"Americans have discovered fear"
About this Quote
A whole national psyche, punctured in four words: "Americans have discovered fear". Saramago, the novelist of moral epidemics and political sleepwalking, isn’t admiring a new emotional maturity. He’s diagnosing a late, unsettling initiation. The subtext is that America long sold itself on invulnerability - geography as moat, money as armor, optimism as civic religion. To "discover" fear suggests it wasn’t absent elsewhere; it was deferred, outsourced, or kept at the edges of the story.
The line lands like a rebuke because it flips American exceptionalism into American naivete. Fear is not introduced as a response to a specific threat but as a historical fact arriving at last, like adulthood. That’s Saramago’s cynical precision: he treats fear less as a feeling than as a governing technology. Once fear becomes mainstream, it can be monetized by media, operationalized by politicians, and internalized by citizens as common sense. The discovery isn’t personal; it’s institutional.
Context matters. Read against the post-Cold War moment and especially the post-9/11 era, the sentence captures a shift from confidence to securitization: airports turned into rituals, surveillance into a comfort object, foreign policy into a permanent emergency. Saramago’s intent is to warn that fear doesn’t merely reflect reality; it edits it. It narrows what people will tolerate, what they will believe, and what they will trade away - quietly, proudly, even gratefully - in exchange for the sensation of safety.
The line lands like a rebuke because it flips American exceptionalism into American naivete. Fear is not introduced as a response to a specific threat but as a historical fact arriving at last, like adulthood. That’s Saramago’s cynical precision: he treats fear less as a feeling than as a governing technology. Once fear becomes mainstream, it can be monetized by media, operationalized by politicians, and internalized by citizens as common sense. The discovery isn’t personal; it’s institutional.
Context matters. Read against the post-Cold War moment and especially the post-9/11 era, the sentence captures a shift from confidence to securitization: airports turned into rituals, surveillance into a comfort object, foreign policy into a permanent emergency. Saramago’s intent is to warn that fear doesn’t merely reflect reality; it edits it. It narrows what people will tolerate, what they will believe, and what they will trade away - quietly, proudly, even gratefully - in exchange for the sensation of safety.
Quote Details
| Topic | Fear |
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