the little death that brings total obliteration

On the other hand, a state with no power to cause fear would be, well, a wimp of a state. A state with the exclusive power to incite mass fear would be an ugly sight. The tyrants of the 20 th Century – Stalin, Hitler, Mao, and their many, many imitators - taught us that. Surely, there needs to be some limit on the state’s ability to use the instruments of fear to impress its will upon us. To contemporary ears, the Hobbesian state is bound to sound a shade too tyrannical - despite the fact that its legitimacy rests on voluntary submission to the will of the sovereign. Cross up the state and you’re really in trouble. We charge it with the responsibility of keeping order amongst us. And we give it enough power to enforce that responsibility. Instead of a thousand little cockroaches constantly nipping at each other, by entering into civil society we all surrender power to the big kahuna of the state. But one could reasonably wonder about the state itself? Shouldn’t we now fear it? Hobbes's answer is that of course we should. Now Hobbes thought that all power should be concentrated into the hands of the state so that we no longer have to fear each other. So fear is a good thing because it is the glue that binds people together. And he argues that to end this war, we enter into civil society and surrender all power - all power to invoke fear – to the state. He claimed that in the state of nature human life is “solitary, nasty, brutish, and short” because everyone is at war with everyone else.

That's at any rate what the philosopher Thomas Hobbes - one of the founding fathers of the social contract tradition - seemed to think. It could even be said that society itself is founded on fear. For example, when we fear the consequences of global warming and try, as a consequence, to prevent it from happening, our fear has motivated us to do something good. And fear sometimes leads us to do the right thing. We by no means mean to suggest, though, that all political uses of fear are illegitimate. We want to explore the ways in which politicians stoke our fears in order to mobilize us to action, stifle dissent, and justify all sorts of repressive policies. More particularly, it's about the use and abuse of fear as a political tool. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.

And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.

The little death that brings total obliteration