Drawing on a statement of David L. Altheide’s, Zygmunt Bauman writes that “it is not fear of danger “that is most critical, but rather what this fear can expand into, what it can become… Social life changes when people live behind walls, hire guards, drive armoured vehicles… carry mace and handguns, and take martial arts classes. The problem is that these activities reaffirm and help produce a senes of disorder that our actions perpetuate.”” (quoting David L. Altheide, p.132)
Bauman then takes this discussion further: “Fears prompt us to take defensive action, and taking defensive action gives immediacy, tangibility and credibility to the genuine [-p.133] or putative threats from which the fears are presumed to emanate. It is our response to anxiety that recasts sombre premonition as daily reality, giving a flesh-and-blood body to a spectre. Fear takes root in our motives and purposes, settles in our actions and saturates our daily routines; if it hardly needs any further stimuli from outside, it is because the actions it prompts day in, day out supply all the motivation, all the justification and all the energy required to keep it alive, branching out and blossoming.” (pp.132-133))
I liked these statements… and couldn’t help thinking or Richelle Mead’s Vampire Academy series…
Ref: (italics in original; emphases in blue bold, mine) Zygmunt Bauman (2006) Liquid Fear. Polity Press: Cambridge, UK
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