Martha C. Nussbaum Talks Fear and Politics on PBS NewsHour
The problem with fear in politics
Jeffrey Brown:
So, the subtitle, “A Philosopher Looks at Our Political Crisis,” so that’s the next term I want you to define, political crisis. What do you see?
Martha Nussbaum:
Well, what I see is that people are being stampeded by their emotions, and they’re not stopping to figure things out and to work on the real problems.
And what happens when fear gets into the works is, it’s like sort of a grain of sand that gets into the whole mechanism, and makes us spin off and turn get targets that are not real. So we get frightened. And then we think, oh, the problem is really the immigrants. Or it’s on the left too. So the problem is really those elites, instead of thinking, well, what are the actual problems, and what can we do to fix them?
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