“Fear is
arguably the most sinister of demons nesting in the opens societies of our
time. But it is the insecurity of the present and uncertainty about the future
that hatch and breed the most awesome and least bearable of our fears. That
insecurity and uncertainty, in its turn, is born of the sense of impotence: we
seem to be no longer in control, whether individually, severally or
collectively –and to make things still worse, we lack the tools that could
elevate politics to the level where power has already settled, and so enable us
to recover and retake control over the forces that shape our shaped condition
while determining the range of our possibilities and the limits to our freedom
to choose: control which has now slipped or has been torn out of our hands. The
demon of fear will not be exorcised until we find (or more precisely construct) such tools.”
-Zygmunt Bauman,
“Uncertainty and Other Liquid-Modern Fears”, in Jiri Priban, Liquid Society and Its Law (2007), page
36.
