Baruch de Spinoza, the great 17th century philosopher, wrote that the two basic human emotions (or “affections”, as he called them) are fear and hope, and he suggested that a balance needs to be struck between the two, because fear unmingled with hope leads to despair and hope unmingled with fear can lead to destructive self-confidence. This very idea can be applied to contemporary societies, especially at a time when, what with cyberspace, instant interpersonal digital communications, the massification of industrial entertainment and mass customization of commercial and political microtargeting, collective sentiment is becoming more and more “like” individual sentiments, even if it is still made up of selective aggregates. That is why identification with what you hear or read is so immediate these days (“it is what I think” – even if you have never really thought about “it” before), as is also the case with loathing (“I knew I had reasons to hate it” – even if you have never really hated “it” before). Thus, collective sentiment easily becomes an invented memory, somewhere in the future of the past of individuals. The only reason this has become possible, of course, is that, in the absence of any alternative, the degradation of the material conditions of life makes you vulnerable to reassuring ratifications of the status quo.
Once we convert hope and fear into collective sentiment, we come to the conclusion that there may never have been such an unequal global distribution of fear and hope. The vast majority of the world’s population live in fear – fear of hunger, war, violence, disease, employers, job loss or the likelihood of never finding a job, fear of the next drought or the next flood. Almost invariably, that fear is experienced without the least bit of hope that something can be done to make things better. In contrast, a tiny portion of the world’s population lives in such an excess of hope that they seem utterly devoid of fear. They are not afraid of any enemies because they deem the latter to be either destroyed or disarmed; they are not afraid of the uncertainties of the future because they are well insured against every possible risk; they are not afraid of the uncertainties at home because they can move to any other country or continent at any moment (and are even looking into the possibility of occupying other planets); they are not afraid of violence because they have security experts at their service, along with sophisticated alarm systems, electrified walls and private armies.
The global social division of fear and hope is so unequal that a number of phenomena that used to be unthinkable less than thirty years ago now strike us as being the ordinary features of a new normal. Workers “accept” being more and more exploited through labor, with no rights whatsoever; young entrepreneurs “confuse” autonomy with self-enslavement; racialized populations are confronted with racist prejudices, often on the part of supposed non-racists; women and LGBTQ people continue to be the victims of gender-based violence, notwithstanding all the achievements of feminist and anti-homophobic movements; and non-believers as well as believers of the “wrong” religions are the victims of the worst forms of fundamentalism. At the political level, democracy as the rule of the many for the benefit of the many tends to be turned into rule of the few for the benefit of the few; democratic normalcy allows itself to be infiltrated by the fascist-leaning State of exception, at the same time that the judicial system, understood to be the empire of the law for the protection of the weak against the arbitrary power of the strong, gradually turns into a legal war waged by the powerful against the oppressed and by the fascists against the democrats.
