Liquid Fear (Zygmunt Bauman)

For Bauman,

“Fear” would be defined as the name we give to our uncertainties, that is, our ignorance in the face of the threat and the unknown about what should be done. In this way, human beings share this experience with animals, that is, we also oscillate our minds between the alternatives of escape and aggression.

For the sociologist, humans know something more, something beyond that: a kind of “second degree” fear, a fear, so to speak, socially and culturally “recycled” - what he called secondary or derived fear.

This derived fear can be seen as a trace of a past experience of facing direct threat, a remnant of the fear lodged in our soul.

We reproduce this reactive behavior of fear even if there is no longer a direct threat to life or integrity.

“Derived fear” is a feeling of being susceptible to danger; a feeling of insecurity and vulnerability, a future thought that if it comes to fruition, there will be little or no chance of escaping or successfully defending oneself;

The interesting thing is that this fear occurs even in the absence of a genuine threat, leading human beings to adopt appropriate attitudes and reactions as if they were in an immediate encounter with the idealized danger.

The further we move away from dangers, the more comfortable human life is, the less our ability to deal with the presence of a threat becomes, so we are more susceptible to letting our imagination run wild.

Dangers can be of three types: they threaten the body, the social order and properties.

In a more general nature, derived fear generally has a sense of feeling threatened regarding the durability of the social order and the reliability thereof. In general terms, man fears an inversion of social values.

The resulting defensive or aggressive reactions, intended to mitigate fear, can thus be directed away from the dangers actually responsible for the suspected insecurity. Hence we observe prejudice and ethnic persecution, which the author discusses about diverting the central problem around an enemy with a face, someone elected by the collective imagination or by political economic interest to be the enemy.

For example, Bauman states that after the attacks on the twin towers, the resulting fear was diverted to the entire Muslim people, indiscriminately, political speeches indirectly suggested that, it was necessary to protect themselves from terrorists, and as they did not have faces, the response of the The fear was to treat all Muslims as potential terrorists. The opposite effect is that the imperialist and disastrous international policy of the US government was not even remotely identified as responsible for the growth of hatred towards the US government by extremist groups.

Bauman will say that what is most frightening is the ubiquity of fears (in the sense of the lack of a concrete form); Because for the author, fear can leak from any corner or crevice of our homes and our planet. Just like on dark streets or bright television screens, which at all times give us a feeling of urgency and insecurity.

Every day, we learn that the inventory of dangers is far from complete: new dangers are discovered and announced almost daily, and there is no way of knowing how many more, and what types, have managed to escape our attention (and that of experts!) – preparing to attack without warning.

Everywhere, there has been a rise in global warnings. Every day there were new global warnings about killer viruses, a collapsing economy, low food production and rising violence.

At first these global warnings were scary, but after a while people started to enjoy them. In fact, knowing that this is a scary world does not mean living in fear, for we have more than enough clever stratagems, which are kindly offered in the stores of the liquid modern world.

To understand the concept of liquid modernity, we would summarize it as a feeling of urgency for pleasures, as if life were on credit. Relationships and values ​​are fluid, adaptable and easily take any direction, that is, there is an urgency in the thought that tomorrow cannot be, must not be, will not be like today – it means a daily rehearsal of disappearance, disappearance, extinction and death . you always need to be in the now, updated, connected and living at any cost.

Liquid life flows or creeps from challenge to challenge and episode to episode, and the common habit of challenges and episodes is their tendency to be short-lived.

The same can be assumed regarding the life expectancy of the fears that currently afflict our hopes. Many fears enter our lives along with the remedies that you have often heard about before being frightened by the evils they promise to remedy.

Bauman refreshes our memory about the “Millennium Bug”, obviously if you were born in the 80s to 90s you should remember, if this is not your case, then sit back and history is coming, taking the liberty of paraphrasing Castelo Rá Tim Bum.

The danger of the millennium bugit was a collective fear that began at the end of 1999, beginning of 2000, that computers at the time would not understand the change inmillennium and this would cause a general breakdown in systems and services. In simple terms, for reasons of memory space they had reduced, simplified, the dates into day, month and year, there were two final digits, it turns out that when reaching 99 and entering 2000, the dates would reset to “00” and that would cause automated systems not to recognize the turn of the century. The solution was to temporarily change the reference from the year 2000 to “20”, generating a new problem in the year 2020. For example, in 2020, New York's parking meters stopped working.

But the millennium bug,was not the only terrifying news that was brought to you by the very same companies that had already offered to immunize and save the fledgling world of computers and the internet, you are always out there hearing about viruses, worms, phishing schemes and countless evils that plague the world. internet and moves millions with combat software. Have you ever wondered how the news of the first virus found on a computer was received?back in 1971, called Creeper, which displayed the message "I'm scary, catch me if you can"?

Bauman also exemplifies how Catherine Bennett exposed a plot behind the package that promoted expensive therapy, warning that “wrong foods are responsible for rapid and premature aging; four-week program” – at a modest cost of £119. People's fear of aging and death attracts thousands of people interested in knowing what this secret was, before it was too late.

The consumer economy depends on the production of consumers In this system, consumers in their basic needs are finite, so it is necessary to create new consumers, and the best way to do this is to create needs, that is, products and services designed to face fear . Thus, it is profitable to use the fearful and frightened feelings, hoping that the dangers they fear will be forced to retreat thanks to the products offered.

In the liquid-modern environment, however, the fight against fears has become a lifelong task, while the dangers that trigger them – although none of them are inseparable from human life. Our entire lives are now one long, and probably unwinnable, struggle against the potentially disabling impact of fears and against the dangers, genuine or supposed, that make us fearful.

Human inventiveness knows no boundaries. There are a plethora of stratagems. Outwit time and defeat it on its own field. The modern liquid world screams from all corners: it is necessary to delay frustration, but not immediate satisfaction. So why worry now?! Carpe diem. In simple terms: enjoy now, pay later. Courtesy of the credit card companies, Bauman said: Don't put off until later what you can do now - that's the motto of society now.

We live on credit: nowadays, “good budgets” are those that maintain the excess of expenses in relation to income at the level of the previous year.

Why wait when you can taste future joys here and now? The credit card magically brings that infuriatingly elusive future right to you. Note that you can consume the future, so to speak, by civilization's creative anticipation.

Another point explained by Bauman is that this world, as reality shows have vividly shown and convincingly proven, is about “who sends who to the trash can”; or rather, who will do it first, while there is still time to do to others what they would very much wish, if they had the chance to do to you” – and before they can act on their desires, these reality shows give you this personal satisfaction of feeling part of a bigger thing, someone important in deciding who behaved best according to your judgment and therefore deserving of the round's prize.

People are not eliminated because they are bad, but because it is part of the rules of the game that someone must be eliminated and because other people have shown themselves to be more skilled in the art of standing out, of manipulating others like them.

It's not that people are expelled because they have been identified as unworthy of staying. It's exactly the opposite: people are declared unworthy of remaining because there is a quota of eliminations that must be met.

The first factor of these programs is that punishment is the norm, and reward, an exception:

The main means of achieving this effect is “fame”, which is a shallow abbreviation of the expression “being kept in the memory of posterity”. Paradoxically for a path towards individual immortality, belonging to a category is what guarantees access. Fame, and the fight for that access (including that to make a category eligible to grant such immortality to its members) has throughout history been a collective affair.

For Bauman, in addition to fame, there is also personalized immortality, in which the State would recruit men to defend its interests and these men would die as war heroes. This concept begins to dissolve and disappear. This alternative stratagem, which has gained gradual and continuous strength throughout the Modern Era, appears to be achieving the most important position in our liquid modern consumer society, that is, liquid modernity is marginalizing concerns about immortality in history through the devaluation of everything that is durable, permanent, long-term.

He transplants to the present moment the importance that was attributed to “after”; from durable to transitory. It decouples the horror of death from its original cause, making it available for other uses, trumpeting more tangible and (above all) immediate effects of concerns about the afterlife.

Death is now a permanent presence, invisible but vigilant and strictly watched, in every human achievement, deeply felt 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The memory of death is an integral part of any function of life. Great authority is attributed to her, perhaps the greatest, whenever a choice needs to be made in an existence full of choices.

The relationship also bears the seal of the end (even though, unlike true death, this seal can be removed; theoretically, a relationship can be revived and therefore rise from the dead.

As the bonds of the liquid modern era become clearly tenuous and “until further notice”, life becomes a daily rehearsal of death and “life after death”, of resurrection and reincarnation – all enacted by proxy, but , in the same way as reality shows, which are no less “real”. Death then,Thus stripped of its mystery, familiarized and domesticated, the wild beast becomes a pet.

Death-by-proxy becomes a constant and indispensable link to sustain the endless sequence of “new beginnings” and efforts to be “reborn”, characteristic features of liquid-modern life, and a necessary stage in each of the infinitely long series cycles of “death-rebirth-death”. In the permanent drama of liquid-modern life, death is one of the main characters in the cast, reappearing in each act.

Bauman basically says that just like our romantic relationships that already begin with the expectation of ending, it is death by proxy, that is, we are so dynamic in our relationships, so against values ​​and moral principles, so liquid in our way of being and thinking , that most people when they meet someone, they can't imagine that partner for the rest of their life, there is a feeling, a spark, that says that there are infinite possibilities out there, that eventually you will be promoted, you will be destined for another country, for in another city, you will meet interesting people... this itch inside the individuals of this liquid society, does not allow anything to last, everything is shallow and ephemeral, it is born, dies and is reborn, dies again, as if a constant and expected update of a fashionable smartphone.

“Second degree” death is similarly fragmented and discontinuous, and no matter how painful the experience of the loss of a singular world may be, it was neither expected nor desired to lead to a different dynamic. It won't delay the flow of episodes, much less interrupt it, stop it altogether. In a liquid-modern life, there are no points of no return, and any prospect of there being would be actively (often successfully) avoided and rejected. Because liquid modernity is linked to present pleasures, in the now, that's why the idea of ​​an end is inconceivable, people want to live in the now and every mistake they make in the present serves as justification for a new beginning, we don't deal with frustration, we prefer a return, and thus the vicious cycle of return and rebirth preached by all the influencers we follow. We become hungry for self-help, for high performance and for a life that is not ours.

Here's that friend who ends the relationship and makes a point of telling the world that he is doing well, that he doesn't feel anything about the end. The culture of extreme happiness, everything is an opportunity to start life over again, start valuing yourself again, restart the plans you left aside, move forward. Have you ever stopped to think about how much you’ve been telling yourself that it’s a “new beginning”?

Jean Starobinski, having cited La Rochefoucauld's observation that “people would never fall in love if they had not heard of love”, and having carefully examining the history of human illnesses, he discovered that “there are diseases (particularly neural and 'moral' diseases, neuroses and psychoses) that spread because they are talked about”, in which “the word plays the role of contaminating agent”, and concluded that “verbalization enters into the composition of the very structure of lived experience”. It leads to reflection on our choices and behaviors, how the beliefs transmitted in speeches lead people to adopt absolute truths. We see this in modern relationships, monogamy for example fighting with polyamory, both defended by opposing forces of discourse, the first a moral, legal and cultural discourse, the second a flag of the actress of the moment, the singer of the masses, placed as a fight for gender equality, sometimes anyone with a microphone and a camera becomes an expert on all kinds of subjects.

Bauman exemplifies that the rise of the religious right is related to the first wave of impact of globalization on North American society. People who have lost their well-paying jobs; and now their wives are working and sometimes earning more money than them.

Their lives are falling apart before their eyes, and not because of gays and feminists. It's because of globalization. But the Republicans, with their powerful propaganda machine, are capable of transforming this alienation.

That's why manipulation can generate huge profits with little or no risk: It has a grateful clientele among the millions who desperately try to keep their eyes from beholding the face of Medusa, Bauman said.

The phenomenon to be manipulated and transformed into a profit generator is the fear of death – a “natural input” that can enhance infinite resources and the practice of total renewal. The primal fear of death is perhaps the prototype or archetype of all fears – the ultimate fear from which all others derive their meaning.

Learned theologians cited the Book of Job from cover to cover to defend the unbreakable bonds between sin and punishment, and virtue and reward, against the regularly provided evidence of pain inflicted on a pious, God-fearing creature, a true example of virtue. As if theologians' resounding failure to present convincing arguments (much less conclusive evidence) that the credibility of routine explanations of evil had emerged unscathed from the bitter test of Job's pious misfortune were not enough to frustrate any prospects of understanding, the dense The fog in which the allocation of good and bad luck had been hermetically hidden did not dissipate when God himself joined the debate...

Neiman points out that “since Lisbon, natural evils have no apparent relationship with moral evils, since they no longer have any meaning” “if the residents of that great city had distributed themselves in a more balanced way, and built lighter houses, the damage they would have been much smaller, perhaps they would not even have occurred… And how many unfortunate people lost their lives in the catastrophe because they wanted to collect their belongings?

Rousseau insisted that if not the Lisbon disaster itself, then certainly its catastrophic consequences and horrifying scale resulted from human failings, not nature.

Hannah Arendt explains the shock and confusion that most of us felt when we heard about Auschwitz for the first time, and the gesture of despair with which we reacted to the news, due to the excruciating difficulty in absorbing its truth and fitting it into the framework of the world with that we think and live by – a framework based on “the assumption current in all modern legal systems that the intention to do wrong is necessary to commit a crime”.

Emotions, like their biological bases, have a natural time course; lust, and even bloody lust, is eventually satisfied. Furthermore, emotions are notoriously unstable and can be transformed. A lynch mob is fickle and can sometimes be moved by solidarity – say, the suffering of a child. To eradicate a “race”, it is essential to kill children… Meticulous, comprehensive, exhaustive murder required the replacement of the mob with bureaucracy, of shared hatred with obedience to authority. The required bureaucracy would be effective whether administered by anti-Semites and extremists or by moderates, considerably expanding the pool of potential recruits…

We now know that “societies as a whole” can succumb, “in one way or another”, to Hitler, and we also know that we will only learn that they have succumbed if we live long enough to discover; if, in other words, we survive its capitulation. We will not notice “the dilation and widening of the current” any more than we notice the dilation of tsunami waves – because we have been successfully trained to close our eyes and cover our ears. Or perhaps we have been taught that “things like this” do not happen in our modern society, reason, Kant pointed out, that commands us to “act only according to the maxim that you can will while it becomes universal law.”

It would be better for all of us – more pleasant and comfortable, but not, unfortunately, safer – to believe that evil is just the devil in the guise of a shorter name, shortened to a single letter (just like the criminal on the wanted list who , to escape capture, shaves his beard or mustache).

Bauman goes on to say that trust is in trouble the moment we become aware that evil can be hidden anywhere; that he does not stand out in the crowd, does not carry distinctive marks or an identity card; and that everyone can currently be in your service, be your reservists on temporary leave.

Certainly, there are a countless number of people sufficiently immune and averse to evil to withstand its flattery or threats – and with eyes open enough to recognize them as works of evil. The issue, however, is that we do not know who they are or how to distinguish them from the cities that, historically and conceptually, used to be the metonym of protection and security have become sources of threat and violence”. The various specimens of “bunker architecture”, as a preferred housing option for those who can afford that luxury, are monuments to the dubious threats and embodiments of fear that cities provoke. The “modern bunker architecture”:

The fact that in liquid-modern times we need and desire, more than at any other time, solid and reliable bonds only contributes to exacerbating anxiety. Although unable to give pause to our suspicions, stop smelling betrayal and fearing frustration, we seek – compulsively and passionately – wider “networks” of friends and friendships. In fact, the broadest network we can squeeze onto the cell phone panel, which obsequiously increases in capacity with each new generation of these devices. And when we try to hedge our bets against betrayal and thereby reduce risk, we incur more risk.

We prefer to invest our hopes in “networks” rather than partnerships, hoping that within a network there will always be cell phones available to send and receive loyalty messages. We hope to make up for the lack of quality with quantity (the probability of winning the lottery is minuscule, but who knows, maybe a set of miserable odds could constitute a more decent chance?).

The inhabitants of the liquid-modern world, accustomed to practicing the art of liquid-modern life, tend to consider escaping the problem as a better bet than facing it. At the first sign of evil, they look for a passage equipped with a reliably heavy door to lock once they have crossed. The dividing line between lifelong friends and eternal enemies, once so clearly laid out.

The MAD theory isa doctrine of military strategy where the massive use of nuclear weapons by one side would effectively result in the destruction of both - attacker and defender.

Modern developments in these select enclaves of the planet that have gathered enough power to seek and find ways to satisfy their locally generated ambitions in a global space, and to mobilize global resources to sustain their local enjoyments, have been guided by a logic that – in flagrant violation of the intentions proclaimed by modernizers – has made the spread of these ambitions within the species a truly catastrophic prospect, and a healthy lifestyle through a constantly expanding chain of medical-pharmaceutical interventions is the main driving force of modern medicine.

We are becoming a society of interventions, we all want a healthy life, but we are not willing to follow the more difficult path of physical activities, leisure, good nutrition and hours of introspection away from the dopamine generated by digital media... no! We don't want to pay this price, we prefer that medicine that enhances memory, those vitamins that eliminate fruits and vegetables from the diet, that medicine to sleep, to wake up, to feel less tired, to lose weight.

Beyond civilization owes its morbid (or even suicidal) potential to the very same qualities from which it derives its greatness and glamour: the innate aversion to self-limitation, the inherent transgressiveness, and the resentment and disrespect toward all borders and limits – especially the idea of final or ultimate limits.

It consisted, firstly, in the tendency towards adiaphoria: the tendency to minimize the relevance of moral criteria, or, when possible, to eliminate them altogether from an assessment of the desirability (or, indeed, permissiveness) of human actions, ultimately leading to instance to a situation in which human agents are unable to repress their immoral impulses.

It consisted, second, of individual human agents being expropriated of moral responsibility for the consequences of their deeds.

She suggests that “connected revolutionaries” could now “imagine they were changing the world while comforted by the fact that nothing would really change (or, at best, they could get record companies to lower CD prices).”

The technological fetish “is political” for us, enabling us to go about the rest of our lives unburdened by the guilt of perhaps not doing our part and secure in the belief that we are, after all, informed and engaged citizens. The paradox of the technological fetish is that technology acting in our place actually enables us to remain politically passive. We do not have to assume political responsibility because there will always be an opinion formed, disseminated and chewed on by technological communication media and fashionable ideological or intellectual groups.

The three great thinkers conveyed a similar message: we suffer from a moral lag.

Bauman continues in his book by saying that the globalization of harm and loss results in the globalization of resentment and revenge.

The idea of ​​a “borderless market” is a recipe for injustice and, ultimately, for a new global disorder in which (contrary to Clausewitz) it is politics that becomes the continuation of war by other means. Global disorder and armed violence feed, reinforce and animate each other.

Negative globalization has accomplished its task, and all societies are now fully and truly open, materially and intellectually, so that any harm caused by deprivation and indolence, wherever it occurs, is accompanied by the insult of injustice: the feeling that evil has been done, an evil that demands to be repaired, but above all avenged.

Relying on the tools made available by all-powerful globalizing pressures is an integral part of terrorist strategy. In the words of Mark Danner, the most powerful weapon of the 19 terrorists who used their knives and pocket knives to destroy Manhattan's Twin Towers was “the most American technological creation: the internet”.

Given the nature of the modern weapons at the military's disposal, responses to these terrorists tend to appear clumsy, cumbersome and imprecise, launching over an area much larger than that affected by the terrorist attack and causing an increasing number of “casualties”. collateral”, and therefore also more terror, disruption and destabilization than the terrorists could possibly produce on their own – just as in seeking to end poverty, they spend ten times more among themselves than necessary.

Bauman when talking about fundamentalists states: They are – as anyone can confirm – hereditary sinners (and that means innate, genetically determined, irredeemable), idolaters, infidels, instruments of Satan, dark forces standing between the corruption of the present and the comfortable, cozy and safe dream world purified of its poisonous and carcinogenic presence. All of this would probably be rejected by the patent office – if today's fundamentalist preachers were demanding their “intellectual property rights”. What they offer to potential converts is only an open and blatantly desecularized version of the totalitarian temptations that have accompanied all of modern history, being tested with particular zeal and most spectacular effect by the movements.

Margarete Buber-Neumann, notable witness to the two varieties of totalitarian horror of the 20th century. She was drawn into the Communist ranks in the early 1920s, along with many thousands of well-educated young men and women, perplexed and appalled by the futility and inhumanity of a society divided and disjointed by the carnage of the Great War, and, just like her, searching in vain for a meaningful life in a world seemingly devoid of meaning. The moment she made the decision to join the ranks, Margarete gained a community of like-minded people, thousands of “brothers” and “sisters” sharing thoughts, faith and hopes.

Just like her, says Bauman, modern loners became part of a powerful totality – when people join the ranks, they finally acquire the certainty that they begged and got an answer to any question. And if they really listen and submit to seduction, they don't do it because they are Muslims. Being Muslim only explains why they prefer the voice of mullahs or ayatollahs to those of sirens of other denominations. To the others, who listen with the same avidity and allow themselves to be seduced with the same satisfaction, but are not Muslims.

Cognitive dissonance, always the distressing and painful experience of an intrinsically irrational situation that does not allow for a rational solution, in this case is twofold. Reality denies them the values ​​they have learned to respect and cherish, while at the same time denying them the opportunity to embrace the values ​​they are insistently exhorted to embrace – even though the messages encouraging them to embrace those values ​​are notoriously confusing and disturbing, in In short, loners welcome speeches that are beautifully constructed and structured into a simple message: (Integrate! Integrate! I belong to something greater!)

But poor you, ever since the CIA managed to stage a coup to overthrow the democratically elected government of Mossadeq in Iran half a century ago, Western countries, and particularly the United States, have been unable to stop interfering in the Islamic regimes of the Middle East, using as basic weapons, intermittently, generous bribes, threats of economic sanctions or military interventionsdirect.

Thus, Bauman explains that insecure people tend to feverishly search for a target on which they can vent their concentrated anxiety, and to restore lost self-confidence by placating this offensive, frightening and humiliating feeling of impotence.

The anonymous detective who apologized to Girma Belay, the defenseless Ethiopian refugee and marine engineer, after police brutally entered his London flat, stripped him naked, beat him, pinned him against the wall, pinned him down and held him jailed for six days without charge. Still, given all the injustice he suffered in London, Belay summarizes the consequences of this categorical experience, even if suffered individually: “I'm afraid; I do not want to leave." Belay blames his fate on those “terrorist bastards” who “acted in such a way that all sweetness and freedom was destroyed for people like him, Muslim and of Arab origin.” Realize the absurdity, abused people feel grateful for the action of government authorities, and blame the aggression on terrorism.

Which in turn, achieved its objective by causing such strong instability in a country that is proud of its system of government and the powers of its democracy considered fair and immaculate. The terrorist wins a victory when he causes the fear and terror generated to bring everything down, into ruins, and distrust and violations of privacy become legitimized in the name of a greater good: the fight against terrorism.

“While Home Secretary Charles Clarke cannot, under current legislation, prevent Mr Bakri from returning, he would be able to do so under plans announced last Friday to exclude or deport those who preach hate or justify violence.” Observe what speeches in the face of fear are capable of doing, authoritarianism gains strength and people begin to agree with the greatest absurdities, just as in Orwell's “Animal Farm”, Napoleon the pig blamed the invisible enemy Snowball to justify all the totalitarianism he had instituted at Granja dos Bichos.

But it is the insecurity of the present and the uncertainty of the future that create and feed the most terrifying and least bearable of our fears. A feeling of powerlessness: we no longer seem to be in control, whether alone, as a group or collectively, of the affairs of our communities, in the same way that we are no longer connected to them.

It is our “obsession with security”, as well as our intolerance for any gap – however small – in its supply, that becomes the most prolific, self-renewing source. Bauman explains that our need to acquire all the mechanisms and products to make fear bearable, the feeling that the armored car is fundamental in large cities, the need for a titanium glass watch that can withstand up to 2 thousand meters underwater , as if you needed to look at the time at this depth or you would fall into the sea, even in the middle of the city. This obsessive need for security, to get away from everyone, that feeling that there might be a psychopath at our side, is one of those responsible for taking away the best form of security from us, that is, the spirit of community. Because within the spirit of knowing your fellow man, of being close, values ​​and bonds are developed that increase protection against dangers.

This obsession that sells newspapers and clicks, this need to know the 10 characteristics that your neighbor could be a psychopath or a terrorist, this frustration of hopes adds to the damage of insecurity the insult of impotence – and channels anxiety into a desire to locate and punish the guilty, as well as being compensated for the betrayed hopes.

In Jean-Jacques Rousseau's memorable distinction), modern society was built on the quicksand of contingency. Exhorted, urged, and pressured daily to pursue their own interests and satisfactions, and to be concerned only with the interests and satisfactions of others as they affect their own, modern individuals believe that others around them are guided by equally selfish motives.

Fear encourages us to take defensive action, and this gives proximity, tangibility and credibility to the threats, genuine or supposed, from which it presumably emanates. In other words, I am so involved in protecting myself from others and from things reported in the press that the fear becomes very credible, true and almost breathing down my neck, weighing down my shoulders, congregating with my family at the table.

For every five words in our house, one is a warning about the dangers that surround the world. Unemployment, not carrying a cell phone, not carrying money, not opening emails, not answering the phone, not believing what the neighbor said, not stopping drinking water. There is always a caveat in our affairs at home or with friends.

Bauman goes on to talk about globalization, which paradoxically, is precisely its docile and ever-increasing submission to other powers, both inside and outside its territory, but always outside its control, that makes not only retention, but the expansion, extensive and also intensive, of its policing and order protection function. “By further freeing the market and allowing its borders to penetrate the public sector, the government must shoulder the bill for market failure, for externalities it refuses to acknowledge, and act as a safety net for the inevitable losers of market forces.”

The deregulation of market forces and the submission of the State to unilateral “negative” globalization (that is, globalization of business, crime or terrorism, but not of the political and legal institutions capable of controlling them) need to be paid for, and daily , in the currency of social rupture and devastation: the unprecedented fragility of human bonds, the transience of communal loyalties and the weakness and revocability of fundamental rights.

We are increasingly willing to accept cuts in social security in the name of a competitive market, we are happy about the increase in prisons, but we are not worried about the snowball effect of the marginalization of individuals, the low levels of public education in needy neighborhoods, the lack of structures in these neighborhoods, the extreme poverty that still plagues part of the countries. We prefer a wholesale giant to be saved with government subsidies to avoid the much-feared word “mass unemployment” and we deceive ourselves with the siren song that this measure will increase our competitiveness.

To quote Lawson once again: “Since there is nothing else to fall back on, people are likely to abandon the notion of collectivism altogether… and turn to the market as the arbiter of provision.” And markets, notoriously, act in the opposite direction to the intentions of the welfare state. The market thrives in conditions of insecurity; he takes advantage of human beings' fears and feelings of helplessness.

Offering increased flexibility as the only remedy for an already intolerable amount of insecurity, messages from political powers present the prospect of even more challenges and more privatization of problems – and thus, ultimately, more uncertainty, not less. They leave little hope of collectively guaranteed existential security and instead encourage their listeners to focus on their individual security in an increasingly uncertain and unpredictable, and thus potentially dangerous, world.

This type of care, of which the “welfare state” is now accused, was punished for being excessive – it provoked widespread rebellion.

Bauman asserts that Margaret Thatcher was celebrated for launching and leading a frontal attack on the “nanny state” under the slogan: “I want a doctor of my choosing at a time of my choosing.” The choice seemed indeed a welcome relief from the routine, but it was fraught with obstacles and pitfalls of an unknown variety, as having the freedom to choose a doctor and being able to pay for his services are two distant and distinct things, but no less alarming and uncomfortable.

Freedom without security is no less disturbing and terrifying than security without freedom. Both conditions are threatening and permeated with fear – the alternatives between a rock and a hard place.

self-confidence that accompanies it. “Progress”, once the most extreme manifestation of radical optimism and the promise of universally shared permanent happiness, is quickly transforming into its opposite, drifting towards the dystopian and fatalistic pole of our predictions.

We will be destined to grope blindly. Perhaps staying near brighter places is the less terrifying choice, even if it ultimately proves useless.

To slow the dizzying pace of change, much less predict or determine its duration, we tend to focus on the things we can, or believe we can, or are confident we can, influence.

Thus, we focus on palliative targets by taking meticulous precautions against inhaling someone else's cigarette smoke, ingesting fatty foods or “bad” bacteria (while greedily drinking liquids that promise to contain the “good” ones), exposure to the sun or unprotected sex, and so we seek to detoxify the interior of our bodies and homes, locking ourselves behind walls, surrounding the access to our homes with TV cameras, hiring armed guards, driving armored vehicles or taking martial arts classes .

David L. Altheide states: “is that these activities, although we seek to feel security, they reaffirm and help produce the sense of disorder that our actions precipitate” to combat, that is, in the intention of erecting strong walls against fear, we are reinforcing fear at all times and making it increasingly higher in relation to our erected walls.

Bauman highlights that a large amount of commercial capital can be – and has been – accumulated from insecurity and fear. “Advertisers” deliberately exploit widespread fears of a terrorist catastrophe to increase sales of highly profitable 4x4 SUVs, which are presented in advertisements as being immune to the risky and unpredictable urban life outside… Such vehicles appear to alleviate the fear. Never have you wanted a Hummer so much... you've never wanted so much to associate a car with rocks falling from the sky, earth breaking, impassable roads, after all, the message is clear, you need to be prepared to move through the burning city, the city in ruins of urban agitation.

On the political side, “law and order”, increasingly confined to the promise of personal protection, has become a major selling point, perhaps the biggest, both in political manifestos and in electoral campaigns.

Ray Surette, stated that the world seen on TV seems to be made up of “sheep citizens” protected from “wolf criminals” by “sheep dog policemen”, in a continuous movement

gaining legitimacy and political approval by strengthening the government machinery to declare war on crime and, more generally, “disorders of public order” (a broad and, in liquid-modern environments, bottomless category, capable of accommodating the entire range of uncomfortable “others” – from homeless people sleeping in the open to snooty students).

Bauman delves deeper into the depths of the modern world and talks about the “negative celebrities”, generic models of the liquid-modern era. “Much of modern celebrity,” suggests Epstein, “seems to result from careful promotion.” Celebrity is based “on the transmission” of a feat, but also “on the invention of something which, if not examined too closely, could pass for a feat”. And he concludes: “Most of today's celebrities float on a 'hype' that is actually a publicist's fuel.

The new individualism, the fading of human bonds and the withering away of solidarity are engraved on one side of the coin that bears the effigy of globalization on the other. In its current, purely negative form, globalization is a parasitic and predatory process that feeds on the energy extracted from the bodies of nation-states and other protective devices that their subjects have enjoyed (and occasionally fallen victim to) in the past.

The absence of a politically organized global community means that the super-rich can operate without any concern for any interests other than their own. We are in danger of being left with just two genuinely global and international social groups: the super-rich and the intellectuals, that is, the people who attend international conferences dedicated to assessing the damage caused by their super-rich cosmopolitan colleagues.

In Bauman’s definition, the “super-rich”. They are generally described by the term “neoliberals”. The message and practices they try to make global are known as “neoliberalism” – the words of Pierre Bourdieu. Neoliberalism, to use John Dunn's scathing expression, is a “bet on the fittest” – “a bet on the rich, to some extent forced on those with the good fortune of already being rich, but above all on those who have the ability, courage and luck to become that way.”

“People are led to assume that there is no alternative to some malignant economic forces beyond their control. The truth is that penury and ambition constitute political choices, not economic destiny; we can be Nordic, not North American, and we can be employers like John Lewis, not Gate Gourmet.”

This is mainly why state governments, struggling day after day to resist the storms that threaten to devastate their programs and policies, stumble from one crisis management campaign and one set of emergency measures to another, dreaming of nothing more than remaining in power after the next election, and otherwise devoid of far-reaching programs or ambitions – not to mention visions of a radical solution to the nation's recurring problems.

Bauman, is still categorical in highlighting that although global terrorism is an extremely real danger and continually reproduced in the “no man's land” of global immensity, much of its officially estimated threat, if not all of it, “is a fantasy that has been exaggerated and distorted by politicians. It is a dark illusion that has spread without question to governments around the world, as well as to the security services and international media.”

“At a time when all great ideas have lost credibility, fear of a phantom enemy is all politicians have left to maintain their power.”

“Bauman mentions that although 500 people [until February 2004] were arrested based on the new laws against terrorists, only two were convicted” (and let us note: despite being tiny, this proportion is still infinitely greater than that of those convicted among prisoners of Guantánamo after several years of incarceration without charge). The measures taken by the government to confront terrorism seem to have been calculated to further deepen the sense of emergency and the “fortress under siege” complex, that is, you will probably know about the 500 arrests of terrorists, but you will hardly know the fact that of these , 498 were innocent of the charges.

The “war on terror”, instead of combating the global proliferation of the small arms trade, has caused it to increase considerably (and the authors of a joint report by Oxfam and Amnesty International warn that small arms are “the real weapons of mass destruction”, as they kill half a million people each year). The profits made by American producers and traders of “self-defense objects and devices” from popular fears are extremely high.

The British judiciary has acquiesced, with few (although eagerly publicized) exceptions, to the government policy that “there is no alternative to repression” – and so, as Gearty concludes, “only liberal idealists” and other equally deluded sympathizers “have the expectation that justice will lead society” in the defense of freedoms.

In fact, nowadays it is necessary to be careful about new terrorist attacks. But we also need to look with suspicion at the guardians of order who may (mistakenly) take us for a carrier of this threat...

New Bundestag resolutions, new legislation primarily served the terrorists, increasing their public visibility (and therefore, indirectly, their social stature) to a level far greater than that which they could achieve on their own. According to the conclusions shared by the researchers, the violent reaction of the forces of law and order greatly increased the popularity of terrorists. In other words, not all the campaign intended by terrorists to show themselves to the world was as effective as the free advertising that governments, politicians and sensationalist press were able to do.

Bauman ends his speech by saying that in liquid-modern states one can in fact observe an evident “totalitarian inclination”. It is possible to verify in the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century, which obtained and maintained the submission and obedience of their subjects through terror promoted by the State, strong signs of extravagance and apparent lack of logic in the way in which totalitarian States practiced exemption from the law – in other respects a universal prerogative.

Modern, comparatively early democratic state as an agency aimed at reducing fear or eliminating it altogether from the lives of its citizen-subjects. Uncertainty did not need to be manufactured. State-administered means of repression and violence could be used only on extraordinary occasions, and for the most part left to rust.

Modern democracy could be written in terms of the progress made in eliminating, or constraining and taming, successive causes of uncertainty, anxiety and fear. While contemporary democracy seems to be designed to have the opposite effect, the State starts to reaffirm individuality and drown the collective, there is a heavy discourse that social well-being is to blame for all the delay and inefficiency of political ills. of public power.

The cycles of fear are renewed, from the passage of the “bourgeoisization of the proletariat” – seen with concern and sadness by nostalgic left-wing intellectuals in the post-war years – to the “proletarianization of the bourgeoisie” in the United States with the economic crisis.

These citizens trying to get away with this income will be constantly tormented by the fear of salary cuts and staff reductions, as well as the disastrous consequences of an illness, however brief.

Roosevelt's “war on fears” declaration (fears of lack of freedom, religious persecution and poverty) was obviously replaced by George W. Bush's “war on terrorism” declaration, as well as his promise that This will continue for a long time (some of its collaborators, even more insensitive, warn that it will never end…).

“If proletarians can be distracted from their own despair by media-created pseudo-events, including the occasional brief, bloody war, the super-rich will have little to fear.”

The most powerful weapon of the rich is globalism. Once a certain corporate threshold is passed, paying taxes becomes voluntary, as Rupert Murdoch's accountants can testify. In the face of any physical or even fiscal threat, it is easy to take the money, or move, elsewhere.

Members of the super-rich global elite need not worry about alleviating the fears that haunt the natives/locals of the place they stopped for a few moments, as “keeping the proletarians happy” is no longer a condition of their own security.

So for these large corporations, if the volume of local fears becomes too great for them to feel comfortable, there are so many other locations they can move to, leaving the natives to stew and burn alone in the cauldrons of panic and nightmares...

Thus, in the age of liquid fear, uncertainty is not an enemy to be fought, but a constant companion to be understood. It is our ability to adapt, face volatility with resilience and embrace the unknown that allows us to thrive in an ever-changing world. Liquid fear can challenge us, but it can also inspire us to seek authenticity in a world of superficialities, to find meaningful connections in an ocean of ephemeral relationships, and to forge our own inner security on shaky ground. So remember: in a liquid world, we are shapers of our destiny, able to swim with grace in the waters of the unknown. True power lies in our ability to face fear with courage and embrace uncertainty as an opportunity for self-discovery and growth. May our journey into liquid modernity be marked by the desire to understand, adapt and thrive, no matter how liquid the world may seem.

That's why this channel exists, so that you can have contact with some thoughts that help you have tools to understand and guard against some traps that we put ourselves in by not exercising reflection on different thoughts.

Obviously, Bauman is a critic of capitalism, especially in globalizing discourses and strong advertising against social security and the loosening of state borders. This does not mean that all of his ideas are the absolute truth, but they help to compose our repertoire of reflection on different themes, and here in particular about the constant fear that we seem to feel.

This was a special summary for you who follow our channel, I recommend you read Liquid Fear, it is an interesting book with interesting ideas.