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May 17, 2006
This post picks up on an earlier post about Why Spinoza Today? Or, "A Strategy of Anti-Fear" [Rethinking Marxism Vol 17, No 4, October, 2005]. In this article Hasana Sharp says:
The unprecedented increase in emergency powers since 9/11 is justified, according to an astute analysis by William E. Scheuerman, on the basis that the executive power must be freed from the constraints of the deliberative process in order to respond as quickly as possible to a "physical threat" upon the vulnerable body of the polis ['Rethinking crisis government', Constellations, 9 (4): pp. 492/505, 2002, p.496]. The political body is imagined according to a model of an organic, human body whose penetration must be forestalled and whose injury must be treated. The treatment of the injury to a political body is not as self-evident, however, as the medical treatment of a wound or broken leg. Moreover, the path to healing requires more than an immediate counterattack upon some other physicopolitical entity....The cultivation of fear and anxiety, however, is a much easier way to instill order.
Fear is an economic affect, in the short run. Fear and threats are a highly effective way to constitute political order.,
We have seen that with conservatives, such as Bush and Howard, rule their polities through fear and threats in the context of the war on terror.
Sharp then adds Spinoza argues that a society within the grips of the sad passions means that the social body's power to think and act is weakened, and the actions that spring from them often produce more sadness rather than less, whilst such passions deeply estrange human beings from each other. Insofar as they are assailed by hate and fear, they are enemies. At its limit, such fear provokes a situation of pervasive civil war. People, then, are most fearful to one another when they are themselves most filled with fear. Thus, the "fear of the masses," as out, always refers both to the fear that those in power have of the masses and the fear that the masses themselves exhibit and suffer.
Because the state is always dependent upon its own constituents for its strength and power it has often relied upon threats, violence, and coercion to maintain its citizens in fearful obedience. Thus, the state deploys the strategy of displacing its own fear of the masses onto the masses themselves. Historically, those who came to power motivated the subjects to rebel, precisely by animating their fear and hatred. Once established, the state can then encourage collective fear of external enemies as well as state power in order to overcome the situation of civil war that brought about revolution in the first place. This can, according to Spinoza, achieve temporary order and obedience.
Sharp adds that Spinoza argues that:
What is important to note, then, is that fear poses the greatest threat not to one's external enemies, but to the power structure itself. The government that subjugates its citizens and produces their loyalty through fear creates not a democracy but an aggregate of highly resentful slaves...Ultimately, if a government relies overwhelmingly on the sad passions, it creates wretched conditions and an unbearable affective disposition for its constituents*/yet another way in which power gives birth to its own gravediggers.
Thus, as long as the ruling affects remain overwhelmingly sad, fearful, and productive of superstitious subjectivity,
democracy cannot be said to exist effectively. The conditions that preserve and even require tyranny include an overwhelmingly fearful mass or multitude. In other words, for as long as fear remains the ruling affect, at least one of the major causes for tyranny remains.
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I never watch the news anymore. It's nothing but depressing scary content. I have turned to the internet and more printed material where I can ignore the crap and move on to more important things. My brother is leaving for Iraq soon and I'd rather not hear Mr. Fox News tell me how many pieces of shrapnel they pulled from his body (God forbid)