The politics of fear

THIS SUMMER IS BEING HARD. There is a sense of collective depression palpable in the environment in view of the increase in global uncertainty, populist drift and the inability of our leaders to face the challenges we have around the corner. Fear is perhaps the most destructive feeling that human beings harbor; be it the fear of what a future that we intuit worse than the present will bring us, the fear of those who are different from us, the fear of losing our identity, our work or the things that are important to us. And everything is changing so fast that it's hard not to be afraid of something ; If the elderly feel fear in a world that they no longer recognize and find hostile, young people also fear the precariousness, lack of stability or uprooting that often accompanies the opportunities offered by globalization. We must understand well the capacity for destruction that fears the most valuable we have, what Barack Obama called "the audacity of hope" in the book with the same title.

The problem is that collective fear is tremendously effective in the hands of demagogue and unscrupulous leaders, whether it is a search for a scapegoat to blame for the complex problems of modern societies that they are unable to solve or transform political adversaries in irreconcilable enemies with whom it is not possible to discuss anything or reach any agreement. And this happens precisely when it is more necessary than ever to reach pacts and transversal solutions, precisely because of the complexity of the problems and because they affect all citizens, who have chosen our representatives precisely so that, from different sensibilities, they face them. It is impossible for a single leader to resolve issues that transcend not only political parties but even states . But that is precisely what those new strong men who use our fears and promise us security and a return to a world that no longer exists sell us.

In this way the very foundations of democracy are undermined, which requires starting from the basis of the recognition that the political adversary also seeks - and in good faith - solutions to collective problems, and that therefore an alternation in power is not no catastrophe, nor attempt against the survival of the State or society. Moreover, reality shows us that the solutions or proposals of political competitors can be very similar, especially when they have a technical and / or empirical foundation. But the polarization leads to their being discarded simply because they do not come from the co-religionists or because of the supposed political cost of coinciding with the adversary on important issues. We leave the land paid for populists of all types and conditions and battered the rules of the democratic game.

But we must also recognize that our fears do not appear out of nowhere ; The real problems are there, whether it's job precariousness, rental prices, inequality, global warming or any other we can choose. What happens is that instead of confronting them with rigor and solvency, with rationality and with the greatest possible consensus, the politician demagogue, nationalist, illiberal, populist (all labels can be applied because they usually coincide) simply limits itself to azuzar the most basic passions of the electorate with the essential collaboration of equally unscrupulous media or social networks, which play a fundamental role in the propagation of hoaxes and in the excitement of our worst instincts.

Recall that it is no accident that words and speeches that criminalize or despise or present as a threat to certain groups are followed by violent actions against them . The role of hate radio , for example, in the Rwandan genocide is well known . Something similar happens when the speeches that foster fear come from political leaders or people with power, from communicators or simply from people who can be considered as referents, as happens with teachers in relation to their students. Growing the seed of hate and fear takes time but let's not fool ourselves; History teaches us that it always ends up fruiting . That is why it is so important to detect and identify those responsible as soon as possible. And protect yourself.

To protect ourselves we need to know the world better and to know ourselves better. In the first place, to handle the empirical evidence, that is, the data that guarantee that today we live in general more and better than at any other stage of Humanity and that we have an impressive accumulated wealth, as Hans Rosling and his co-authors remind us in their Factfulness book. Secondly, we cannot forget our cognitive biases that are responsible for many of our irrational behaviors. We must recognize that we have brains designed for a very different and much more insecure life than we now have in modern and civilized societies. Being afraid all the time and always being alert to potential predators was a guarantee of survival in the savannah; although in the end the danger did not materialize it was always more advisable to sin by excess than by default of prudence. Perhaps now the fears we suffer in our societies are not so useful . In short, it is important to know how our brains work, and that their main function is to keep us alive, not to reach the truth or, more modestly, to understand reality. Not knowing how some characteristic biases of our species work makes us extremely vulnerable to populist, catastrophic or directly false political discourses.

But, thirdly, we need to reinvigorate our institutions and our liberal democracies that are the ones that can best defend us against the siren songs of barbarism that hides behind so many populist speeches of our day, although they are pronounced by people educated in elite institutions and from respectable parties. To begin, we should return their role as places suitable for debate and quiet and reasoned public conversation. Starting with the political leaders and ending with the citizens, we must have public discussions again in the institutions that have been designed for that, starting with the Parliaments . Our democracy has to be, today more than ever, a deliberative democracy where all, political representatives, experts and ordinary citizens try to solve the problems caused by our collective fears.

Judith Shklar said in her essay The liberalism of fear that what liberalism intends is precisely that every person can take without fear and without privilege the possible effective decisions in all possible aspects of his life as long as he does not prevent the other Adult person do the same. It also reminds us that we have to fear power and that the best way to lose its threatening nature is to make it impersonal (the rule of law) to limit and disperse it (through checks and balances ). These are the great achievements of liberalism as political science or science of institutions.

So we need more than ever our liberal democracies with their institutional, legal and citizen networks that we must strengthen so that they are able to protect us from parties and leaders willing to play Russian roulette with our fears and anguishes. At the national level, we hope that a party like Vox with whose votes will be governed after being invested yesterday Díaz Ayuso the Community of Madrid does not get carried away by the example of formations such as the Salvini League . And it is that fear is incompatible with freedom.

Elisa de la Nuez is a State lawyer, co-editor of Is there a right? and member of the editorial board of EL MUNDO.

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