Corporate DispatchPro BY FABIO JAMES PETANI AND MANLIO GRAZIANO VIA REUTERS
A geopolitical reading of fear In his 2009 book The Geopolitics of Emotion, Dominique Moïsi divided the world into three emotional regions: the territory of hope (emergent countries), the territory of humiliation (the world of Islam), and the territory of fear (the old powers, also known as “the West”). A lot has changed since 2009. According to Moïsi, the territory of fear is inhabited by those “who are apprehensive about the present and expect the future to become even more dangerous”. Perhaps today we should realize that fear has conquered the world. Otherwise put, we live in a time, which is spatially organized by globalized fear, and this, politically speaking, is not a good omen. The old powers remain the pioneers, so to speak, of this globalized emotion. The concern for the present and the conviction that the future may only get worse have been materializing for decades now in two areas of mass behavior, the nature of which is intrinsically antisocial: the explosion of public expenditure (and debt), and the drop in birth rates. The connection is that when no good is expected to come from the future, it is better to spend everything immediately, even what you do not have. Similarly, it is better not to have children, who would be plagued by the burden of debts developed with such nonchalance. In the territory of fear, the cry of “every man for himself” echoes in sinister ways. A few days after the arrival of the pandemic in France, President Emmanuel Macron qualified the “return of fear” as an opportunity to rediscover solidarity and “human values”.Yet nature and history suggest otherwise: rarely does fear allow us to reconnect with “human values”. To take refuge from danger is human only because it is a spontaneous reaction of organisms,
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