that we're always going to be having emotional responses to the things that matter to us.
And what if we saw examining them as one of the most crucial parts of a person's development and arrived at an understanding of the emotions, not as useless, irrational, animalistic spasms as they've been thought about in the past, but what if the emotions can actually tell us a lot of important stuff
about how a person or a society is appraising reality in terms of what is valuable to them?
Are we neglecting an extremely important aspect of understanding human thought and cooperation more generally?
So building off this portion of her work that we talked about before, knowing all this is so important to her.
If you asked Martha Nussbaum about many of the problems we've been talking about on this podcast lately, she's not going to be an anarchist that thinks we just need to remove forced hierarchical authority.
She's not going to be an anti -capitalist where she thinks the answer is revolution.
No, she's going to be someone who thinks these problems can be solved from within the current system as it exists.
And don't get her wrong.
Absolutely, she would say, structural changes, economic reforms, flattening the hierarchies, all these things may be a good thing for people, and let's certainly have a conversation about it.
But what if a major factor that we're completely overlooking here, that's the reason our democracies have been functioning so poorly and the reason so many people currently feel powerless to be able to change anything, maybe what has changed in recent years is not that the system has proven to be a failure,
but that maybe a toxic level of fear as an emotion, use our emotions to keep us locked in a monarchy of fear.
That's the title of her book that we're talking about today, The Monarchy of Fear.
I mean, to just start making a case for that point, if you wanted to, fear is the emotion you would take advantage of if you were trying to establish or maintain a monarchy.
I mean, fear is a currency within a monarchy.
When you can get people to constantly fear outside threats that are going to come in, ruin their lives, take everything they have, when you can even get people to fear each other from within a society, that is exactly the point that people will start to gather together under a strong, absolute leader
that is promising to keep them safe from all those threats.
It's a time -tested strategy from all throughout human history.
So like she does with many of the other emotions, Martha Nussbaum does a full examination of the emotion of fear.
And to show how primal of an emotion we're dealing with when we talk about fear, she spends time not only looking at the evolutionary origins of it, but at the origins of fear and our psychological development as children.
Maybe you'll remember from last episode, but she has a pretty provocative statement she's known for.
She says that human babies are born into this world as little tyrants.
And it may sound there like she's coming at all the babies of the world trying to put them all on blast, but in fact what she means is that the babies need to be little tyrants, in part because of this asymmetry between how physically helpless they are and how cognitively aware they are about what's
going on around them.
Meaning we all start our lives as our political discourse.
That is the politicians, the political influencers, the media companies.
All these people understand that fear sells.
Fear is something that gets people clicking.
It's something that gets people tuning in the next day so they can sell their viewers soap during the commercial breaks.
Fear is a really good way to move the needle, no doubt about it.
But as Martha Nussbaum is going to say, fear is also an emotion that when left unexamined, is fundamentally toxic to the processes of democracy in particular.
Because she says democracy is a specific way of organizing society that heavily relies on trust and cooperation between people.
It requires civil dialogue.
It requires us mutually seeking the common good.
It requires us to have hope for a future.
