"And the terror itself is an example of the world's uncontrollability"
About this Quote
Terror, for Beck, isn’t just a tactic or an event; it’s a demonstration. The line turns fear into evidence: the point of terror is not only to harm bodies or grab headlines, but to force the public to experience a world that will not stay inside the fences of policy, borders, or prediction.
This is classic Beck, the sociologist of the “risk society,” where modern life is defined less by distributing wealth than by distributing hazards. Industrial accidents, financial crises, pandemics, climate catastrophe, terrorism: different causes, same cultural effect. They expose the limits of expert management and puncture the comforting myth that modern institutions can insure us against the future. Beck’s sly move is to treat “terror itself” as a kind of social fact. The fear becomes part of the phenomenon, producing new behaviors: surveillance acceptance, securitized public space, suspicion as common sense.
The subtext is a rebuke to the political temptation to narrate control. Leaders promise security the way brands promise reliability; Beck points out that this promise is increasingly performative. Terror works because it hijacks that gap between what states claim (comprehensive protection) and what they can actually deliver (partial, probabilistic mitigation). By staging randomness and vulnerability, it makes “uncontrollability” felt, not argued.
Context matters: Beck’s late-20th/early-21st century Europe, post-Cold War and post-9/11, where global interdependence meant that dangers traveled faster than accountability. His sentence lands like a diagnosis of modernity’s anxiety: the real weapon is the revelation that the system has no master switch.
This is classic Beck, the sociologist of the “risk society,” where modern life is defined less by distributing wealth than by distributing hazards. Industrial accidents, financial crises, pandemics, climate catastrophe, terrorism: different causes, same cultural effect. They expose the limits of expert management and puncture the comforting myth that modern institutions can insure us against the future. Beck’s sly move is to treat “terror itself” as a kind of social fact. The fear becomes part of the phenomenon, producing new behaviors: surveillance acceptance, securitized public space, suspicion as common sense.
The subtext is a rebuke to the political temptation to narrate control. Leaders promise security the way brands promise reliability; Beck points out that this promise is increasingly performative. Terror works because it hijacks that gap between what states claim (comprehensive protection) and what they can actually deliver (partial, probabilistic mitigation). By staging randomness and vulnerability, it makes “uncontrollability” felt, not argued.
Context matters: Beck’s late-20th/early-21st century Europe, post-Cold War and post-9/11, where global interdependence meant that dangers traveled faster than accountability. His sentence lands like a diagnosis of modernity’s anxiety: the real weapon is the revelation that the system has no master switch.
Quote Details
| Topic | Free Will & Fate |
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