"Our tragedy is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it... the basest of all things is to be afraid"
About this Quote
Faulkner is naming fear as the quiet dictator of modern life, not the sudden panic of a jump scare but the chronic, low-grade tremor that becomes a lifestyle. The line lands with a grim twist: the real “tragedy” isn’t that we’re afraid; it’s that we’ve learned to live with it. “So long sustained” implies endurance, even skill. A society can metabolize dread until it feels like common sense, and that adaptation is what horrifies him. When fear becomes bearable, it stops announcing itself as an emergency and starts masquerading as prudence, tradition, realism.
The rhetoric is deliberate: “general and universal” widens the frame from private neurosis to cultural condition. Faulkner is writing with the aftertaste of the Great Depression, the rise of authoritarianism abroad, and a world sliding toward mechanized war. In that climate, fear is not just an emotion but a public utility, something governments, markets, and mobs can distribute and exploit. He’s also a Southern novelist who understood how entire communities train themselves to fear change, intimacy, and accountability, then call it virtue.
“The basest of all things is to be afraid” is not a scold; it’s an indictment of what fear does to character. “Basest” suggests moral diminishment: fear shrinks the human scale, makes cruelty feel necessary, makes silence feel safe. Faulkner’s subtext is almost therapeutic and almost political: if you want a different world, you don’t start with policy. You start by refusing fear’s claim to inevitability.
The rhetoric is deliberate: “general and universal” widens the frame from private neurosis to cultural condition. Faulkner is writing with the aftertaste of the Great Depression, the rise of authoritarianism abroad, and a world sliding toward mechanized war. In that climate, fear is not just an emotion but a public utility, something governments, markets, and mobs can distribute and exploit. He’s also a Southern novelist who understood how entire communities train themselves to fear change, intimacy, and accountability, then call it virtue.
“The basest of all things is to be afraid” is not a scold; it’s an indictment of what fear does to character. “Basest” suggests moral diminishment: fear shrinks the human scale, makes cruelty feel necessary, makes silence feel safe. Faulkner’s subtext is almost therapeutic and almost political: if you want a different world, you don’t start with policy. You start by refusing fear’s claim to inevitability.
Quote Details
| Topic | Fear |
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