What can we do with the realization that we ourselves are creating the fear we experience in the face of a threatening world? This feeling of threat and concern can’t be explained or argued away. After all, the fear of not being able to maintain one’s social status through the generations, or the fear of another financial collapse that would take personal savings and private pensions down with it, cannot be dismissed out of hand. We can see that fears are dependent on our demands, but reducing our demands does not necessarily reduce our fear. We have to be able to generally rely on something, even if deep down we know that everything in life just keeps moving along.
The communication of fear is subject to a strange inconsistency in modern society. As individuals, we don’t want to seem fearful especially to our friends and acquaintances. It is not particularly attractive to express feelings of helplessness, deadlock, or paralysis. The fearful self is not an individuality pattern1 that scores points with others. The ideal of coolness that is so prized today in pop culture practically polices itself by censoring the expression of fear. On the other hand, the expression of fear in public can always claim to have something authentic about it. A confession of fear is indisputable because no one can object to the appropriateness of the declaration, only to the credibility of the speaker. Anyone who uses fear as a justification for their opposition to something is legitimized – particularly when they do so in the name of others who dare not do it, who have no voice, or who haven’t yet grasped the situation. Fear expressed by proxy can pose serious difficulties for the leadership of a country, a company, or a civic organization.
In other words: announcing your fear can make you appear weak in private and strong in public. But the temptation is always there to deceive yourself and others. You’d rather not reveal to your partner that you lie awake at night brooding about a treacherous comment made by your boss, or that you’re forever thinking about your changing sexual appetites. Even to friends, you’ll only make a few passing melancholy remarks in a humorous tone. Your fear is stuck in an endless loop of dark thoughts that can’t find the right way to express the feeling of suffocation.
The public incitement of fear, on the other hand, follows certain templates that illustrate worst-case scenarios. We are usually told we face the threat of environmental or economic apocalypse, which leaves us very little time to make radical changes. And the reference object for this fear is correspondingly vague: you may fear for your children’s future or for the survival of our blue planet. Anyone who argues that pensions are actually relatively safe thanks to the pay-as-you-go system, or that in the old industrialized countries in particular, which still indulge in the ideology of growth, the air is getting better and the rivers cleaner comes across as either an absurd skeptic or a cold cynic. The fear put forth as an argument in public debates eludes the principle of argumentation.2
The paradox of communicating fear3 is that the authenticity of the expression is often purchased at the price of the remoteness of the reasoning. What could the inevitable collapse of the planet – under the rallying cry of “More money!” – have to do with my personal and private situation as a “precariously prosperous” middle-aged, middle-class citizen? In a nutshell: there is a danger that you are deluding yourself in your fear.
The underlying question here is whether fear can be communicated at all. After all, the experience of fear involves a sense of being alone with the feeling that everything is falling apart and nothing can hold together. For Kierkegaard, this was evidence of the modern phenomenon of discovering that we must live our lives ourselves and through ourselves. This fact is what drives the self – which can avail itself of nothing and no one – into the arms of fear. During the Great Depression in the late 1920s, Heidegger wrote that this Dasein, which must be itself, is suspended in nothingness.4 This is the danger that promises salvation.
For Heidegger, fear is not necessarily a negative concept. As an affect of selfhood, it can actually be positive when the Dasein, in its “being-toward-death,” dissociates itself from others and their idle chatter. Instead of talking in circles, one becomes aware of oneself. Heidegger’s existential heroism views the fundamental loneliness of the self as the prerequisite for the inner collectedness of the self.5
It is always illuminating for a certain sociohistorical moment when the silence surrounding fear is broken – when the fear that seems to be buried in the personal and private sphere is expressed in a way that is considered generally applicable to the public. The fearful self is invoked as the subject of fear and can consider its flaw to be a mark of distinction. Then we no longer need to explain our fears because they have already been understood. And then fear no longer separates individuals, it brings them together as a whole.
This is where the politics of fear come into play, which escalate personal experiences of degradation and group-specific fears of loss into a general expression of helplessness and threat. Expressions of dismay that speak to a “loss of utopia,” a “regime of locusts,” “buying time,” or “the specter of capital” generate an atmosphere of social instability that holds out the prospect of predictable crises, systems susceptible to failure, and expanding social divisions. None of this is plucked from thin air, but it makes a big difference whether you believe you live in a failing, changing, or vanishing world.
What’s important here is the instance in which emotions are consolidated. Long before the age of financialization, when Germany seemed to be endlessly waiting for social change in the 1980s, the economists Guy Kirsch and Klaus Mackscheidt developed a typology of affective political leadership.6 They distinguished between demagogues, statesmen (or stateswomen, we should add), and ordinary officeholders. The typology works with classic motifs: the demagogue intensifies the people’s fear and throws a scapegoat at their feet, who is blamed for all of their misery; the officeholder numbs the fear by painting a picture of social reality which lacks all unsettling and threatening aspects; and the statesman shows how the fear is founded in reality and how we can confront our fears nonetheless without condemning everything wholesale.
We immediately think of the populist instigators who warn against the extinction of a nation or against the euro debt pact; we hope instead for the great oratory of the statesman or stateswoman who acknowledges the limits and flaws of capitalism but also points out ways to evade the hazards; and, for the time being, we settle for the officeholder who competently and consistently solves the practical problems that arise day after day.
The most insightful aspect of Kirsch and Mackscheidt’s book is its correction of a logical but misguided understanding of politics. We are quick to assume that the purpose of politics is to solve communal problems which, though they affect everyone, are beyond the problem-solving capacity of the individual. Whenever the call goes out in times of crisis for experts who know something about economics or management, we are falling back on this understanding of politics as an arena for negotiating strategies to solve collective problems. The fact that election campaigns are actually more about allegiance, devotion, anger, envy, ill will, and enthusiasm than about objectively analyzing various ideologically accented approaches to solving problems must seem like a regrettable side effect of rituals of mass mobilization. When politics gets people so riled up that their eyes blaze, then according to this understanding of politics, it no longer has anything to do with the necessary debate about the best way of supplying and distributing resources, but has instead degenerated into sentimentality and affective theatricality.
For Kirsch and Mackscheidt, this popular denunciation of the business of politics as a politics of illusion, which operates with emotions instead of arguments, is based on a halved concept of the political. The political dispute doesn’t really revolve around whether the top tax rate should be 47.5 or 49.5 percent, whether extra retirement benefits should be paid to women who had children before 1992 or before 1989, or whether there should be a 0.05 percent or 0.03 percent tax on all financial transactions – it revolves around whether the tax rate should be raised appreciably for the rich and super-rich, whether mothers who put their careers on hold to raise their children because they had no access to a kindergarten or all-day school should have their parenting recognized in the form of a pension, or whether politicians are prepared to keep a check on risky spot trading in the financial market. This is not a debate about improving the supply of goods for citizens, it is a fight about granting social rights to groups and establishing social boundaries in general.
The interests of individuals do not play the main role in this dispute – ideas about our co-existence do. And these ideas are embodied in the political confrontation between politicians. This is why political struggle is always a struggle for identification.
Politics without passion, without emotional energy, without the dynamics of psyches encountering and repelling one another, and without fear and desire is no politics at all. In a representative democracy, political leaders are the projection anchor for these political affects. When viewed in this light, an election campaign, with its mixture of argumentative explication and personal confrontation, does not serve primarily to prepare a factually founded mandate between voters and the person they elect, but rather to lay the foundation for a personally mediated relationship of trust between citizens and their representatives – or to reveal the existence of a serious representation deficit.7
The problem of fear is implicit in the question of trust. The public looks at the men and women in the running and searches for signs of how they interpret the present social situation. Should we be afraid? Can we live with our fears? Do we dare hope for a world without the fear of fear? The demagogue says: “I’m one of you! I understand your situation and I empathize with you! And I’m telling you: we are being betrayed and sold out!” Demagogic discourse uses fear as the basis of a policy of social separation. It implies that there is a ruling class who is feathering its own nest and pushing large sections of society to the margins. These oppressed and marginalized forces are invoked as a testament to the disorder of society as a whole, and with their desires and drives, needs and goals, fantasies and visions, they represent everything that is ignored and opposed by prevailing opinion.
Demagoguery elevates fear to the measure of distinction between truth and lies. If you are afraid, you are in the right, because the prevailing chatter is designed solely to lead us to believe that the situation can be brought under control through endless discussion and compromise. Much like psychoanalysis, demagogic discourse constructs a sphere of latency which stands in opposition to the sphere of what is manifestly negotiated. The demagogue can therefore portray herself8 as the representative of “senseless frustrations,”9 someone who promises to relieve the fear that, in truth, affects everyone. She can express all of our concerns without inhibition or restriction – not because she is superior to us, but because she is so psychologically similar to us.
The ordinary officeholder, on the other hand, banks on the relative solidity of fear management in the ruling classes of society. Her political success is predicated on calmly pointing out that ruin can be averted by progressing and learning. She can avail herself of a reality of surprisingly reliable expectations even as central expectations collapse. While large sections of the public sit and wait for the masterstroke that is supposed to lead us out of the crisis, the officeholder has left all admonishers and laggards behind her long ago with her fast and flexible policy of small steps. The quiet force she embodies is based on a pragmatism that skirts the big questions and focuses instead on gradually working through the problems of the moment. Fear is not established in images of threat and endangerment, it is processed on sight, in a sense.
What distinguishes the officeholder is not her superior knowledge or exemplary behavior, but rather the “above-average averageness”10 of her attitude toward life. There is nothing aristocratic or eccentric about it. Signs of fear do emerge in her self-presentation, but they appear alongside signs of joy, confidence, and weariness. She conveys to the public that she is in no way a special person with extraordinary gifts. The only resource of courage that sets her apart is the courage to wield power.
The ordinary officeholder might well cope very efficiently with the problems of political governance, but she also lulls her fearful constituents by disregarding all experiences and worries that could cause fear. This sustains an unspoken pact of fear between the officeholder and her followers, which sweeps aside ambiguities, feelings of vertigo, and the urge to flee. The officeholder gives citizens the sense of calm they need to hold onto their guiding principles in confusing situations; but she also does not make demands on them to ensure they don’t lose courage in testing situations. In the end, the political success of the officeholder could have the same roots as her almost inevitable failure: blocking developmental processes, defending immovable borders when encountering the world, and maintaining rigid defense mechanisms.
The statesman is an exceptional figure who owes his existence to a fortunate coincidence of subjective disposition and objective opportunity. Winston Churchill would never have become Winston Churchill without World War II, Willy Brandt would not have been Willy Brandt without the leeway offered by “peaceful coexistence,” and Nelson Mandela would not have been Nelson Mandela without the long wave of decolonialization. But without Churchill, World War II would have taken a different course, without Brandt, there would have been no Ostpolitik, and without Mandela, South Africa would be a different place.
The statesman resonates with his electors not because he confirms the imperatives and prohibitions of their self-image, but because, on the contrary, he believes the boundaries that confine and define individuals can be overcome. His rhetoric is directed at the despondent I who is addressed as part of the we. And his message is “We will resist, even if it takes blood, sweat, and tears!” or “We will not perish if we admit our guilt!” or “If you fall, you can stand up again!”
The statesman exemplifies an inner sovereignty that has been formed through opposition and defeat. This is the source of his counterpoint to doomsday sentiments, assumptions of inevitability, and blockade mentalities. The passion of resentment and temptations of dormancy are pitted against a belief in the openness of the future. Nothing has to stay the way it is; we can give something up in order to gain something else; we can become different by uniting with others and creating a new framework together.
The demand for self-transcendence is what causes the relationship between the statesman and the people to be characterized by tensions and contradictions. This relationship is not geared toward the preservation of what people already have or the disinhibition of their desires. Instead, it aims to expand and enrich the life possibilities and potential experiences of citizens in and through politics. As the one who opens the door and leads the way, the statesman takes on the spiritual role of presenting fear as something that can be controlled by loosening one’s inner shackles and opening up social boundaries.
This is why rejection and affection, disparagement and gratitude toward the statesman are often so close together in the public’s sentiments. While the ordinary officeholder can count on the unexcited support of wide swathes of the population whose fears she soothes, the statesman faces passionate opposition as well as passionate devotion.
His followers will praise his unfamiliarity with economics and overlook his clumsy administration for as long as they believe these traits are the prerequisite for his power in a crisis. But once the waters have calmed again and everyday problems reappear, then the statesman will have fulfilled his purpose and his tenure will usually come to an inglorious end.
It is as if the people who felt understood and supported by the statesman in a time of resistance and change then want to take revenge on the person they had relied upon in their weakness and timidity. When the tension born of ambivalence between the statesman and his people abates, the once so ardent relationship suddenly evaporates into nothing. The statesman will lose the next election and go down in history for it.
We, the public, apparently can’t get enough of such stories. It is revealing that political themes which are adopted for the purposes of presenting dubious characters, unfathomable passions, and complex learning processes enjoy enduring popularity in movies and, now more than ever before, in television shows. We need only think of Kevin Spacey as Francis Underwood in the American series House of Cards, or Sidse Babett Knudsen as Birgitte Nyborg in Borgen from Denmark. The great themes here are power, envy, sex, and prestige. These shows revolve around techniques of self-assertion, ways of concealing motives, and methods of calculating effectiveness in murky situations within multi-level worlds. Along with champions of self-esteem and masters of intrigue, we encounter stubborn, ignorant, and pathetic characters who try to come to terms with their lifelong fears, lifelong lies, and lifelong trembling. Power can apparently be dramatized in a more instructive and enthralling way in the world of politics than in that of economics or sports. The questions addressed for our entertainment are: Who rules us? Who do we follow? What do we believe?
This observation from the factory of mass media is confirmed by the sociology of celebrity.11 The top spots on the celebrity scale are occupied not by figures from the world of entertainment or sports, or by the rich with their business successes and social projects; no, the uncontested leaders by a wide margin are the politicians who are considered to be the leaders of a country’s politics – and out in front are the respective holders of the highest and most important public office.
Nothing interests the people on a talk show more than what the American president, the French president, or the German chancellor have to say about their motivations, convictions, and goals. Even former government leaders are invited to attend and speak at events for a great deal of money, and their mere physical presence is often more important than what they have to say about the state of the world. We want to know their aspirations and feelings so we can find out something about ourselves.