Miedo

Since the start of the 21st century, the level of uncertainty that we have been forced to deal with in Western societies has steadily increased. Determined not to give up, we kept pedaling as fast as we could, as many hours a day as our bodies allowed us, with the perennial feeling that we could always have tried a little harder. But when a virus brought the entire world to a standstill, we were blasted at the speed of light into an unknown wasteland, alone with our fears. Fear is a book about the fears that have articulated our lives in recent years and that COVID-19 has highlighted and exacerbated, thus accelerating the change of era in which we were already immersed: the crisis of neoliberalism, climate change, the growing inequality, the exodus of migrants and refugees, the robotization of the labor market and the increase in chronic unemployment, the rise in housing prices, the demographic crisis, social polarization and tension fueled by the algorithms of large technology companies, or privatization of public services. The inability of representative democracies to respond to these challenges has ended up turning them into a series of fears that populist and far-right parties have used to impose their agenda and hate speech.