1. Wild in the Streets: The Political Economy of Threats and the Production of Fear.
- Author
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Lipschutz, Ronnie D. and Turcotte, Heather
- Subjects
- *
ECONOMICS , *FEAR , *THREATS , *POWER (Social sciences) , *COMPETITION (Biology) , *AMERICANS , *TERRORISM - Abstract
Fear is not, contrary to Thomas Hobbes, inherent to human nature. Fear must be taught, it must be learned, it must be produced. How else are we to know who is friend and who is foe, whom we are and are not? Still, the production of fear is no easy matter, and on it rests much more than individual survival. On fear rests authority. On fear rests economy. On fear rests power. In this paper, we explore how fear is produced through a political economy of threats and sold to the American public. We do not contend that there are no hazards in life, some of them quite deadly, or that people’s malevolent feelings and intentions are imaginary. We do claim, however, that threats have neither content nor significance until they are invested with meaning that draws on both the familiar and the alien. There are many threats, but turning them into a fear that can be consumed amounts to more than dissemination of intelligence or a calculation of risk. We propose that, only through a careful examination of the ways language, social relations, and material things are combined into a finished package of danger can the production of fear be understood not as warning but as the creation of terrified and terrorized populations seeking protection from the very state that produces those fears. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2004