One - Unsettling Times

Summary

There is today so much inequality, discrimination, and uncertainty concerning the future that the lives of most people in the world are dominated by fear rather than by hope. However, people cannot afford to be so pessimistic, given that their struggle for survival, an urgent and inescapable everyday task, is at stake. Their struggle will be all the more successful, and their revolt all the more likely to attract followers, if more and more people come to the realization that the hopeless fear of powerless majorities stems from the fearless hope of powerful minorities. This epochal condition endows our time with an atmosphere of monstrosity, i.e. the unpredictable and uninsurable risk to avert vulnerability, the almost incommensurable power differences between oppressors and oppressed, and systemic impunity. Monsters present themselves as specifically disturbing threats, while at the same time constituting realms within which there is room for manoeuvre and resistance. This chapter identifies seven such threats.