We Have Nothing To Fear But Fear Itself

Americans attribute that famous saying to FDR in his own 1933 Presidential Inauguration address in the Great Depression, but it was 400 years earlier. In the sixteenth century, the great French writer Michel de Montaigne (pictured right) – the man who pretty much invented a whole new genre, the essay – wrote: ‘the thing of which I have most fear is fear’. Although it depends on which translation you read. In another, the wording is slightly different: ‘The thing in the world I am most afraid of is fear, that passion alone, in the trouble of it, exceeding all other accidents.’

Although we all have heard something borrowed, something new, something old, and something used, some things are just constant, and fear is real when things are out of control in the world. Unfortunately, as JRB has quite often boasted about his progressive ideas akin to FDR, he has single-handedly really outdone others as well as himself by pushing the world into a fearful economic chaos without any endgame in mind.

For more than 40 years in the U.S., neo-liberalism has dominated economic and political debates blaming free-market and growth-at-all-costs approaches to economic and social policies. Additionally, JRB argued the biggest challenges of Climate Change, systemic racism, and wealth inequality made problems worse.

Actually, capitalism offers solutions to all those challenges. The largest reductions in carbon emissions have come from natural gas, thanks to the market innovation of shale fracking. Genetically engineered crops have increased farm yields too. The wealth created by competitive labor markets have helped minorities employment grow by reaching out to train many for trades in new high paying job skills. Globally, extreme poverty has plunged to less than 10% from 45% in 1980 while world GDP has more than tripled. 

People are no longer geographically tied down, they are a global community. They have fast broadband, smart-phones, computers, and other technologies enabling everyone to share knowledge. 

In an 1817 letter to George Ticknor, Boston University from Thomas Jefferson equated knowledge with power, safety, and happiness:

This last establishment [a state university] will probably be within a mile of Charlottesville, and four from Monticello, if the system should be adopted at all by our legislature who meet within a week from this time. my hopes however are kept in check by the ordinary character of our state legislatures, the members of which do not generally possess information enough to perceive the important truths, that knowledge is power, that knowledge is safety, and that knowledge is happiness.