A Taxonomy of Fear

In the 2018 book The Coddling of the American Mind, Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff defined safetyism as “a culture or belief system in which safety has become a sacred value, which means that people are unwilling to make trade-offs demanded by other practical and moral concerns.”15

in the fascist imagination, there must be a victim to be protected and an invasive enemy on the attack: if young people are adopting beliefs in multiculturalism, gender fluidity, and socialism, then someone must be forcing these ideas on their innocence.

Furcht und die Politik der Verletzlichkeit

Right from the beginning, I noticed that many people avoided the topic if it was approached logically and directly (e.g., with hard data). I observed built-in resistance in our cognitive and affective circuits that rendered questioning modernity counterintuitive and uncomfortable. This in turn generated defensive responses when people were prompted

By killing a handful of people the terrorists cause millions to fear for their lives. In order to calm these fears, governments react to the theater of terror with a show of security, orchestrating immense displays of force such as the persecution of entire populations or the invasion of foreign countries. In most cases, this overreaction to terror