Many people think that we live in an age of fear. We do not. We live in an age of anxiety. Certainly, there are any number of things to be fearful of nowadays. There's COVID, of course. There's political uncertainty. There's terrorism. There's government overreach. There's global warming. There's housing costs. There's poverty. There's food insecurity. The list goes on.
I do not deny that people today live in fear, or that sometimes this fear can be excessive. But yet, I do not think fear is the predominant emotion of our age. That title goes to anxiety.
What is the difference between fear and anxiety? The best explanation I have ever read comes from a book about existentialism-- the title and author of which I have unfortunately forgotten--which I read some 12 years ago. Here was the explanation. Fear is walking along the edge of a cliff afraid you might fall off. Angst, or anxiety, is walking along the edge of a cliff afraid you might jump off.
Note the distinction.
Fear is fundamentally a reaction to outside forces that we do not control. Fear is a response to external danger. This danger might attack us, or befall us. It might "come for" us. We fear what might happen to us or our loved ones. Look at the list I wrote at the beginning of this essay. Note that all those items I mentioned are external threats.
Anxiety, on the other hand, is a reaction to an internal threat. We get anxious when we believe we will create our own downfall. People have anxiety before a test because if they fail, there is a real sense in which they caused their own failure. We get anxious before a performance because a mistake is tantamount to giving other people the opportunity to mock us due to our failure. We feel responsible for the outcome. Anxiety is a response to internal danger. Anxiety is fear of what we might bring upon ourselves.
A person confronting death at the hands of another lives in fear. A person confronting death at his or her own hands lives in anxiety. We are fearful of accidents. We are anxious of mistakes.
I read recently (in an article in the May 2020 Atlantic) that people develop phobias in early to mid childhood, like fear of snakes, fear of spiders, fear of heights, etc. But they begin to develop anxiety around adolescence. This makes perfect sense. Phobias are reactions to external objects, and children who rely heavily on external sources of support and care will react to negative external experienced. In adolescence, however, these children confront a new keen self-awareness, the loss of control over their own bodily development. They grow into bodies that they do not understand and yet must identify with. Adolescence is a period where children are threatened by themselves, and therefore must be a period of anxiety.
And in case you think my whole theory of anxiety is armchair psychology, you're wrong. This is armchair and google psychology. Look at what the top result on google said when I asked it what the difference was between fear and anxiety. "Anxiety is a generalized response to an unknown threat or internal conflict, whereas fear is focused on known external danger." (Emphasis added) Boom! Take that doubters!
Now that I have proven my distinction beyond the need for any further googling, let's continue. Why do I say we live in an age of anxiety and not fear? One short, but unsatisfactory answer, would be to say that we live in an age of egotism and narcissism. We're obsessed with self-image, and so we are always concerned for presentation, which is a matter of anxiety.
While this may be true in itself, I do not think it is complete. Egotism is a problem, but I think it leaves out all the exogenous forces that are acting upon us to increase our anxiety. I believe we actually live in an age of anxiety because we have been molded into decision-makers and test-takers. We've lost faith the our institutions. Indeed, our institutions have lost our trust. Many of us feel a weight of responsibility not just for our own decisions but for the decisions of all humanity,
Let me give an example. Fox News used to have a slogan they used mostly on radio broadcasts. The slogan was, "we report, you decide." Now, on the surface, this seems like a great moto. News media shouldn't be telling people what to believe, should they? But stop and think for a second about the added pressure this places on the individual consumer. The subtle message is this: you are responsible for what you believe, even though we just told you what to believe. Do you see the imbalance?
The whole point of the news is to tell you what the world is like. You can't be everywhere. You can't investigate everything. You don't have resources and tools at your disposal. You depend on external actors to bring you your information. But right at that moment that you need the most assistance, that "moment of truth" if you will, that moment when you determine the facts--it is precisely at this moment that the news agency withdraws and disavows all responsibility. You decide! Sure, we just gave you our version of events, but your belief is your responsibility.
I use Fox News because this was their slogan, but the same applies to any other news organization. The airwaves are flooded with information, usually of the contradictory variety. It is nearly taken for granted now that our news agencies are as dishonest as our politicians. And as these institutions disavow the decision making processes of determining the facts, they whisper into your ear, "You decide." The fear of false information is now transformed into the anxiety of you believing false information. You are forced to take an active role, and therefore you are forced to accept personal blame when you believe in false information.
Neil Postman referred to our age as an age of information glut, a time when we have so much information thrown at us that we have no way of sorting it out, and yet we are told that we must sort it out. And we sort it out with MORE INFORMATION! (See Postman's book Technopoly, chapter 4)
As individuals, we are continually placed in the exam room. "Come to the right conclusion!" we are told. And if we are wrong, if we do not reach the right conclusion, the problem is with us. If you can't synthesize the information, that's your problem. The result of all this is anxiety. The individual is continually told to confront the possibility that they might be broken. They might be wrong. They might fail to reach the right conclusion amid the information glut.
In previous epochs, philosophers made it a note that individuals should not have to solve all of society's problems themselves. John Stuart Mill was confronted with the question of whether his utilitarian calculus made moral life impossible since an individual would need to do an intense moral analysis for every action they took. Mill's answer was to say that we have societal norms for precisely this reason. We follow our norms in our day to day lives, reserving out moral judgment for cases of improvement, not reinvention. "[T]here has been ample time [to form a moral code], namely, the whole past duration of the human species." (See Utilitarianism, Chapter II)
And yet, moral codes, no less the news trustworthiness, are but one more item we are asked to continually reconsider. Moral traditions are important not because the past contained some kind of eternal moral truth, nor because the past moral traditions were even good. They are important because these moral traditions took moral weight off the individual. When matters are settled, so also settles our anxiety. Today, the moral landscape is constantly shifting. As soon as one grasps the current "politically correct" moral language, it is immediately made obsolete. With bureaucratic precision a new politically correct language is promulgated.
The real danger of a postmodern age isn't degeneracy; it's intense anxiety. Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek has a wonderful example he uses to illustrate today's predicament. In the past, when the father told his daughter they were going to visit grandma, he'd say, "Look, I don't care whether you like grandma or not. You're going to visit her." Today, however, the postmodern father says to his daughter, "You don't have to visit grandma. Just know that she loves you very much and will be very disappointed if you don't visit." (See this interview from 25:23 to 28:04)
This example from Zizek perfectly illustrates the difference between fear and anxiety. In the past, the daughter feared the father, but she was never forced to hold an opinion about her grandma. Today, the father does not wield fear, but the daughter is made to feel anxiety over the moral failure of not caring about her grandma. As Zizek puts it, what masquerades as a new form of freedom is in fact a new form of anxiety.
Now do you see how "we report, you decide" is a nefarious motto? What appears to be offered as a form of autonomy is in fact a new form of authority. The individual, who has no means of investigating the facts, is told it is their responsibility to determine the facts; while the new agency, which has the investigatory means, divests itself of responsibility.
Which brings us to politics. Since COVID hit us early this year, I've heard all sorts of people telling us "Don't live in fear," as though COVID were something we were afraid of. In fact, people are not living in fear at all. They are living in anxiety, because they sense that COVID is something that we can control, and therefore if it spreads, that's on us. That's our responsibility. And now that COVID is taking over 3,000 lives every day in America alone, that sense that this is our fault is only growing.
I cannot help but feel that the overwhelming sentiment of our age has been misdiagnosed. We are living in anxiety, not fear. But why is this important? Well, let's just consider this one item. Anxiety is closely tied to responsibility, while fear is not. The anxious person senses they are the cause of their own success or failures. This responsibility can feel crippling and debilitating, but it can also be intense and motivating. On the other hand, the person who lives in fear often neglects the nature of their own responsibility. This relationship to responsibility speaks to the current age. Far from degeneracy or idleness, many people of our time feel immense responsibility, and recognizing this in other people might just be the difference between finding mutual opportunities to work together or dismissing one another and exacerbating the current political rifts in society.
I want to end this on a personal note. I am a naturally anxious person. I have sensed the growing anxiety in public discourse, and I fear it is getting worse. (See what I did there?) Am I wrong about any of this? Sometimes I wonder whether or not I am projecting my own experience onto society at large, but how would I know unless I first overcame my own anxiety and just put this out there? After all, the problem with anxiety is not that things are out of our control. The problem with anxiety is precisely that these decisions are in our control. Learning to live with that anxiety means, in some sense, learning to live with the constant risk of making a terrible mistake.
Be kind to your neighbor who disagrees with you. Chances are, they feel the weight of responsibility too.
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