In modern societies, fear is an issue that affects everyone. Fear knows no social bounds. The high-frequency trader sitting in front of his computer is just as susceptible to anxiety as the deliveryman returning to his depot, the anesthetist picking up her children from kindergarten, or the model looking in the mirror. In its substance, too, fear is infinite: fear of school, fear of heights, fear of poverty, fear of heart disease, fear of terrorism, fear of losing social status, fear of commitment, fear of inflation. And fear can develop along any axis of time. We may fear the future because everything has gone so well up to this point; we may feel fear in the present because we worry about our next steps, since a decision in favor of one option is always a decision against another; and we may even fear the past if we think that something we’ve put behind us might rear its head again.
Niklas Luhmann, whose systems theory of functional equivalents always provides for alternatives in any situation, views anxiety as perhaps the only a priori principle in modern society about which all members of society are in agreement. It is the principle that applies absolutely when all other principles have been qualified.1 Anxiety can bring the Muslim woman into conversation with the secularist, the liberal cynic with the despairing human rights activist.
But no one can convince someone else that their fears are unfounded. At most, fears can only be contained and dissipated through discussion. Of course, this requires that we accept the fears of our interlocutors instead of denying them. This is a well-known therapy scenario; recognizing your own fears can make you more open and flexible, so you do not need to immediately react defensively and dismissively when fear comes into play.
Though they are obviously diffuse, the fears currently coursing through the public consciousness say something about a particular sociohistorical situation. Through concepts of fear, the members of a society come to an understanding about the conditions of their co-existence: who moves forward and who is left behind; where things break and where chasms open up; what is inevitably lost and what might yet survive. It is through concepts of fear that society takes its own pulse.
In 1932, on the eve of the Nazi era, Theodor Geiger published a classic work of social structural analysis – The Social Stratification of the German People – in which he describes a society dominated by fears of displacement, loss of prestige, and defensiveness. He introduces us to the characters typical of the time: the small businessmen with their burning hatred of social democratic cooperatives; the homeworkers with their tiny landholdings who have grown solitary and eccentric on account of their domestic isolation and who tend toward violent rebellion; the young secretaries with their bobbed hair who are threatened by rationalization and who dream of dashing gentlemen. There are also the miners who gain their sense of self-worth by heroicizing the dangers of their profession, and whose unionized collective interests are not so much institutionally organized and class-conscious in nature as they are comradely and professional; the petty bureaucrats who guard their tiny sliver of power all the more jealously and flaunt it all the more eagerly the more their positions are squeezed by pay grades and internal tasks; the army of young graduates who experience a decline in the value of their education, the disintegration of their status, and the exclusivity of the professional world; and, finally, the various characters from the capitalist class, between whom there is no love lost: the large-scale landowners who find capitalism’s intrinsic concept of a global economy unpalatable, the rentiers who have a finger in every pie and no loyalty to any particular social roots, the captains of industry who, on account of the relative immobility of their investments, have been tied to specific industrial sites for generations, and the resourceful merchants whose chain stores keep the urban populace stylishly decked out and supplied with delicacies from overseas – and not forgetting those who have been unsettled by the global economic crisis, an irregular class of the unemployed who have nothing to lose, and for whom nothing of permanence seems to be of any value.
In the social portrait that Geiger sketched freely but with lively precision, all of these people were united by the feeling that the social order from which they came had been superseded. The world of salaried employees that emerged from multiple regroupings of the working class and (in due course) from educated circles, the “old middle class” clinging to its property-owning mentality, and the bourgeoisie of the center collapsing into countless interest groups – none of them found social or political forms of expression with which they could identify, either for themselves or society as a whole. Grizzled old social democracy seemed to be trapped in outmoded ideas, the center appeared more inclusive and encompassing but also had to uphold a Thomist-Catholic social philosophy, and the economic and national liberal parties were reeling just like the social classes and milieus searching for a foothold in the confusion. In a situation such as this, anyone who could pick up on the fears of being overrun, left with nothing, and pushed to the margins, and who could then bundle these fears together and direct them at a new target, could mobilize society as a whole. One year before Hitler took power, Theodor Geiger grasped the vanguard importance of a young generation that was removing itself from history, stylizing itself as an agent of national activism and, in doing so, turning the rumble of fear into the engine of a new age. Today we know that these ranks produced the ideological avant-garde of the totalitarian era, who functioned as the controlling elites of industrial society well into the 1970s in Germany and beyond.2
It was Franklin D. Roosevelt, a man admired to this day as a statesman, who put the issue of fear and the strategy of fear absorption on the political agenda of the twentieth century. In his inaugural address as the 32nd President of the United States of America, which he held on March 3, 1933, in the wake of the terrible Great Depression, he found the words that would establish a new type of politics: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”3 Free men must not be afraid of fear because this can rob them of their self-determination. Someone who is driven by fear avoids what is unpleasant, denies what is true, and misses out on what is possible. Fear makes people dependent on seducers, guardians, and gamblers. Fear leads to the tyranny of the majority because everyone runs with the pack; it allows one to toy with the silent masses because no one raises their voice in protest, and once the spark has been ignited, it can throw all of society into panicked confusion. We should take Roosevelt’s words to mean that the first and foremost responsibility of national politics is to allay the fears of citizens.
One can view the entire development of the welfare state in the second half of the twentieth century as a response to Roosevelt’s claim. Eliminating the fear of disability, unemployment, and old-age poverty is supposed to form the backdrop for a self-confident citizenry – one which explicitly includes employees – so that they are free to organize themselves in order to express their interests, they are free to lead their lives according to their own principles and preferences, and so that, in cases of doubt, they can stand up to the powerful in full awareness of their freedom. As Franz Xaver Kaufmann might put it, politics of fear leads to “security as a sociological and sociopolitical problem.”4
If you fall, someone should catch you; if you are at a loss, someone should advise and support you; if you are born into disadvantage, you should be compensated. This is why the welfare state of today has taken up the cause of providing qualifications to the under-qualified, advice to people and households in debt, and compensatory education for children from underprivileged families. The purpose of this is not just to combat poverty, social exclusion, and systematic social disadvantage, but to combat the fear of being thrown on the scrapheap, disenfranchised, and discriminated against.
A certain reflexive effect comes into play here. By using the principle of fear as a reference point, the welfare state – with its measures for security, empowerment, and equality – delivers itself up to the world of emotions. Can social security, employment offices that have turned into job centers, or quality assurance agencies for everything under the sun banish our fear of fear? For Roosevelt, coping with fear was the decisive criterion for public happiness and social cohesion. During the election campaign that led to his first victory, he proclaimed that he had looked thousands of Americans in the eye and seen that “they have the frightened look of lost children.”5
It is important to bear in mind that the development of the welfare state in the second half of the twentieth century was framed by an unprecedented promise of integration into modern society. The expectation here was that anyone who made an effort, invested in their own education, and exhibited certain capabilities would find a suitable place for themselves in society. Social placement was no longer pre-determined by one’s origins, skin color, region, or gender; instead, it could be influenced by will, energy, and a commitment to one’s own dreams and desires. The fact that chance played a much greater role for most people than goals and intentions was acceptable because it was thought that, despite everything, you would end up in a position that, in hindsight, you could feel you had earned and deserved.
Who still actually believes this? Of course, we live in a modern society that values the positions we have earned rather than those allotted to us. The fact that social inequality persists – as has been confirmed time and again by social structural analyses – changes nothing about this principle.
Most young people, who are convinced that we live in a pyramidal class society in which any movement from a lower to a higher social standing is unlikely, assume that they themselves will make it through somehow. They are referred to as a “lost generation,” one which has to hire itself out for peanuts despite having all the best qualifications. They get by, but they don’t believe they will have careers involving a gradual rise in status, like that of their parents’ generation born around 1965.6
After all, there are so many things you can do wrong. You can choose the wrong elementary school, the wrong secondary school, the wrong university, the wrong specialization, the wrong trips abroad, the wrong networks, the wrong partner, or the wrong place to live. This implies that a selection process takes place at each of these transitional points, where some get through but many fall by the wayside. The process starts early and never seems to end. You need a good nose, the necessary cooperative skills, a sober sense of relationships, and a feel for timing. Because the corridors ahead are always wider than those behind you, because the social capital from relationships and contacts is growing ever cheaper for the majority but more expensive for a minority, and because relationship markets are becoming more homogeneous and thus more competitive, an individual’s fate is increasingly the expression of his or her good or bad life choices.
This change can be summed up by saying that our mode of social integration is shifting from the promise of advancement to the threat of exclusion.7 We are no longer motivated to keep striving by positive messages, only by negative ones. This prompts us to worry whether our will is strong enough, our skills are right, our appearance is convincing. Our fears have changed along with the costs. If, at every fork in the road, we face the prospect of ending up with those who are left behind waiting for a “second chance” – because life no longer allows for long hauls, only short hops – then anxiety really is, as Kierkegaard says, “freedom’s actuality as the possibility of possibility.”8
Anxiety springs from the knowledge that everything is open but nothing is meaningless. Our entire lives seem to be on the line at every single moment. We can take detours, take breaks or shift our focus, but these actions must make sense and contribute to the fulfillment of our life’s purpose. The fear of simply drifting through life is hard to bear. The stress of anxiety is the stress of the search for meaning, and this cannot be alleviated by any state or society.
Sales are booming for self-help books about availability, emotion, and risk based on findings from cognitive psychology, evolutionary theory, and the physiology of the brain. And the message is always the same: you have to keep your options open, think in scenarios, and seize “good opportunities.” You should be wary of overestimating yourself, but you should also avoid indecisiveness. And, in general, learning about the bifurcation of the mind should take away your fear of fear. We have an intuitive system that is responsible for fast thinking and a controlling system that works slowly, gradually, and hierarchically. By switching organically between the two, you can stay fit and flexible in a bewildering life with uncertain outcomes.9
But if you stand still, stop learning, and fail to strike a balance, you will quickly become a welfare case. And if, in the end, you can even die well or die badly,10 as the relevant thanatological literature assures us, then the fear of fear itself becomes a hidden motif in our popular doctrines of what comprises a “good life.” And the threat of exclusion – as gently as it is brought home to us, and as wise as it may sound – never ends.
This is not the fear that Roosevelt witnessed in the 1930s, that of “lost children” who place their hopes in the protection of the state and entrust themselves to a “good shepherd”; instead, it is that of wily “ego tacticians”11 who mistrust the state and mock politicians who behave no differently than they do themselves. It is not the fear of being humiliated and forgotten as a group or collective, but rather of tripping up as an individual, losing one’s balance and free-falling, without the parachute of a sustaining environment or a traditional “loser culture,”12 to finally disappear into social oblivion.
This fits with the universalized attribute of precarity13 that emerged in the first decade of this century. Precarity suddenly applied not just to employment situations other than the “standard” lifelong, full-time job appropriate to one’s qualifications, but also to the generations with uncertain paths from education into employment, partnerships based on ideals of romantic love or single parents living together, the social milieus of those who had been declassed and left behind, and the very nature of socialization processes in general. A precarious social existence is one in which standardized expectations bump up against non-standardized realities. This is the norm today, which is why the demand for role distance and ambiguity tolerance is rising. We apparently accept far more divergence than we once did. But this also makes the division between inclusion and exclusion all the sharper. As long as you can make a case for your sexual, religious, or ethical diversity, everything is fine. But you’ll quickly find yourself on the outside if your difference makes no difference to the happiness, colorfulness, or creativity of other people. The fear of fear rears its head as soon as someone’s otherwise unremarkable difference fails to resonate or connect with others.
This indicates a change in our experience of fear, one which relates to an epochal shift in our behavioral programming. In The Lonely Crowd – David Riesman’s sociological physiognomy of the behavioral world of the twentieth century, which he published in 1950 together with Reuel Denney and Nathan Glazer – Riesman described how Americans were changing from “inner-directed” people guided by their conscience to “other-directed” people guided by their external contacts. When a population expands and people from rural areas stream toward urban agglomerations, and when science and technology become productive forces of their own kind, then individuals need a firmly anchored behavioral control program that is informed by overarching principles and lends stability to their behavior as the world around them changes. Riesman uses the metaphor of an internal gyroscope that can point in different directions while remaining centered on an internal equilibrium. It is naturally frightening to leave your native behavioral habitat as an emigrant, social climber, or “regional pioneer” in order to make your fortune in a different and unfamiliar world; and it is a sign of courage to believe in the enrichment of your world view and the stability of your values nonetheless. In the language of the European tradition, we would refer to these grand notions as “learning” and “conscience.” Inner-directed individuals strive to expand their perspectives and test their conscience. This makes it possible for them to reconcile their adaptation to the foreign with their consolidation of the familiar.
Fear is thus conquered in a vertical mode, so to speak. Individuals must sort out their anxious feelings of disaffection, dispossession, and disembedding for themselves and with their god, as the case may be. Bourgeois confessional literature is full of depictions of disorienting learning experiences and agonizing examinations of conscience. But what beckons is the triumph of individuation that makes the individual – who can come from anywhere and fit in anywhere – into an autonomously acting, socially ascribable person who is identical to himself.14
But when population growth declines, the countryside becomes a suburb, and the conquest of the world reaches its limits, then interpersonal relations become tighter and more inescapable, and the self must try to adapt to others and come to terms with them in a “shrunken and agitated”15 world. Then individuals are no longer rewarded for their obsession with proving themselves, but instead for their ability to adopt the perspectives of others, respond resiliently and flexibly to changing situations, and find compromises through teamwork. The psychological gyroscope that maintains internal equilibrium is replaced by a social radar that registers the signals sent by others. The self becomes a self of others – and then faces the problem of forming an image of itself from the thousands of images reflected back at it.
This is not about the importance of appreciation and affection from one’s fellow human beings, which is part of the social nature of the self. Instead, the other-directed person is characterized by a greater sensitivity to contact, which turns the expectations and desires of others into the source of direction for one’s own behavior. Such behavior is not regulated primarily by the conventions and manners enforced by external authorities, nor by the norms and values internalized through conflict-ridden personal formative processes, but by the expectations, and the expectations of expectations, that are literally negotiated second by second between the people currently involved in a situation. “Role-taking,” as the symbolic interactionists would later say, is “role-making.”16
By distinguishing between inner-directedness and other-directedness, Riesman wanted to illustrate the “exceptional sensitivity to the actions and wishes of others”17 exhibited by the normal person of today. This sensitivity conceals a defensive and reactive constitution. The other-directed character feels dependent on the judgment of his peers, allies himself with fashionable trends and prevailing opinions, and, in cases of doubt, prefers to remain silent rather than offend or resist. And in moments of loneliness and fatigue, he feels oppressed and enslaved by the assumed needs and desires of the people around him.
This is the breeding ground for what is referred to in the social sciences as the sensation of “relative deprivation.”18 Comparing yourself to others in a similar situation determines how you feel in the world. These others may be friends, contemporaries, or colleagues. And as we know from the psychology of the conservation of resources,19 losses weigh far more heavily than gains. What does he have that I don’t? How do I come off compared to her? This may relate to money, popular status symbols, or a radiant appearance. The self is geared toward others and goes into a tailspin when it no longer believes it can keep up. We are timid and cautious when we feel abandoned, and we grow stronger and more confident when we believe we can appeal to others and win them over.
The idea of what others think of us, and what they think we think of them, thus becomes a source of social anxiety. It is not the objective situation that weighs on individuals and breaks them down, but rather the sense of losing out compared to significant others. Other-directed characters lack the inner reserves that could make them relatively immune to absurd comparisons and ludicrous temptations. Behind their unbridled envy is a deep fear of not being able to keep up, of being the dupe who is left out and left behind.20
This fear is very difficult for other-directed individuals to admit to or share with others, however. It is what drives Willy Loman in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman and the suburban housewives in Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. They prefer to hunker down with their bad feelings, have a bourbon at every opportunity, swallow sedatives like candy, and seek refuge in the crowd with their insatiable need for feedback and belonging. It is no coincidence that David Riesman’s book – which captured the social condition of twentieth-century humanity better than any other – is called The Lonely Crowd.
All of this raises multiple questions. What do the fears of the “lonely crowd” of today look like? Who makes up the “silent majority” that feels patronized and overlooked? Which social developments make people feel powerless, and when do people feel completely abandoned? And, naturally, how can the self withstand this fear, and which discourses and rituals can help it reach an understanding with others about their shared fears? The phenomenology of fear illustrates the kind of society in which we live.