Emotions and political rhetoric: Perception of danger, group conflict and the biopolitics of fear

Introduction

In the present article I will argue that some kinds of emotional discourse in public life may be dangerous for a democratic society. Cognitive biases and heuristics lead us to identify some situations as dangerous, whether they are a real threat or not. This may lessen our ability to deal with risk regulation, and thus leave us more exposed to real dangers. Citizens often lack the highly technical knowledge that is necessary to accurately evaluate the implications of public decisions, so this makes them vulnerable to manipulation from political leaders, social entrepreneurs, or even their own governments, who might use the rhetoric of fear in order to create insecurity, reinforce the identity of a political community using exclusionary criteria (such as ethnicity), or other kinds of exploitation. The rhetoric of fear has a powerful emotional charge that must be counterbalanced by means of critical thinking and rational decision making.

In the present article I shall argue that it is important to pay attention to such manipulative practices, in the first place because they can be criticized on ethical grounds, as they may give rise to social conflict and even violence, and, in the second place, because they may distract citizens and governments from public issues that actually need to be addressed.

Firstly, I will examine the complex nature of emotions and examine both the physiological and cognitive dimension of emotion, and I will analyze the multiple ways in which emotions interact with other phenomena, such as other emotions or thoughts. I will argue that, in virtue of their cognitive nature, emotions can be influenced and directed towards certain objects, such as social groups.

I will use fear and disgust as privileged examples of how emotions are double-faced and have physiological and cognitive aspects and can be aroused in different situations and directed towards different objects. This makes them especially vulnerable to rhetorical manipulation.

Also, I will consider the heuristics and biases that lead citizens to evaluate risks wrongly, and governments to take decisions mistakenly. I will analyze how emotions can be exploited and argue that we must be aware of the implications of certain types of political discourse that are inherently threatening for democracy.

Animal and human emotion

Let us start by talking about the complexity and uniqueness of human emotion and outlining some of its features. In recent years, there has been a proliferation of studies dedicated to the neurobiological investigation of emotions in humans and animals, and several efforts have been made to shed light on the multi-faceted nature of these emotional responses. There is no doubt that we share part of our emotional repertoire with animals, as emotions were shaped by natural selection over our ancestors (Panksepp, 1998). This set of basic emotions differs depending on the author. Paul Ekman and affect program theorists claim that there are six basic emotions that we can recognize in any culture: surprise, anger, fear, sadness, joy, and disgust (Ekman, 1992; Griffiths, 1997). Robert Plutchik (1980) suggests that emotions are adaptive responses of incorporation, rejection, destruction, protection, reproduction, reintegration, orientation, and exploration. The emotions that would correspond to each response would be acceptance/trust, disgust/loathing, anger/rage, fear/terror, joy/ecstasy, sadness/grief, surprise/astonishment and expectancy/anticipation, respectively. More recently, evolutionary psychologists John Tooby and Leda Cosmides have proposed that the function of emotions is to give responses to adaptive problems. These types of responses would include anger, cooperation, sexual attraction, jealousy, aggression, parental love, friendship, romantic love, esthetics of landscape preferences, coalitional aggression, incest avoidance, disgust, predator avoidance, kinship, and family relations (Tooby & Cosmides, 2008, p. 116).

Fear is no exception and forms part of this basic and primary repertoire (in conjunction with other emotions). Some authors defend the idea that the neural circuitry related to emotions is able to process relevant information from the environment exceptionally fast, giving rise to immediate reactions in the range of milliseconds (Zajonc, 1980, 1984).

However, even if this is true, in the case of human beings emotions acquire a greater complexity by virtue of their cognitive dimension and our complex appraisal skills (Lazarus, 1991; Scherer, 2001). Our brains are much more developed than those in other animals, and this means the difference is not only quantitative but also qualitative. The way in which we evaluate the world around us cannot be understood in action-reaction terms because we have beliefs, thoughts, imagination, memories, the ability to think about the future, the capacity to understand complex causal mechanisms, and so on. The same can be said of emotions: the unique features of the human brain and the way it interacts with the environment, make human emotions a different phenomenon.

Several authors have also argued that we have a responsibility concerning our emotions, meaning that we can keep them under control, at least to a certain extent, and that we can be held accountable for our emotional reactions. For example, we usually think that anger is a reasonable reaction if someone has been seriously offended. Nevertheless, if someone reacts with extreme anger (for example, committing physical violence against others) in response to minimal offense, we would think not only that she was overreacting, but that she might have acted differently, and, that if acting differently had been in her power she would have done so.

Some authors have offered traditional philosophical arguments defending the idea that we are responsible for our emotions (Neu, 2004; Sherman, 1999). Others are trying to bring together empirical research and philosophical reasoning in order to determine to what degree we can say we are morally responsible for our actions (Levy, 2014). Nevertheless, as Jerome Neu acknowledges “while we may sometimes intentionally express our emotions, they may sometimes manifest themselves in ways seemingly not subject to our will” (2004, p. 176). So we can say that there are degrees of activity and passivity when we talk about exercising control over our emotions, in the same way that there are degrees of activity and passivity when it comes to other action tendencies. In any case, while we humans can be considered at least partially responsible and accountable for our emotions, none of this can be said about animal emotions.

There is another feature of our emotions that I would like to emphasize here. Emotion is something that occurs to individuals only. We experience them subjectively, and this experience is by no means transitive, as they take place in a particular, distinct and separate body. Nevertheless, emotions also have a public dimension. They can be expressed, communicated, and shared with others. In fact, they are promiscuously spreadable and contagious. This attribute is particularly important in regard to the study of the collective dimension of fear. As I shall argue, this characteristic turns out to convert fear into something particularly exposed to the dangers of political rhetoric.

Biological and cognitive underpinnings of fear and disgust

In accordance with the evolutionary approach that we have outlined, we can define fear as an emotional state of protection elicited by a threatening event. This process involves perceptual mechanisms that are activated automatically and immediately, in order to detect a danger and elicit a defense response. These responses can be varied and prompt us to flee (or try to avoid the threat in some other way), to fight or even to freeze.

In considering the neurophysiological mechanisms that underlie fear reactions, research in the field suggests that the amygdala plays a critical role in linking external stimuli to defense responses (LeDoux, 2003). As Joseph LeDoux points out, “with the accumulation of a great deal of empirical research, the amygdala has replaced the hypothalamus as the centerpiece of the subcortical networks involved in detecting and responding to threats” (p. 733). However, this does not mean that fear only follows a subcortical path. According to LeDoux, projections from the amygdala to the cortex occur, and “are believed to contribute to the experience of fear and other cognitive aspects of emotional processing” (p. 733). LeDoux’s assertion calls our attention to the dual nature of emotion once again: non-cognitive, unconscious and subcortical on the one hand, and cognitive, conscious and cortical on the other^[1]

Another emotion which is intimately connected to fear and—as I will maintain later— also has a dangerous presence in political discourse is disgust. As we have seen, some authors believe that disgust is one of the basic and primary emotions of our repertoire. This means that, similarly to fear, it has a twofold nature: not only does it have an evolutionary function deeply rooted in our animal nature, but also a cognitive facet that links it with our ideas and thoughts.

Disgust is related to fear in the sense that it is an aversive state aroused by repulsive objects. Rozin and collaborators claim that disgust may have evolved as a rejection response to food that might be health threatening. Hence, these authors think that disgust is connected with the possibility of introducing something dangerous into the body through the mouth (Rozin & Fallon, 1987, p. 23; Rozin, Haidt, &Mc Cauley, 2008, p. 757). This is why this emotion is usually accompanied by some characteristic traits of body language: disgust is expressed through the retraction of the upper lip (usually with the mouth closed), wrinkling the top part of the nose, and other refusal gestures. Other authors suggest that the evolutionary emergence of disgust has two sources, each with a different origin and a different function, but both eliciting the same reaction. Daniel Kelly (2011) proposes that one system is related to the rejection of potentially toxic food, and the other to the avoidance of pathogenic agents that could cause contamination in a broader sense.

The category of objects that is able to cause disgust is highly heterogeneous. Nevertheless, for the purposes of this essay, let us assume that there are two types of disgusting objects: paradigmatic and primary ones, and imaginary ones. Paradigmatic objects of disgust would be things like corpses; feces; rotten items, especially if they are animal; cockroaches; things that show signs of putrefaction or decay; strong and offensive odors; items that look greasy, dirty or viscous; or bodily wastes. Although this group of objects is highly diverse, there is some sort of universality in the things that we usually think of as disgusting^[2] Most likely, this universality stems from the fact that this category of objects includes things that can be threatening to our health. Consequently, if, from an evolutionary point of view, the principal purpose of disgust is to protect us from particular kinds of dangers, at this point, the boundary between fear and disgust becomes blurred.

Now, let us turn to the second class of objects that can elicit disgust: imaginary ones. Rozin and Fallon (1987) argue that when we are disgusted at something, there is not only a physiological reaction, but also a cognitive component: we think that the object is contaminated, or that it is potentially contaminating. Therefore, disgust is a biological reaction that protects us from getting sick, but also contains an important cognitive component linked to the ideas of contamination, impurity and pollution. Here we find what these authors call “laws of sympathetic magic” (similarity and contagion) operating or the principle known as “once in contact, always in contact” (Rozin, Millman, & Nemeroff, 1986, p. 703; Rozin et al., 2008, p. 760).

Finally, these ideas draw attention to the fact that there is no need for the actual presence of a disgusting item of the primary sort in order for the emotion to be experienced. Having the idea of potential contagion or of imaginary impurity is enough to confer disgusting properties on the object. The psychological mechanism operates the other way round as well: projecting disgusting properties onto something or someone makes the object disgusting. For instance, Rozin and colleagues found that people had “a large preference for consuming a piece of chocolate fudge shaped as a muffin, as opposed to a piece of the same fudge shaped as dog feces” (Rozin & Fallon, 1987, p. 30). In a similar vein, positive laws of contagion also occur, and that explains why fans have an intense desire to collect objects that the people they admire have worn or that have belonged to them.

However, the relationship between fear and disgust does not stop here. As we have seen, fear can be an immediate response caused by the perception of a threatening stimulus. This means that fear arises as a result of the interaction of the organism with a potential or real danger. Nevertheless, leaving aside this objective dimension, fear is also experienced as a subjective phenomenon. The experience of fear will depend on the interpretation of the situation. Here, once again, the cognitive aspects of the emotion are crucial. As was the case with disgust, fear can operate as the imaginary anticipation of a threatening situation^[3] The connection between fear as a basic survival mechanism, and its cognitive facet is also complex: if a person develops a faint-hearted character, she will be prone to think that many things are dangerous, even if they are not; similarly, fear can be induced by others when something is represented as dangerous, even if the danger is not real. It could be said that fear awakens an intensified state of experience: it accelerates our perception and gives us a more acute awareness of our environment and the situations in which we are involved.

This has clear consequences for shared and public life, when fear of “others—those that have a different religion, nationality, race, sexual orientation, etc.—is” used for political purposes.

Political fear can have a broad range of effects. It may guide public policies, influence law, or keep entire groups out of power while maintaining others. We will deal with these issues in the following sections.

Fear, politics and biopolitics

Fear is the driving force behind one of the most celebrated figures of our political imagery: the social contract. Thomas Hobbes observed that we have the desire to preserve our own life, and that we try to avoid death. The problem is that no one is invulnerable, and no one can expect to be able to dominate others (but we can indeed expect that others may try to dominate us). On the other hand, due to the fact that everything may be considered necessary or useful for self-preservation, and given that all human beings are quite similar regarding their mental and physical attributes, it is natural to expect that they may try to take from us things that we consider valuable. It is also natural not to feel safe from their appetite for possessions and their ambition. This state of affairs prior to the social contract in which everyone feels fear of others is what Hobbes calls the state of nature.

In the Hobbesian state of nature there is no mechanism for putting an end to disputes. This is why Hobbes describes this state of nature as a “state of war”, and, more specifically, a war of “all against all”. The only solution to this problem is to establish a sovereign authority. When people agree to join a civil or political order, they consent to obey a common authority and subsume their own power to a sovereign (or institutionalized) power. So, basically, fear of others (and, in particular, fear of “agonizing death”) is the underlying motivation that compels us to endorse the social contract, to create the State, and to limit our own freedom with the purpose of preserving the freedom of everyone.

From this point of view, preservation of life is the most important good affirmed by reason, and death is the fundamental evil. However, reason often lacks the motivational power of passion. Leo Strauss puts it the following way: “as reason itself is powerless, man would not be minded to think of the preservation of life as the primary and most urgent good, if the passion of fear of death did not compel him to do so” (Strauss, 1996, p. 15; Hobbes, 2012). The same emotion that we share with other animal species becomes a rational emotion in human beings. It leads us to unite (and eventually to cooperate) with others, restrict our liberty and establish the institutions and laws to which we hold allegiance. Subsequently, fear has, in some sense, a civilizing mission.

Hobbes sensibly draws attention to the fact that, in the human world, there are more things to fear than in the animal world. Obviously, we fear predatory beasts, snakes, earthquakes, floods, viruses and bacteria. Nevertheless, hostility from our peers is probably the most insistent source of danger. So even if human societies also have to face natural forces, human antagonism is the threat par excellence—not to mention that currently we have the potential to annihilate humanity through the advancement of weapons of massdestruction^[4] Similarly, there are also other forms of vulnerability that stem from human action (or the absence of it), and that affect us, such as economic crises, poverty, lack of education or basic health services, or the absence of civil rights.

As philosopher Martha Nussbaum observes, “human beings have to make decisions in a world for which evolution has given them only a very rudimentary preparation” (Nussbaum, 2012, p. 29). This suggests that the form that our ideas regarding our own safety and wellbeing take are by no means instinctive. On the contrary, these ideas depend on complex and intricate thinking, and, in every society, “this process of extending and shaping fear is influenced by culture, politics, and rhetoric” (2012, pp. 29-30).

The ancient philosopher Aristotle was well aware of this, and in Rhetorics (a sort of manual addressed to political orators), he described the motivational power of passions, and stated that the public—their thoughts, their beliefs—could be persuaded if the speaker was able to provoke the appropriate emotional state. Fear is definitely one of the basic emotions that the orator must be able to stimulate and control. In other words, Aristotle illustrates how to make an audience feel afraid in order to influence their opinions. Undoubtedly, he was a perspicacious observer of worldly things—in fact, he is often thought of as one of the earliest biologists. As we will see, Aristotle’s ideas correspond to recent research findings in empirical psychology.

As stated above, when we talk about the political implications of fear, we must be aware that it may have a positive role, as it promotes civilization and obedience to the law. On the other hand, it can be politically misused for perverse purposes through rhetoric. Some authors claim that we are living in an era in which politics is no longer related to ideology, but to biopolitics, defined as the management of the well-being of human life^[5] Biopolitics is concerned with heterogeneous issues such as healthcare, migration, abortion, medical technologies or the global distribution of resources. The unifying thread behind these varied problems is the relationship between politics and the preservation and promotion of life and welfare. And, if biopolitics is related to everything that has some importance for the preservation and well-being of the individual, then it must deal with every potential source of danger—climate change, immigration, ecological catastrophe, financial crisis, crime, disease, terrorism. A wide variety of things are likely to provoke fear. Regardless of whether that may produce uneasiness or steal a little bit of tranquility or quality of life—particularly, in the western world, it is likely to be a source of anxiety and concern. Given that biopolitics is predominantly connected with these kinds of emotions, we can say that biopolitics is, to an extent, the politics of fear. Let us now explore some of the mechanisms that operate behind social fears and how they can lead us to mistakenly evaluate risks and, consequently, to decide ineffectively in affairs of public interest.

Heuristics, biases, fear and risk regulation

Let us now explore some of the psychological mechanisms that lead us to think in a biased way and that make us vulnerable to the political rhetoric of different actors that might take advantage of this to achieve their own goals. In the early seventies, Kahneman and Tversky developed what is known as “the heuristics and biases approach”, a perspective on bounded rationality that sought to explain how we make intuitive judgments under conditions of uncertainty (Kahneman, Slovic, & Tversky, 1982; Kahneman, 2003; Tversky & Kahneman, 1973). By that time, the mind was beginning to be conceptualized as a sort of computer with a limited capacity for processing information. The idea of effort-saving cognitive subroutines that offered reasonable—yet imperfect—solutions to problems appeared to be a remarkably interesting and persuasive theory, so it became enormously influential in the psychology of intuitive judgement studies.

We can define heuristics as a cognitive shortcut that allows us to make intuitive judgments and give responses to problems in a (reasonably) efficient and quick form. As noted above, these strategies allow us to make decisions and behave without spending much effort and time thinking about and considering different possibilities. So heuristics are part of our practical rationality, and are advantageous in a wide range of situations. We must be aware that they can also lead to biases, prejudices and errors in judgement.

Based on the idea of availability heuristic that I will discuss below, Cass Sunstein and his collaborator, jurist Timur Kuran, coined the term “availability cascade”. This can be defined as “a self-reinforcing process of collective belief formation by which an expressed perception triggers a chain reaction that gives the perception of increasing plausibility through its rising availability in public discourse” (Kuran, 1998, p. 683). The underlying mechanism behind this behavior is explained by a combination of informational and reputational motives: each individual endorses the common perception in part because that is what she has learnt from the apparent beliefs of others, and in part because acting otherwise publicly could involve her being less socially accepted. And the consequence of this process of the formation of beliefs is that persistent social availability errors may become permanent, unless a counter-mechanism keeps perceptions consistent with the facts. As a result, the delusions of the masses may last for an indefinite period, and they may bring about inefficient or even detrimental laws and policies (Kuran, 1998, p. 685).

To sum up, an availability cascade is a self-sustaining sequence of events. It may begin with an unimportant event reported by the media. This information spreads quickly creating social alarm, and governments find themselves being pushed into taking action in order to solve the problem, or potential problems that may arise.

When thinking about risks, we operate under what is called an “availability heuristic”^[6] To put it simply, this means that “people tend to think that events are more probable if they can recall an incident of their occurrence” (Sunstein, 2002, p. 33). For example, if a flood has not occurred in recent years, people would be less likely to have insurance, even if they live on flood plains. Another example: studies have shown that we make large errors when we have to estimate which events cause more fatalities. People mistakenly believe that there are more deaths due to accidents than due to disease, when the opposite is true. Similarly, they underestimate the risk of some real dangers, like diabetes or stroke, but overestimate the number of deaths caused by homicide. Sunstein concludes that this suggests that “highly publicized events are likely to lead people to be exceedingly fearful of statistically small risks” (Sunstein, 2002, p. 34).

Diminishing the risks has become a major concern for contemporary governments. As we have seen, we face global challenges that are a source of constant distress. The way in which we evaluate the dangers and how governments act in response to our worries has serious implications. As Cass Sunstein notes, people too often think poorly about real dangers. They fear the wrong things, and this has disastrous consequences. When people feel frightened, governments tend to act; when people feel indifference, governments act indifferently too, exposing us all to existing and perhaps greater risks. For example, if citizens are worried about immigration because they mistakenly think that immigrants represent some sort of threat, it is likely that policymakers will decide to adopt more restrictive policies regarding the arrival of migrants, and public discourse may develop a propensity towards xenophobia too. However, if citizens are uninformed and unaware of the real danger that contamination might entail for their health, rulers will be permissive concerning regulations about pollution, greenhouse emissions or hazardous waste, to mention but a few.

Ethnification, group conflict and emotional rhetoric

There are many social agents who are well aware of the collective dynamics of availability cascades, and they will not hesitate to exploit their possibilities for their own benefit. These entrepreneurs may be located anywhere in the social and political system: they may be government members; they may be related to media, or perhaps nonprofit organizations, the business sector, or civil society. In any case, the unifying thread that guides these collectives is that they will “attempt to trigger availability cascades likely to advance their own agendas” (Kuran & Sunstein, 1999, p. 687). On occasion, we must be watchful about the kind of discourse that these entrepreneurs put into circulation, given the fact that it could lead to hostility and even violence between groups.

One of the most effective tools for drawing attention to an issue is to deliberately apply a strong emotional charge. And there are few emotions more efficient than fear. Sometimes these social entrepreneurs can elicit concern among the population (or even mass anxiety) by exaggerating the threatening potential of some risks. The rhetoric of fear, as wisely noted by Aristotle, operates by making the audience believe that a threat is not remote but so near as to be imminent, convincing them that the danger has the power of destroying them, or of harming them in ways that will cause great pain, and persuading them that they are hopelessly vulnerable when facing it (1382a21-1382b27).

These kinds of social dynamics are deeply connected with ethnic or intergroup conflict. Timur Kuran also developed the concept of “ethnification” as a process in which ethnic origins, symbols or links acquire an overstressed salience and significance (Kuran, 1998). For the most part, societies are pluralist and contain different social groups that do not share ethnic origins, religious beliefs or other kinds of preferences. This means that cooperation, interaction, and other forms of socializing (like friendship relations or marriage) occur between members of different groups. Nevertheless, occasionally, a problem may arise, for example, an economic or political crisis, and then hatred and hostility between groups may develop too.

People may start giving importance to and emphasizing their ethnic or group idiosyncrasies, and making clear distinctions between in-group members and out-group members. In this context, social pressures may increase and induce further ethnification, leading to an escalation of ethnic conflict. Known as “in-group bias,” this tendency implies that any social division may reinforce social divisions by accepting, highlighting and celebrating group particularities rather than commonalities with other groups. This process creates familiarity, intimacy and confidence, even between people who do not know each other personally, and puts a distance between people who have had regular interactions (Kuran, 1998, pp. 630-31), creating what are known as “imagined communities”^[7], as well as imagined divisions.

A great deal of literature assumes that there is a human tendency for in-group favoritism and out-group hostility. This seems to be a nearly universal pattern of discriminatory attitudes, including perceiving one’s own group as superior (Sumner 1906; LeVine & Campbell, 1972). Decades ago, Allport (1954) conjectured that in-group favoritism has an adaptive value because it facilitates coordination and survival. Little is known about the evolutionary forces that shape group membership and in-group favoritism. Some studies suggest that symbolic markers, although originally meaningless, evolved to play an important role in group formation and in-group favoritism. The reason, as Allport suggested, might be that this mechanism is useful in solving coordination problems (Efferson, 2008). Nevertheless, these natural tendencies that evolution shaped in order to enhance our ability to cooperate and find solutions to problems becomes totally maladaptive and dysfunctional when it leads to conflict against other groups. For example, studies have shown that when people confer great significance to group membership, they tend to adopt a defensive behavior. This mechanism also operates the other way round: if a group feels threatened by another group, its members will be more likely to assign importance to group belonging (Brewer, 1979; Ellemers et al., 1999; Janis, 1982; Mackie & Goethals, 1987).

Kuran argues that we can find a clear example of this sort of group dynamic in former Yugoslavia. A country that was once characterized as a civilized multiethnic nation became ethnically segregated with astonishing ease, giving rise to the subsequent war.

One of Kuran’s most innovative contributions is to suggest that “the fears and antagonisms that accompany high levels of ethnic activity may be a result of ethnification rather than its root cause” (1998, p. 648). In other words: fear is not the root of the problem, but a consequence. For example, when individuals engage more acutely in their ethnic activities, the reason might be that they are doing so because they feel threatened and anxious about the activities of other ethnic groups. These fears cause distrust and concern to grow. Nevertheless, fear can be aroused and manipulated in order to nourish ethnification processes. As stated before, these cascades generate, and are stimulated by, cascades of fear. Let us imagine the following example: the members of one community frequent two pubs that happen to be owned by people belonging to different groups. Inasmuch as the ethnification process advances, the members of each community will probably feel more comfortable, and, in case things get worse, even safer, if they attend the establishment owned by one of their own. The pubs thus become ethnically differentiated, and pub attendance is transformed from an activity without any specific significance into an ethnic one^[8]

What is the role of political rhetoric here? There are many examples of fear, hatred and aversion campaigns. The Rwandan genocide, for instance, was a consequence of a campaign against the Tutsis: they were portrayed as a loathsome, hateful and dangerous ethnic group. These powerful emotions, aroused by propagandists, had a noticeably important role in bringing about the massacre (Glover, 1999, p. 121). Here we can see a pattern similar to the one described by Kuran. The Hutus and Tutsis were not distinctly separated. They shared a language, had the same culture, and marriages between members of the different ethnic groups were common. Genocide was not something that arose spontaneously: it was a deliberate action planned by those who wanted to keep hold of power. That is the reason why the Hutu government started an aggressive hatred and fear campaign against Tutsis. Newspapers, radio, television, prominent public figures, and so on were all entrepreneurs who encouraged the exclusion of the Tutsis from education, business and public life; they told Hutus to stop having mercy on their imaginary antagonists, affirming that anyone who had some sort of relationship with them would be considered as a betrayer, portraying them as “cockroaches”, and finally defending their annihilation in an explicit manner. In a similar vein, the Croat government used the media as a means of arousing fear amongst the Serbian population, convincing them that they were in serious danger of being massacred.

Martha Nussbaum, who has studied political emotions with profundity and perspicacity, also points out that the rhetoric of fear is closely related to the rhetoric of disgust (Nussbaum, 2004, 2010, 2012). Earlier I referred to empirical research that indicates that people feel disgust at animal waste products, corpses, rotten items and similar objects, but also at other objects that they imagine have these properties (sticky, oily, putrid) (Rozin & Fallon, 1987; Rozin et al., 1986). In ethnification and other in-group bias processes we find that groups also imagine that other groups have such attributes to an exaggerated degree. This is what Nussbaum has called “projective disgust”. Jews, Muslims, women, gays, African Americans, members of the lower castes in India, and members of all kinds of minorities have all at some time been portrayed as disgusting. And people feel distressed and push aside and stigmatize those with whom they associate disgusting properties.

It is not unusual to find the rhetoric of disgust in racist, sexist or discriminatory propaganda. It is not unusual either for this propaganda to seek to dehumanize these vulnerable groups, making them more exposed to violence and abuse. In the campaign against Jews, the Nazis used these kinds of symbolic associations in order to construct a derogatory representation of Jews. Hans Frank, governor of Poland, said that it was a country which was full of “lice and Jews” (Glover, 1999, p. 339). Hitler wrote, referring to Vienna after the First World War: “Was there any form of filth or profligacy, particularly in cultural life, without at least one Jew involved in it? If you cut even cautiously into such an abscess, you found, like a maggot in a rotting body, often dazzled by the sudden light - a little Jew!” (Glover, 1999, p. 339). Ruth Kalder, a widow of a former commander, said (in 1975), making reference to Jews: “They were not human like us. They were so foul” (Glover, 1999, p. 342). As we have seen, in the Rwanda conflict, Hutus and moderate Tutsis were called “cockroaches”. And, in Pol Pot’s Cambodia, political enemies were portrayed as “rotten fruits” that had to be removed from the basket (Glover, 1999, p. 306). This sort of behavior seems to create a portrait of the social universe as if it were split into two categories: “the ‘pure’ and the ‘impure’; the construction of a ‘we’ who are without flaw, and a ‘they’ who are dirty, evil, and contaminating” (Nussbaum, 2004, p. 35).

Thus, as Jonathan Glover wisely points out, “tribal conflicts rarely just ‘break out’ ”. On the contrary, “hostility is enflamed by the nationalist rhetoric of politicians” (Glover, 1999, p. 123): one group agitates the passions, the other group feels threatened and acts with its own defensive nationalism and igniting rhetoric, and finally groups become imprisoned in a spiral that escapes their control. This is how politicians push populations into their “tribal trap”.

To start off a cascade, ethnic activists struggle for access to the media, control of the symbols, and for history to be rewritten. They stress the common traits and promote solidarity between members of the same group, and they highlight the differences between them and the members of the other group, and incite conflict against them. Furthermore, this obsessive insistence on the ethnic differences—physical traits, language, religion, etc.—presents them not only as obstacles to cooperation, but as a threat in themselves.

Memories of past antagonism and humiliation are also efficient instruments when it comes to resuscitating old resentments and bitterness^[9] As Kuran notes, it is significant that Serbs showed selectivity in recognizing past offenses against themselves. Not by chance, their leaders invoked the scars produced by Ottoman rule, but ignored more recent losses promoted by Russian ideologies and west European protectionism (Kuran, 1998, p. 649).

So we can conclude that wars and hostilities do not explode spontaneously: quite the opposite, it seems they can be stimulated and guided by emotional rhetoric. Every democratic society must be watchful about the kind of discourse that these entrepreneurs put into circulation, given the fact that they can lead to hostility and violence between groups.

Conclusions

Emotions have a complex nature involving diverse, often overlapping dimensions. In a species like ours, even an emotion as basic as fear can be understood as a complex phenomenon rather than a mere stimulus-response episode. We possess more evolved structures and, therefore, more elevated cognitive capacities which make our emotions operate distinctly. Moreover, human emotions interact in multiple ways with other phenomena, such as other emotions, thoughts or desires. In conclusion, human emotions have a cognitive dimension that makes them susceptible to exploitation by rhetorical means.

Fear is an emotion that has a particularly relevant presence in public life. Moreover, it has an adaptive value for obvious reasons: on the one hand, it is a defense mechanism for survival; on the other, it plays a fundamental role as motivation for forming civil society. Thus, since it protects us from nature’s dangers, and from those represented by other humans, fear is a fundamental tool for our survival. That being said, once we have left the state of nature, a scenario of constant fear can lead to overwhelming dysfunction. As we have seen, this may be what happens in ethnification processes and other forms of intergroup conflict. We must be aware that we are subject to engaging in similar behaviors to those described. For example, in recent years we have experienced a comparable phenomenon: the radicalization of some Muslim communities and the tendency for Islamophobia that the West has developed.

Political powers and other social agents are likely to make use of the rhetoric of fear in order to take advantage of the resulting situation. There are many examples of this. In the face of uncertainty due to economic crises, parties of the extreme right are on the rise in Europe: the National Front in France, Golden Dawn in Greece, or the Northern League in Italy, to mention but a few, are trying to create an atmosphere of insecurity and promote xenophobia, nationalism and euroskepticism. But the rhetoric of fear does not occur only in the political arena. Greek banks lost billions after the victory of left-wing Syriza in January, as depositors withdrew their money worrying about liquidity. Sometimes, the rhetoric of fear may come from more informal settings. For instance, the rumors that spread the belief that vaccination can cause autism have led many parents to stop vaccinating their children, exposing them to greater risks, and exposing the rest of the population as well.

On a different note, fear of others—or for those important things that others could steal from us—usually prompts us to ask for protection and security, accepting reductions in our freedoms or even in respect for human dignity. Examples of this can be found in the use of racial profiles in the prevention of terrorism and crime, or the existence of places such as Guantanamo detention camp—where detainees were not subject to the protections of the Geneva conventions. Sometimes this fear might have its roots in an objective danger, as when a society has to deal with terrorist attacks, but the citizens must be aware of the inappropriate use of this emotion.

Fear is a complex emotion connected to our beliefs about what may threaten us. Cognitive biases and heuristics induce us to perceive some situations as dangerous, even when they are not, and to ignore threats that may represent a real risk. The efficient and successful regulation of risk involves a significant challenge to democracy. Our welfare is subject to our ability to deal with natural and social dangers. But the response that we give to these problems must be guided by rational thinking and sound deliberation.

Democracy is a project that is never completed: public institutions and citizens must persistently work on it. Effective decision making in public affairs depends on different forms of highly technical information on a wide range of topics—health, economy, international regulations, etc. One of the most challenging questions that democracy faces is precisely this: citizens often lack the knowledge necessary for them to have an informed opinion on questions of public interest. This may lead them to be defenseless against manipulation—whether it comes from political leaders or from other social entrepreneurs— and the fickleness and inconsistency of emotions and unsound decision making. The passionate charge of emotional rhetoric requires the counterbalance of critical thinking, so the manipulative intentions of some entrepreneurs can be revealed and the actual problems addressed.