我不应该害怕。恐惧是心灵杀手。恐惧是带来彻底毁灭的小死亡。我要面对我的恐惧。我要让它从我身上过去，从我身上过去。当它过去时，我将用心灵之眼看到它的道路。有恐惧的地方就会一无所有。只有我能留下来。

This weeks episode is about fear. More particularly, it's about the use and abuse of fear as a political tool. 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. We by no means mean to suggest, though, that all political uses of fear are illegitimate. Some things are worth fearing. And fear sometimes leads us to do the right thing. 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.

It could even be said that society itself is founded on fear. That's at any rate what the philosopher Thomas Hobbes - one of the founding fathers of the social contract tradition - seemed to think. He claimed that in the state of nature human life is “solitary, nasty, brutish, and short” because everyone is at war with everyone else. 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. So fear is a good thing because it is the glue that binds people together.

霍布斯认为所有的权力都应该集中到国家手中这样我们就不用再害怕彼此了。但人们有理由怀疑国家本身?我们现在不应该害怕吗?霍布斯的回答是，我们当然应该。在某种程度上，这就是重点。而不是一千只小蟑螂不断地互相咬，通过进入公民社会，我们都把权力交给了国家的大kahuna。我们让它负责维护我们之间的秩序。我们赋予它足够的权力来执行这一责任。穿过这个州，你就真的有麻烦了。

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. Surely, there needs to be some limit on the state’s ability to use the instruments of fear to impress its will upon us. Otherwise, the state will just run amok. The tyrants of the 20^thCentury – Stalin, Hitler, Mao, and their many, many imitators -- taught us that. A state with the exclusive power to incite mass fear would be an ugly sight. On the other hand, a state with no power to cause fear would be, well, a wimp of a state. What would the law be without the backing of force? What would a state’s inherent right of self-defense amount to without a kick-butt army to back up that right.

But despite the fact that a state that could not invoke fear in friend and foe would hardly deserve to be called a state, it's hard to deny the downside cost of the constant use of fear as an instrument of politics. It’s because of overblown fear-mongering, one suspects, that we in California are blessed with things like three-strikes and you’re out – which, as far as we can see is helping to bankrupt our state, without doing a great deal to diminish crime. When social problems are framed in ways that are intended to maximize our fear, we’re liable to take actions that are not at all proportional to the problem. Think of the entire war on drugs. It’s turned us into the world’s biggest prison house, without doing much to solve our drug problem.

So maybe Frank Herbert had it right. Maybe fear really is the mind killer. A mind seized with fear makes us do all sorts of crazy things, often way out of proportion to the danger posed by the object of our fear. Which leads us to the question, just what role should fear play in our political discourse? How do we distinguish legitimate from illegitimate appeals to fear? Could there be a politics base more on hope than on fear?

我们很想知道你的想法。