Het probleem van zinverlies in het Westen

CITAAT

Het laatste boek van Frank Furedi Invitation to Terror bevat m.i. een aantal zeer waardevolle elementen over terreur, zodat ik er hier nog een aantal citaten van weergeef.
Achter elk citaat wordt de bladzijde van het boek tussen haakjes vermeld.

“Through a system of meaning provided by culture, people learn to make sense of everyday problems. A web of meaning assists people to discover what binds them together, what society expects of them and guides them in how to manage uncertainty and deal with acts of misfortune. A solid sense of meaning helps a society to believe in its way of life and is itself an important dimension of its power. In the past century societies as diverse as Nazi Germany, Stalinist Soviet Union and the United States were able to project a robust sense of meaning and this helped them to achieve global prominence. The Blitz spirit of a beleaguered Britain also provides testimony of how the authority of shared meaning helps people to deal with uncertainty and adversity.
Twenty-first-century society’s relationship to the future is characterised by an intense consciousness of rapid change which is paralleled by a sense of disorientation about knowing how to interpret it. […] …’the world crisis of meaning’ has important implications for the current problematization of the issue of terrorism. How threats are perceived and how society deals with them are inextricably linked to the web of meaning that binds people to one another. The way an act of terror is interpreted is not directly proportional to its destructive power. How the public makes sense of such an unexpected catastrophe contributes to its impact.” (blz. 81)

“Apprehension about the problem of the home-grown threat endows the question ‘Why do they hate us?’ with a new meaning. The very posing of the question by Bush and others conveys a sense of genuine surprise and bewilderment. The question also expresses frustration and distress about the discovery that not anyone loves us. It resembles the kind of gesture that children make when they discover that they are not the centre of everybody’s undivided attention. Even in its slightly less infantilised form this query hints at a sense of disappointment about being betrayed by someone close. The implicit premise of this question is that they ought really to like us. This is not a sentiment that one directs at clearly acknowledged enemies. Neither President Roosevelt nor Churchill needed to ask why he Nazis hate us. […]
Since September 11 it has become increasingly difficult to ignore the fact that the threat of terrorism is not just an external but also a domestic problem. The difficulties that political leaders have in spelling out ‘our’ way of life acquires momentous significance in relation to the flourishing of anti-Western movements on domestic front.” (blz. 93, mijn cursivering).

“The dynamic of individualisation has encouraged fear to be experienced in a fragmented and atomized world. […] We fear alone because of the difficulties that we have in constructing a moral consensus about the threats facing our communities. We all attempt to make sense of these threats but the fragmentation of moral consensus has forced individuals to look for their own system of meaning. The weakening of shared values fragments the quest for meaning. In turn the fragmentation of the search for meaning privatizes it and lends it an individual character. A quest that is so private often looks for personal solutions and meanings. That is why psychologists and therapeutics have emerged as a dominant paradigm through which meaning is bestowed on our experience. Therapeutics is oriented to the experience of atomized individuals and tries to give meaning to the experience of the isolated individual.”
(blz. 111 – 101)


REFERENTIE

Frank Furedi: Invitation to Terror. The Expanding Empire of the Unknown. Continuum, Londen, 2007.

COMMENTAAR

Ik heb weinig toe te voegen aan deze citaten, die ik opgenomen heb omdat zijn op een duidelijke manier het verband tussen zinverlies en isolement aantonen, alsook de wederzijdse beïnvloeding en versterking van deze elementen.