When they feel the panic rising within them, chances are they repeat some inner mantra along the following lines: your anxiety does not reflect reality. It may be how you feel, but it doesn't tell you anything about the outside world. The mere fact that you are scared does not mean you are actually in danger.
This leads to a habit of thought in which one comes to regard one's fears as nearly always exaggerated. They are out of proportion to the actual risk. If you are afraid of flying, for instance, you are able to recognize that your terror of crashing bears no relation to the actual likelihood of such an accident taking place.
As this becomes more and more a part of one's inner emotional habitus, one starts to never be afraid of much of anything. Any alarm that comes to one from the outside world is interpreted to be most likely a false one. It is just one's anxiety playing tricks again, one assumes. It is heavy-handed "catastrophizing." It is not real.
The problem is, however, that catastrophes actually do happen. And there is no reason why they cannot happen to us. Have we deprived ourselves of the ability to spot the curveballs history throws at us, therefore, if we dismiss all fears as exaggerated?
Do we lose something important if we never regard disaster as a live possibility? Will we be unable to recognize catastrophe for what it is, when it actually does decide to show up? Perhaps, my dears, as D.H. Lawrence once wrote, nihil will come along and hit you on the head.
There is a passage in one of Robert Jay Lifton's books that poses a similar difficulty. He is analyzing a certain kind of paranoiac delusion that leads to destructive behavior (in some instances—to mass murder̦—Lifton was discussing terrorist cults like Aum Shinrikyo in the book in question).
To the person suffering from this particular delusion, it becomes impossible to distinguish between their own mortality and that of others. Because the universe they know exists in their own mind, they confuse their personal death with the demise of the cosmos. They assume that if they perish, the world perishes with them.
The problem, Lifton notes, is that in the age of nuclear weapons, the possibility of the world's destruction is no longer so easily dismissed as a mere phantasm of the troubled mind. In creating ultimate weapons, our species has brought apocalypse out of the realm of prophetic vision or paranoiac misapprehension into that of the distinctly possible.
Of course, with the Cold War behind us, Lifton's sense of impending catastrophe is a little hard for us now to recapture (even though the "ultimate weapons" are still very much among us, and just as deadly and potentially world-ending as they ever were). We may even imagine that the good doctor had himself succumbed to a form of paranoia.
Those of us who grew up without the constant "chafe and jar/of nuclear war" (to borrow Robert Lowell's phrase) find it hard to imagine that anyone ever took the possibility of nuclear annihilation entirely seriously. It obviously didn't happen. So we assume it couldn't have happened.
Everything turned out fine, we think. What were they all so worried about?
So it always is with regard to the fait accompli of history. Once something is in the past, it has become unalterable, and therefore we deny to it any possible contingency in the moment. We expect people in the past to have responded exclusively to what did happen. We forget entirely that, as events were unfolding, they also had to confront each day the possibility of what could happen.
There is a line in Melville's novella Billy Budd, Sailor, that speaks well to this phenomenon. In thinking back to the era of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, Melville bids us recall the fact that people living through these events did not yet know what their final consummation would be:
"That era appears measurably clear to us who look back at it, and but read of it. But to the grandfathers of us graybeards, the more thoughtful of them, the genius of it presented an aspect like that of Camoëns' Spirit of the Cape, an eclipsing menace mysterious and prodigious. Not America was exempt from apprehension. At the height of Napoleon's unexampled conquests, there were Americans who had fought at Bunker Hill who looked forward to the possibility that the Atlantic might prove no barrier against the ultimate schemes of this French upstart from the revolutionary chaos who seemed in act of fulfilling judgement prefigured in the Apocalypse."
Much the same is true of our own era. Quite apart from the continued existence of nuclear weapons and the possibility of their use on a mass scale, we are in the midst of disturbing transformations whose end result we cannot foresee.
In such a moment, the traditional dividing lines between delusion and reality break down. It becomes all the harder to say what is mere paranoia, and what it an accurate or at least plausible projection into the future.
Recent events have forced many of us to take seriously the possible breakdown of our social and political institutions, which we once thought all but eternal. Will these fears be justified?
I, for one, in my heart, still can't quite see it as plausible that the U.S. president will simply refuse to accept the results of an election and cling to power, dismantling our democratic institutions and asserting authoritarian rule.
So too, it seems absurd to me to think that the COVID-19 crisis might last for years, proving impossible to contain or inoculate against, and leading to economic depression and mass death on a global scale.
Yet, why should I regard these things as so unlikely? History is replete with examples of political orders that have broken down and vanished—even ones that had previously lasted for centuries. Economies have crumbled and prevailing standards of value proved meaningless. Why should I think that it could never possibly happen to me? To us?
As D.H. Lawrence aptly put it—to quote once again his poem on the "Latter-Day Sinners": Why should the deluge wait while these young gentry go on eating good dinners for fifty more long years? Why should our Latter-Day sinners expect such a long smooth run for their very paltry little bit of money?
So what is irrational fear, and what is truth? If this coming November election proceeds as planned, if Trump is voted out and—with however much grumbling—leaves office, if the economy manages to right itself from its current downward spiral—then all of this will be seen by future generations as paranoid delusion. Or at the very least as overdone.
But we lack the benefit of their view. We are like Melville's characters living through the Age of Revolution and the Napoleonic Empire. We don't know where these events are taking us. We have no standard of comparison. Nothing like this has ever happened in the past, and so we cannot judge what its outcome will be.
I don't think the U.S. president will dismantle democratic institutions. Because it's never happened before. But then: we've never had a president like this one before.
I don't think the economy will suffer a catastrophic "double-dip" from the COVID-19 recession, leading to a debt crisis on top of the contraction and wiping out financial institutions. But then, we've never had a global crisis exactly like this one before, posing such a massive threat of a coordinated global contraction in economic activity.
These things are not past history to us. They are our present reality. And so we are faced with the terrible contingency of events, rather than the hypostatized necessity that hindsight is so ready to impute.
Why shouldn't the worst happen, therefore? Why should the deluge wait another fifty long years? We are like Lifton, confronting the paranoiac who dreads the coming end of the world. And, just like Lifton, we are unable to tell that suffering soul that their fears are wholly unreasonable. We are struggling to sort out in our own mind what are the limits of the possible.
We are living in an age of pandemic and resurgent authoritarianism. Things we thought to be unthinkable have already come to pass. How many more will come?
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