Late modern westerners are afraid.
Fear of corona, fear of pandemics, climate change, crime and terror.
And although he tries obsessively to control and rationalize his fears, they keep catching up with him even in his everyday high security routine.
Manically he has woven a protective cocoon of prosperity, a healthy lifestyle, high-performance medicine and sophisticated security technologies.
People have never lived more risk-free.
Never safer.
But it doesn't help.
We do not escape fear.
It determines our personal life planning, social debates and political action.
Like flies trying to break free from a spider's web, we struggle further and further into the sticky prison of our phobias.
Associated with this is a deep narcissistic hurt.
Over the centuries we have freed ourselves step by step from the overwhelming burden of traditions and lore, role concepts and prejudices.
Always in the hope of not only becoming freer on the outside, but also on the inside.
But the freer we outwardly became, the more it became clear that limitless freedoms do not make us freer.
We therefore furiously demand more and more freedoms, but even these will not take away our fears.
On the contrary.
It almost seems as if a disastrous compensatory economy ensured that the gain in external freedoms was offset by an increase in internal fears and neuroses.
However, we grudgingly push aside the thought that the causes of these phobias could be precisely those emancipation concepts of modernity that should free us from fear.
It is a telltale feat of repression.
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