially if it is offered to us under the guise of ‘science’,
and carrying, if not a stark warning, at least a message
resembling meaning, purporting to explain to us a final
cause or our ultimate purpose – maybe even both.

A reflection of the fusion of our hands with the remote

controls they operate, and the concomitant conjuring we
have grown accustomed to, is how we project some of
those towering expectations on the world of politics as
well. It is not just us, the electorate, of course. As a rule, a
political party will start with presenting us all the
problems they are the only one qualified to resolve. No
one needs problems more desperately than politicians,
because – otherwise – what would we need them for? But
it seems that our reliance on instantaneous solutions may
be mentally preparing us to have expectations from
politics that we formerly would have called totalitarian. At
what price a sugared drink should be available, what
mode of transportation would be permitted between N
and X, or what way we are allowed to consume our drink
are rather overbearing decisions to delegate to a party
with authority and the availability of violent means to
enforce our compliance. Such policies are sold to us on
the ballot’s occasion not so much under the pretense of
common good, these days, as they are under threat of
impending doom. If we see a resurgence of protectionism
in international politics, it is attractive to peel back the
skins of economic theory and geo-political interests and
determine whether the appeal does not lie at a more
intuitive, or even anthropological level. We have built in a
world-wide peephole in every home, so building a wall to
hide behind seems inversely proportional a measure. The
tragic irony is that we will not notice how safe our own
environment has really become; we have set ourselves a
perfect trap to fear the worst from.

Even the surge in conspiracy theories can be explained in

these terms. The idea that ‘things can go wrong’, that the
natural environment – for us – is everything but an idyllic
garden, that mistakes and poor thinking have always
played a role much more decisive than that of decisive
brilliance in history, that we may get sick and will pass
away eventually: all such thoughts seem feeble excuses
of impotent creatures against a backdrop of leadership
that poses as your last resort in the face of imminent
disaster. Perhaps the greatest mockery of all that politics
has to offer for us now is that the worst calamity Party A –
also known as the Left – claims it is going to protect us
from is Party B – or the Right – as for Party B it is Party A.
By extolling (and expanding) its own power and
importance, politics is assuming a role of purpose in our
lives, of meaning, in itself. For us, the voters, perhaps it is
just as attractive to imagine institutions are that powerful;
that a mark on our ballot will serve as a tap on our all-
powerful remote wand, ready to save us from all dangers.
If, only, the others do not end up on top.

What has happened in the process cannot be understood

separately from the information revolution. Just as radio,
cinema, and television offered a channel for politics to
communicate directly with the people, so the internet has
changed the power of communication in all respects. One
aspect, already referred to, is the globalizing tendency of
instant interconnectedness between the single most
remote spots the world over. But if this gadget serves us
up fears from anywhere we are connected with, the next
aspect makes sure they will land with most dramatic
effect. Because, as we have all learned, we are not
anonymous on the internet, but rather represent a set of
datapoints that – either through our commercial
preferences, through location-data, by way of our
hobbies, or perhaps through more directly political
options – have tagged us as targets for a particular type
of message. As advertisers before them, political pundits
and actual or aspiring rulers have discovered how much
of this information is non-intellectual, or at least non-
political, per se. What we fear is where we may be
motivated to take action. Simultaneous with this process
of philosophical hollowing out of electoral orientation,
another change related to the IT-age is well underway
that is impossible to neatly separate from the former but
does deserve specific mention. I am referring to the
deflating role of professional journalism.

We have built in a world-wide peephole in every home,

so building a wall to hide behind seems inversely
proportional a measure. The tragic irony is that we will
not notice how safe our own environment has really
become; we have set ourselves a perfect trap to fear
the worst from.

The slogan of ‘fake news’ is only a symptom of the

phenomenon. The availability of cost-free information on
the web and the consequent bleeding of professional
press budgets, the entanglement of media in political
strife, and the logic of clickbait which favors less over
more serious publishers are all aspects of this
development. This problem is only aggravated by the way
we constantly select the data we process intellectually.
As has been recently demonstrated by Harvard
economists, we tend to perceive what we were looking
for in the first place, and this tendency has only received
a forceful stimulus from social media that make us find
exactly what we were looking for anyway. Meaning
selects facts – otherwise, how could notoriously false
theories have withstood the test of time and observation
so successfully for centuries? There have always been
specific social classes charged with monitoring
compliance with dominant theories of meaning;
Brahmins, priests, aristocracy, imams, samurai had this
role in pre-modern society. The social development that
underlay the intellectual revolution we identify as the
culmination of modern Western values – be it
meritocracy, professional specialization, literacy, the
principle of one-man-one-vote, or even our allegiance to
the scientific method itself – has upended this more
hereditary, or at least feudal way of organizing society.
What the open, or liberal, society offers us is no longer a
single, approved or official, vision on why we are here and
what we are here for. The invention of terms like
technocrat and clerisy, however, should have warned us
of the perils that await those who imagine any reordering
of society can be definitive. What recent developments
seem to signal is a vanishing role for a middle class that
for the past half millennium has not only manifested itself
through professional specialization, but also by
positioning itself at the center of influence channeling – if
not wielding – power, positioned between the truly
powerful – whether these are institutions, companies, or
families – and the truly numerous masses. Now, the
powers communicate directly with the people, and vice
versa. If there is anything to be seriously worried about at
the moment, it is the intuitive fluency with which both
sides tend to find each other.

It is at this stage I would ask how much agency and

meaning is sought by the people. Is the surge of the
conspiracy an expression of this popular probe? Is this an
unfair characterization on my part? Am I unfairly
suggesting that it is the uneducated masses who are
responsible for the proliferation of one conspiracy theory
after the other? The most likely answer I will get is: yes,
uneducated makes gullible and susceptible. And I will
grant you that anti-elitism – whatever that may mean
today – is a prominent ingredient of the sentiments on
which such theories are brewed. But my point is another,
one that may seem paradoxical, but that in my opinion
lies at the heart of the symbiotic relationship between the
dictator and his masses, between the one swearing on
his omnipotence and those wishing to believe in it. Those
powers may now still lie with malignant forces, but there
is no movement of awareness that cannot, does not,
promise to relieve us. The masses are a hopeless child,
begging for salvation. Someone must be doing this.
Someone must take this fear away.

###

@Jane took a deep breath. She knew she just needed to

leave her worries in the hands of #Experts. It was not her
#Task to do it herself. That was why everybody lived in
#SerenityNow. She thought it was hard to imagine how
people had dealt with having too big a #Footprint before,
how life had been during the #Migrations. But all that was
less than a memory now. Much like she managed to recall
life with her #EntrustedCarer when she was just a child
herself. As everybody knew, it was not about who did
what, and what was caused how, but all matter of
avoiding #DeadlyCorrelations. #Experts had banned all
#Risk from our lives. @Jane was at her #Unit, free at last.

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