Ideas - What 17th-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes would say about American democracy today

Episode Date: January 13, 2025

English philosopher Thomas Hobbes believed that life would be "nasty, brutish and short" without a strong government. IDEAS explores how a new take on Hobbes offers a surprising perspective on the recent American election.

On an evening in early December 2018, the young CEO of a cryptocurrency exchange reportedly dies while on his honeymoon in India. This death is not announced to customers for another month. And when they're told Gerald Cotton is the only person to hold the passwords to their funds, conspiracy theories grow, leaving some to wonder, could Gerald Cotton still be alive? Honeymoon, moving the body, all the missing money. It was like, but what happened? A Death in Crypto Land, available now on CBC Listen

and everywhere you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. That's like a nine. 9 and a half. Probably 8 or 9. Out of 10? I would give it a 9 to 11. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayed. And on a scale of 1 to 10 with 10 being like supreme debilitating anxiety and 1 being like

super chill and all great, where would you put yourself? Probably like seven, I would say. At times I would say it's probably a twelve. Anxiety. For political theorists, you might say it comes with the territory. They strive to understand what holds society together, what separates order from chaos. They poke into the fragile underpinnings of a nation-state and wonder, what happens if these things break?

I wish the media in the U.S. talked to us more. People don't believe that what we're doing is important. Ouch! Political theorists ask, why do people obey their leaders? And what justifies using the state's force against an individual? They come up with answers and debate them, sometimes for centuries. As is the case with Thomas Hobbes and his classic work Leviathan. Old poets said that the gods were at first created by human fear.

Hobbes wrote his towering work of political theory in 1651. It's still provocative. He tries to explain how human beings work in very simple terms that has to do with their appetites and aversions, that is what they love and what they hate. That which men desire, they're also said to love and to hate those things for which they have aversion. So he has this passage, the very most famous passage of Leviathan,

where he calls life nasty, brutish and short in the state of nature, because no industry, no art or science can flourish when people don't know what tomorrow will look like. Vertica, she just goes by the one name, is doing her PhD in political theory at McGill University. She believes she's found a new way to read Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan. There's something about it that people keep missing, something especially relevant in these anxious times for Western democracies. My goal is to persuade my readers that anxiety was a significant concept for Hobbes, which has consequences for understanding Hobbes better,

but there are also lessons we can learn. Vertica's work is the subject of this episode of Ideas from the Trenches, our series where we meet fascinating PhD students from across Canada. Ideas producers, Nicola Lukcic and Tom Howell take it from here. ["The Star-Spangled Banner"] Howell, take it from here. Two weeks after the U.S. election of 2024, we visited Virginia.

The state calls itself the birthplace of a nation, home to the first permanent English settlement in North America. We came to spend the weekend with nearly 200 anxious-looking political scholars. Some mornings when I wake up, I feel my heartbeats going faster. What is making you anxious these days? Most existentially that maybe this whole liberal democracy thing is coming to an end. We were at the annual gathering of the Association for Political Theory. I'm in deep south Texas, so I'm at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley.

I'm on the border with Mexico. And so for my students, which I have a lot of students who are undocumented, students who have family members that are undocumented that are going to be targeted by the Trump administration. So that's a cause of a great deal of anxiety. And also, what is the first target of the tyrant? It's the intellectuals. So that doesn't make us feel very safe.

The attendees are professors, mostly. They teach political theory and there are some graduate students in the room too, still working on their PhDs. They're here to meet their colleagues, to get known, get listened to, maybe look for jobs and take a turn presenting their latest ideas on how to understand politics. We took the opportunity to find out if they're unusually worried right now. What is giving you anxiety these days? Capitalism, job markets, unemployment, the absence of light at the end of the tunnel.

Oh yeah, and also like the whole political situation and like immigration and like that the world is coming to an end. It's like, yeah, pretty much that's giving me some anxiety. I should mention we gathered these comments about their anxieties after most of them had had a couple of drinks. It was the beginning of the Friday night dance party. My anxiety is that there's not a commitment to democratic norms. Above all, in this moment, it was the re-election of Donald Trump that weighed most heavily on people's minds. What is giving you anxiety in this moment in history? A lot of things.

I think because I'm from China and so this year when Trump gets elected again I just get very anxious and worried about all my friends who are internationals and about their capacity of staying in the U.S. or re-entering the U.S. Movement burnout is a thing, is worrying to me. People learning to kind of cope for themselves in ways that are healthy but that might collectively undermine protests is worrying to me. I would say that I think anxiety can be productive for politics. I would also say that there's lots of great research on it, including Vertica's research. If you feel this sense of anxiety,

it might help you to be more prepared to uncertain times. Edorna thinks it's really helpful to be anxious, and I'm Jewish, so I think that as well. What is making you anxious these days? Nothing. That's the first person who said that. Well, I don't find anxiety to be a very helpful emotion. Anxiety just feels like I'm going to curl up into a little ball and hide.

And right now what you actually need to do is take action and organize. We didn't come all this way just to help political theorists unleash their feelings. They had the dance floor for that. This weekend was a big deal for our PhD student, Vertika. It's her debut as a presenting scholar at the Association for Political Theory. Okay, let's do some establishing stuff. Who are you? Well, I'm Vertika. I'm a PhD candidate at McGill University. Hopefully in my final year of my PhD, finishing

my thesis broadly in two words on Hobbes and anxiety. My presentation is up in probably less than half an hour and I'm very excited for the discussion. And so how is Hobbes useful and his understanding of anxiety useful for us? I see that people's anxiety has motivated them to vote in a certain way in this election. Hobbes was thinking about how to get people to just come to a peaceful solution. But I think what's relevant about Hobbes is that he was deeply thinking about, how do I make sure that these destructive passions passions which can lead people to dangerous political consequences?

How can I turn it around? Now in Hobbes's case that was an authoritarian solution. Is that the one we want today in in democratic times? Quite not but I think in thinking about Hobbes in terms of anxiety He was really talking about the common people, their common concerns in what drives their anxiety, is like them being able to meet their needs, fulfil their needs. And there's a sense in which that the person who is anxious is also the less powerful person. A democracy, in effect, is no more than an aristocracy of orators, interrupted sometimes with the temporary monarchy

of one orator. So the reason Hobbes was against democracy is because he was concerned about the wealthy taking over democracy. And I think that's one of the things we saw in this election, that people were disillusioned by the other option because they think it's an oligarchic party. It's not so- The Democrats, you mean? Yeah, the Democrats.

That's one view. People feel that. Hubs gives us new ways to start thinking about where do we go with democracy, the connection between equality and democracy. The question I want to raise is that, is democracy today, like, not fulfilling the promise of equality? And is that the reason that the anxiety for equality is leading people towards what we may call authoritarian solutions?

Okay, so the panelists today, we're going to have Michael Thomas from Stanford University, giving political theology and democracy in 19th century Latin America. R. Ward Holder from St. Anselm College, giving liberal democracy and Christian opposition a Christian realist response. Xingxiu Chen from Northwestern University, giving John Locke and total orable diversity. And Vertica from McGill University, giving glory and the moral God, Hobbes' Transcendental Body Politics, and we'll have comments from Matt Scherer. Quick, welcome everybody, round of applause.

(*audience applauding*) Thank you so much everyone for being here. It is an honor to present with such excellent panelists. Just to give a bit of a context, the broader project from which this paper today I'm presenting is my dissertation of which this is the fourth chapter. In this project, I'm trying to propose that anxiety is an important but neglected passion for Hobbes because he identifies anxiety as a natural cause of religion.

My task in this dissertation is to convince people that it was politically just as significant for Hobbes even though he doesn't talk about it as much. This perpetual fear always accompanying mankind in the ignorance of causes, as it were in the dark, must needs have for object something. And therefore, when there's nothing to be seen, there's nothing to accuse either of their good or evil fortune but some power or agent invisible. Vertica's a fan of Thomas Hobbes now, but when she first encountered his work, her reaction was quite negative. I do remember writing on the Martians. Like some comments using language which I probably shouldn't say.

We can bleep it out. What did you say? F*** you Hobbes. Take us a bit more into that. Why did you react that way? I, um, what it was, it was, I think, like coming from a democratic context. Like, so I'm from India. Dissent against the state was very important to me.

Particularly, this was the context when the right wing had already taken over the Indian state. Like, it was the first of the Modi government in power. And it was a time in India where specifically students were protesting against impositions of the state and the universities. And in that context, I read that, like, well, Hobbes is saying the sovereign should be even above the law. The sovereign makes the law, but the sovereign is not bound by the law himself or herself.

And there was a lot there against dissent and disagreement and sedition was like to be heavily punished. So you saw him as an apologist for dictators. Exactly. Like I saw him as a philosopher who could be used to defend the worst kind of excesses in politics. So a bit of background on Hobbes. He was writing at a time of significant upheaval in 17th century England, probably the bloodiest and most volatile time in its history.

About 200,000 people lost their lives in the country's civil war, with supporters of the monarchy fighting those who supported parliament and democratic rule. And in the midst of it, King Charles I was beheaded. Hobbes was on a mission to understand how to avoid this level of conflict and violence, how to structure society so people can live in relative peace. His belief, without the civilizing effect of government, humans are driven by their core emotion, fear, towards violence. Hobbes bequeathed us a classic bumper sticker line in chapter 13 of Leviathan. He says, in our natural state, human life is, to put it bluntly, crap.

No knowledge of the face of the earth, no account of time, no arts, no letters, no society, and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death. And the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Yeah, I think first-time readers of Hobbes find two things particularly unsettling. One is what they see as his grim view of human nature. Kinch-Holkster is professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley. Hobbes is one of his specialties. Kinch totally understands why, at first glance, people reading Hobbes would react the way Vertica did.

He has a reductive view in some ways. He tries to explain how human beings work in very simple terms that has to do with their appetites and aversions, that is what they love and what they hate. And he tends to describe human beings as being motivated by what people now would think of as their baser instincts or their baser desires or passions. And on the basis of this, the usual view is Hobbes thinks that human beings are in a state of perpetual war, one with every other, unless they set up a sovereign over them. And he argues that that sovereign has to have absolute authority. And so, the other primary resistance to Hobbesian theory

is that his solution for the problem of these human beings is that they have to obey, and they have to obey an authority who is absolute. That is a doctrine that, of course course is entirely unacceptable in the modern world and indeed it was largely unacceptable in Hobbes' own world. So that is the typical portrait that people are reacting to. So based on this brief description, it is understandable then that people would assume that he could be an apologist for a dictator?

Pete Yes, absolutely. And I think that part of the understanding is not entirely a misunderstanding. He does believe in absolute sovereignty. He thinks that sovereignty has to be absolute or it's not sovereignty. For Hobbes, one of the important things to recognize though, that doesn't have to be a monarch. It can be one person, it can be a group of people, which we call an oligarchy or an aristocracy, or it can be an assembly of the whole people, and that we call a democracy. And Vertica, she pointed to an article that you wrote that opened her eyes to a more compassionate view of Hobbes. And that article was called The End of Philosophy.

Can you give us a brief summary of the argument you were making there? The idea is that when philosophers read or when theorists read philosophers or theorists from the past, we tend to assume that they're doing what we're doing, which is to try to uncover the truth of the matter and express what we regard as a true interpretation. But I think at some underlying fundamental level, Hobbes' most important goal is not the truth, but peace and security. He hopes for a state in which human beings can be safe to pursue their own visions of the good.

And his philosophy is primarily geared toward providing the preconditions for that peaceable coexistence as he sees it. So he wants to get to a conception of quote unquote truth in politics, which is the real truth is that we're not going to agree on the truth. And his concern is that emotions or passions, things like anger and fear, resentment, even they can get in the way of our ability to organize so that we can have a more peaceful and happy coexistence. What is his advice for managing emotion given how powerful these emotions can be? So Hobbes doesn't believe in any of these pictures that we find in Plato and many other synths of being able to control our passions via our reason. He doesn't think that that's an entirely illusory goal for an individual, but he does think

that it's probably beyond us as a society. And so he thinks what we need to do is recognize that the passions are intrinsic to human beings and that they will continue to motivate people. And then the question is, how do we motivate these people in a way that will be beneficial to them in the end? And he has a view that the passion to be reckoned upon is fear, as he puts it. And the idea is that you could have a fine society of generous natures

who are giving and thoughtful and so on and so forth, but we can't base our hopes for civil society and a peaceful coexistence with one another on that kind of generosity of spirit. We can, however, base our hopes for peaceful coexistence on the idea that everybody is afraid of the power of the law. And if that fear is getting us to keep away from hurting others, insulting others, and so on and so forth, then it will be, paradoxically, it will be our fear that frees us to pursue the lives we want to pursue. And what role do you see anxiety playing in the politics of America today?

So anxiety for Hobbes is an interestingly double-edged phenomenon. He thinks of anxiety as being a very important force for good in human life. Anxiety is what makes us look forward to the future and try to plan out what we're going to do with our lives, and makes us, in many ways, it distinguishes us from the animals. We look forward to tomorrow and think, how can we do something today such that our tomorrow will be different or better? But he also thinks, he thinks that there's a difference between being prudent, which is to look forward to the future and organize things carefully to better our ends, and being what he calls over-provident or over-prudent.

And that, he's got a wonderful expression where he says, that man which looks too far before him in the care of future time, hath his heart all the day long gnawed on by fear of death, poverty, or other calamity, and has no repose nor pause of his anxiety but in sleep. And that looks like a pretty powerful diagnosis of a modern malady, of fretfulness, of not feeling like there's a positive path forward because we're concerned that even if tomorrow goes okay, there's the day after we have to think about and so on. One of the things he says about this is that we try to fix those feelings of anxiety by positing a stop, by positing an answer, and we put God in the place of the future, and we think that it's up to God what happens

in the future. But then he thinks we create a different source of anxiety by doing that, because we now are fearful of God and how what we do today and what we do tomorrow will be punished. So I think in our current condition, I think Hobbes' diagnosis isn't just about contemporary politics but in a way about contemporary psychology and contemporary society. I think he regards us as tormenting ourselves with concerns about the future in a way that ends up being imprudent. Can we use anything in Hobbes' insights to not just tell us we were doing it wrong, but help get back to that peace thing?

Can we channel our anxiety or our fear in some way that would be constructive to this peaceful idea where we're all operating in order and we've got the right sovereign in the way it's supposed to be? Any recipes look difficult to come by and how to get out, where the exit is from the condition we find ourselves in, I think is a tough question. But I do think where he'd encourage us to focus on how we ourselves are causing the problem. And everybody's inclined to agree with that, but what they really mean by that is that other people are causing the problem, rather than that our own convictions are playing

their role in making other people feel undervalued, making other people feel that their interests are being ignored, making other people feel that we have some kind of contempt or lack of respect for them. And Hobbes, where I think Hobbes is very interesting on this is that he doesn't take the kind of Contean High Road of saying, it's wicked not to respect others because everyone should be a source of equal concern and respect. Hobbes says, yeah, people don't think that. People may well just continue to think that their people are better than other people or what have you. And what Hobbes is trying to tell us is,

it's a precondition for peaceable coexistence with others, that you keep any such opinions to yourself and that you not base a politics on those opinions of contempt. And I think if he could help people to back up in that sort of way from the expression of their views and think about how those views are going to be received and the reaction and the reverberation of those views, that would be very helpful. Learn when to shut up. Learn when to shut up. Yeah, that's right.

There's a, there's a, there's a, the politics of owning the libs or what have you, that kind of politics of, of this gladiatorial sort of bloodport element of contemporary politics strikes me as one that he would regard as extremely destructive. Because if we walk down the street, especially if we're in a different city in America, we think that person is probably one of those people who has such an odious view. And that level of distrust, I think, is absolutely corrosive for the fabric of political society. So love your neighbor, not because you particularly want to love your neighbor, but it's sort of a survival. Yeah. And in fact, Hobbes has this interesting view, which he's very realistic about human psychology.

And he says, we're not all going to love our neighbors. But don't show it if you hate your neighbor. Keep it to yourself. That is good advice. Yeah. Don't fly a flag saying that you despise your neighbor. Well, Kinch, thank you so much. This has been extremely helpful. Thank you. It's been a pleasure. Thank you. It's been a pleasure. Thank you. On Ideas, you're listening to a documentary called Nasty, Brutish and Anxious, what Thomas Hobbs would tell democracies now. It's part of our series Ideas from the Trenches, featuring the work of PhD students across Canada.

We're a broadcast on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, across North America on SiriusXM, in Australia on ABC Radio National, in France on World Radio Paris, and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. We're also a podcast. Subscribe on Spotify, the CBC News app, or wherever you like. I'm Nala Ayed. In 2017 it felt like drugs were everywhere in the news, so I started a podcast called On Drugs. We covered a lot of ground over two seasons, but there are still so many more stories to tell. I'm Jeff Turner and I'm back with season three of On Drugs.

And this time it's going to get personal. I don't know who sober Jeff is. I don't even know if I like that guy. On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. She goes by just the one name, is a PhD student in political theory at McGill University. by just the one name, is a PhD student in political theory at McGill University. She's trying to direct attention to an overlooked aspect of Thomas Hobbes' classic work, Leviathan. What's been overlooked, she argues, is the role Hobbes gives to one particular emotion, anxiety,

and how anxiety drives humans to structure their societies or let them fall apart. And we're back in Canada now and Vertika has been listening to the show so far. Hi Vertika. Hi Nikola, how are you doing? Good. What are your thoughts on Kinch Hoekstra's assessment of the role that anxiety can play in politics through the lens of Thomas Hobbes. That was actually quite instructive for me. Like it was great to hear from another Hobbes scholar on the value and the role of anxiety directly

because a lot of the resistance I've faced in working is that it's hard to demonstrate the value of anxiety for Hobbes. So, Hoekstra did a great job of bringing out both the positive and the negative aspects of anxiety for Hobbes. So Hoekstra did a great job of bringing out both the positive and the negative aspects of anxiety for Hobbes. When Hoekstra outlines that anxiety has a positive aspect for Hobbes, that very thing helps me to just support the argument. There was a reasonable aspect and of course there is an not reasonable aspect of anxiety too. But in my reading, even that Hobbes uses to continuously create motivation for an absolute sovereign. What I suggest is the negative aspects of anxiety or the unreasonable aspects of anxiety motivates them to believe in religious superstitions.

Did anyone else in that half say anything that you wanted to pick up on or underline or challenge? Yeah, it was so fascinating to hear what the other scholars in the beginning were saying about anxiety. One person said that there was the sense of doom, that liberal democracy as we know it is coming to an end. I feel like that really captured what a lot of people today are worried about. I think if we think of Hobbes, that kind of anxiety is, we consider liberal democracy as a kind of civil order today. Although the solution mirrors what Hobbes might have said, okay, absolute sovereign. But really if you think about it, it's liberal democracy,

which seems a more peaceful and orderly way of organizing every day. And the worry is that we're losing that. And so it's kind of a return to the state of nature in that sense. We're losing the order we've set up, which we feel is the best for our peaceful flourishing. And so what happens now? That moment really, for me, captured a sense of like, a very Hobbesian kind of moment there. We spoke with a couple of senior political theorists at the conference in Virginia, people who we can say they've been around a fairly long time and seen many anxious moments come and go in the United States.

So they have extra perspective on it. Here is George Shulman. He's professor emeritus at New York University. And Tom asked him to talk about his anxieties of the moment. I mean, mass deportation, detention camps, the whole thing around sexuality, it's not just trans people. You know, the court cases, they're clearly intending to go after privacy, contraception, birth control.

They're very ambitious right now. So it's a little bit Handmaid's Tale. And they have state power. They have the court system now. Not entirely, but way more than they did even four years ago. So those are all the things that scare me. I would say fear more than anxiety somehow. So George says he feels fear more than anxiety. What's at stake in that distinction he makes?

That's very interesting. I think in that context, George Schulman is saying that you know it's coming. The mass deportation promise, like you know it's coming. So it's not a matter of anxiety in terms of whether this was going to happen to me or not. People are almost in a state of fear that this is coming and it's happening. Because as he said, that they also have the courts behind them. The, we don't even. Right. So fear is more specific.

You're, you're afraid of the tiger. You're anxious about what kinds of tigers might be out there. Yeah. I define anxiety for Hobbes and like, there's like four emotions between which you're vacillating. There's hope and despair on the one hand, and then there's courage and fear on the other hand. And so if you're not vacillating towards hope or courage, the fear aspect has dominated

your emotion. And this is not to say that everybody wouldn't understand anxiety today in the same way. But I think it's worth seeing the concept of Hobbes as he said it. So the real struggle is that you're vacillating or it's a pendulum. And the misery is that you don't know where it's going to settle. You could settle on hope, you could settle on fear, you could settle on courage, you could settle on fear, you could settle on courage, you could settle on despair. Hobbes defines fear as aversion to the possibility of hurt. There is still uncertainty there. You are afraid because there is some element

of hope that it might not happen. But what can hurt you is very clear, as opposed to anxiety, which is about many things on what could possibly happen in the future. And that's why the main difference is that anxiety also has this element of you want to fulfill your desires and you don't know if you can. So fear really is about aversion from things that can hurt you. This distinction between fear and anxiety is the reason why I argue that anxiety was a passion that can explain more comprehensively

how Hobbes tried to motivate people. As Hoechstra was explaining to us, it's fear, but Hobbes also says that it is the hope for commodious living, through which he wants to motivate people to obey this absolute sovereign. The passions that incline men to peace are fear of death, desire of such things as are necessary to commodious living, and a hope by their industry to obtain them. It sounds to me like you're suggesting that to really understand the current moment in

US politics anyway, people have said, oh, this was an election about anger. This was an election about hatred. This was an election about feeling abandoned or whatever. But you seem to be saying, no, no, no, if you want to figure out what's going on here, there's this thing that Hobbes says where what's going on is this vacillation between different emotions. That's the thing to really zero in on if you want to where what's going on is this vacillation between different emotions. That's the thing to really zero in on if you want to understand what's motivating people. Right. Yeah, that's exactly what I'm saying.

The vacillation between different passions creates this kind of agony. It's almost as though you want to know the end. It's like a mystery is playing and sometimes you're just like, just tell me what's gonna happen. So I think it is really the dangerous desire for that kind of certainty on which people acted. And this is why I argue that understanding human motivation in terms of the agony of vacillation between different passions and the desire for certainty

really helps us understand what motivates people. Well, let us play you another clip from illustrious but anxious professor, Jeannie Moorfield from Oxford University. Alright, great. So what is making me anxious is the possibility that we are on the verge of a full authoritarian takeover and there's an entire strata of liberal democrats who are still unwilling to come to grips with what the problems are in this country. And every time this happens in the past, it's been getting bigger and

bigger, they deflect. They say it's either us or it's fascism, democracy is in crisis. There's lots of crying wolf. And now we're here and I'm terrified, incredibly anxious that they still won't reckon with things like the absence of a national health care program. You're Canadian, you know, the fact we spend a trillion dollars a year on our defense budget and have no national health care program. That should be the top of what we talk about. Instead it all gets muddled.

Again, I come back to like liberal unwillingness to admit that they contributed to the problem. And now we're here in full on problem. And I wanna know what we're gonna do. So I'm anxious about that. So this is exactly like the direction in which I wanna take this project like on the next steps is that although Hobbes has in popular culture

been read as an apologist for dictatorship, as we saw, he has lessons for democracy. The reason why he is skeptical of democracy, it's because the wealthy, the powerful takeover and the concerns of the common people are almost ignored. So when Jeannie brought up the point that every time we have this kind of fascist or authoritarian takeover, liberal Democrats instead of reckoning with the problem, go into this us versus them, It's either us versus them.

And we saw this election. A lot of the campaign videos which you'll see is like Harris just responds saying, do you want the fascists to come to power or not? So I feel like an argument strangely, which is for authoritarianism. The lesson for democracy it has is today is that if you want democracy to sustain, it needs to address common people's problems. As she said that we're spending trillions on a defense budget, but we don't have a national health care program. Unemployment is rampant.

There's a housing crisis. I mean, that's in Canada too. And that leads to like placing blame easily on a bunch of immigrants. So I think the lesson for liberal Democrats is that instead of falling back into this us versus them trap, do some self-reflection. Why is it the case that you're not able to focus on the issues that really matter? And I think the answer there is that democracy is taken over by big donors, by oligarchic interests.

So Hobbes was right. Yeah, yeah. So, but he was like, I don't think democracy will solve this problem. So let's just have a nice sovereign who will actually take care of, But of course we know that that's not the direction. That's a very dangerous direction. Hobbes was right, but it's vitally important that we prove him wrong. Yeah.

Yeah, but what we can really learn, I think, as I say, so it is the anxiety for equality, but to address that, you really need to start to see that people want the state because they think that it can help them improve their lives. And if they're not seeing a certain kind of version of democracy provide that they're going to get attracted to another kind of democracy, because let's not forget it is elections which brought this outcome, democratic elections. Before she left, Vertica pointed us to a work of political science.

It gets into the specifics of how anxiety affects real American voters and the decisions they make. The insight they can provide is actually so valuable because the work of political scientists is based on actual empirical data today. As opposed to, let's say me as a political theorist who is neither Canadian nor American trying to comment on American elections based on the news pieces I read. Hi, I'm Bethany Albertson. I'm an associate professor at University of Texas at Austin. Hi, I'm Shaina Gadarian.

I'm professor of political science and associate dean for research at the Maxwell School at Syracuse University. And you work together sometimes? We do. I would say we're both political psychologists. We're interested in how everyday people understand and react to our world. A lot of our work is about what is threatening, but we work on other areas as well.

And tell us the name of your book. Our book is Anxious Politics, Democratic Citizenship in a Threatening World. Oh my goodness, how did I almost forget that? Probably because you wrote it a while ago. We did. We did, yeah. We started working on the book in 2007 and it came out in 2015, but I think still quite relevant when we're thinking

about the kind of politics of 2024 and 2025. To measure the impact of anxiety on politics, Bethany and Shaina carried out experiments in a controlled setting, with a slightly cruel goal. We made people anxious a lot of times. This is on the radio so you can tell. But we look nice, but we actually spend a long time making people feel anxious about politics, which is maybe not so nice. So we did a series of experiments. We knew kind of what made people anxious, but sometimes

we used news manipulations or campaign ad manipulations so that we could trigger anxiety in one group and not the others. The two issues we focused on through the majority of studies with immigration anxieties and public health anxieties. We use a campaign ad that was based on one that had run in California in the 1990s when they were going through discussions about immigration and undocumented immigration. We made various versions of that ad, which talked about both the cost of immigration to jobs and to the economy and to culture. And in one version of that ad, it had very scary music.

We had someone do the narration of it. So it had, you know, talking specifically about the cost of immigration and how it had, you know, talking specifically about the costs of immigration and how it's bad for the U.S. Other people in the study saw a different version of the ad. One of the versions had scary music and one of them didn't. We can randomly assign people to either have this kind of scary immigration ad or not, and then check what their attitudes are about immigration, who they trust to take care of immigration.

That allows us a lot of leverage to see actually how much these small tweaks in political communication can both change people's feelings about politics and policy and then who they trust to take care of it. Everything in the ad is the same. The narration's the same. It's just the music and some of the pictures that are picked to cross the border, guns, drugs, right? And what campaign ads do all the time, right?

They're grainy, they're dark, they're designed to make you feel afraid. The scary version shows people jumping metal fences, being arrested, looking poor and angry. The not as scary ad shows things like an ordinary-looking bus, a public meeting, some kids in a classroom. And then we ask people who they trust to handle immigration, the Democratic Party, the Republican Party, the president, etc., etc. And we ask them for their policy attitudes on immigration. The people who saw the more scary ad afterwards were more likely to say they trusted figures from the Republican Party.

They were less inclined to trust, for instance, Barack Obama. By just changing a couple of things, the music and the visuals, we feel pretty confident that the differences we get in trust after subjects see the ad are due to the changes in the levels of anxiety. People are willing when they are anxious to make this trade off of taking rights away from other people in order to keep the population safe. And that's a trade off that you would continue to have in other policy areas. Terrorism is a very clear example of that.

And we want to think about, we think of anxiety as a tool. It's not, it's not normatively good or bad. It can be used for various purposes. And this is one of them where we want to think about when anxiety is very high about immigration or public health, like whose rights are we willing to take away and who pays the consequences of that in a democracy? That's really interesting. And you know, it's a tool that is neither good nor bad.

And so how can it be a useful emotion for politicians? I mean, if there's if your area is undergoing a flood if you're in imminent in danger of imminent bodily harm for instance right you need that anxiety to focus your attention and motivate behavior right it should get you to pay attention to the news and pay attention to experts and take protective action now this all gets more complicated when you switch from a flood to something more debatable. There's all sorts of dangers out there

that some people will tell you are threatening the country and some people will say aren't. I mean, lots of us, lots of us think that one of the biggest threats we face is climate change. Climate change makes plenty of people very anxious, but we also have strong political messaging that it's not something that people ought to be frightened about. And so, right, in some of these clear-cut areas with imminent threat, imminent danger, like a flood, like a terrorist attack, when it's happening, we can all agree, right, that that anxiety can be

useful in motivating protective behavior, but then take one or two steps away from those things that are obvious to everyone and it gets more complicated, whether that anxiety is normatively good or it can be used towards deceptive ends. Let's set aside whether I'm trying to be deceptive or not here, but if I want to manipulate the anxieties of my public somehow, are there any particularly effective ways of doing it? Because there's some evolutionary benefits in groups, I think one of the ways that politicians are quite effective at making people fearful is to make them fearful of groups that are different than themselves. And sometimes that's ethnic groups or language groups.

Sometimes that's, we think about kind of the discussion going on in the US about trans rights right now, kind of minority groups, sexual minorities. I don't think we're advocating for that, but that is one thing that we have seen that is quite effective. I mean, one of the things to also note is that these anxiety messages, particularly when they're focusing on groups, may also turn off other groups, particularly groups who are kind of more supportive of group rights. You can scare a subset of people, but they may not be universally effective. Right. So like with the concern over immigration, you can build a wall, so there's something very tangible. You can have faces of migrants coming over the border. That's

also super tangible. But when it goes to climate change, it's way too nebulous and complicated to have clear action. Yeah. I mean, I think it's nebulous. I also think it's, you know, who do you put pressure on to actually change things, right? It's like, it's multi-levels of government, it's business, it's, you know, international actors. So it's not only the nebulasness of it, which I think is a problem, but also like,

where do you put the pressure in order to have an effect? Oh, I like this. So step one and using anxiety to manipulate the public is deciding which particular public you're going to make anxious because you probably can't make them all anxious. And then you've got to give those people both a bit of an enemy and you've got to give them a thing to do that's clear. Oh, and also you've got to direct them towards your experts and towards the right information. Yeah. I mean, and again, you don't necessarily need an enemy that it just seems

to be particularly effective. Okay. All right. So we might be able to fix the climate change thing, but only by turning everyone even more against immigrants. It's not perfect, is it? Not, not. We're not advocating that to be clear.

Shaina and Bethany, thank you so much for speaking with us. Thank you. Thank you. and danger of violence and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, pretty, and short. Vertiga is sitting in our Montreal studio. She's been listening to the whole show so far. Hi Vertiga. Hello, it was great fun. Not feeling anxious at all. Good, good. Woodhops, do you think, have any opinion

on whether you should use people's irrational anxiety to manipulate them and keep them in order? Of course, the context is very different. But if he were to use their irrational anxieties, he would say, look, here's this beautiful positive thing you can make, which was the mortal god. However, in his times, it was like he was pretty clear that it was to be for all people.

But in today's times, the idea is that we're creating divisions based on what seems to be positive for one group is negative for the other. So it's hard to say like what he would exactly say to people today. But my understanding is that he would say address the source of these anxieties in terms of like democracies need to better facilitate conditions of more flourishing living for people who are easily attracted by these anxious messages because if their lives are better probably they wouldn't pay attention to anxious messages which can divide people. Right. So in a nutshell then,

if Hobbes were to look at our anxious democracies today, what advice would you imagine that he would share? I think he would probably say that the people who are in charge of ruling, like the people doing politics, if they want to counter forces, which they think are threatening to the body politic over the long term, what they need to do is address what people really want. And that's like, what does everyone really want?

They want to have a more flourishing life. So — Commodious living. Commodious living. Yeah. And it's returning to the message of the end of philosophy by Kinshaw X-ray It's like what is politics really for for Hobbes regime type like the democratic regime type was not really important And he argued a different regime type

But he draws our attention to the messages that what's politics really for and people really care actually about that Like how can it improve their lives more than what is the type of politics. So if you want to protect the type of politics that you want, we need to like back up and pay attention to the fact that the end of this is so that people can have a better life and if they're not having that like instead of like this us versus them kind of paradigm, we need to like really make sure that policies are more directed where people who are stuck in precarity can come out of that, for example, and not like place blame on immigrants, therefore.

I got a question for you. So OK, we have this bumper sticker that is the thing that has made it into pop culture. You know, Hobbes said that life was nasty, brutish, and short unless you had a sovereign to keep you in order. Your research could leave us wanting a different bumper sticker for Hobbes. What would it be?

I think he wanted everybody to have those flourishing lives, and not just some people, and at least to a base level. So probably some combination of, I mean, my title, like originally as I envisaged was From Anxiety to Felicity. So I'll put like Felicity in there, peace there, and probably prosperity. I thought you were gonna say his bumper sticker

was gonna be, take people's anxiety seriously, or you'll get it in the neck. Yeah, okay, OK. OK, that's what you were saying. OK, if you were to turn that around and say, in today's times, what would it be? But I like your version. It's more like a peaceful, happy, yoga-like vision

of the world. Yeah, so one thing I want to say there is that the title of my first chapter is The Therapeutic Hobbes. and the argument that I'm making there is that too much of this self-help discourse, like what we have forgotten is that a lot of people's anxieties cannot be solved by self-help, and these issues are political. And we need to bring back our attention to the fact that for the vast majority of people, their anxieties, like the solutions need to be political. Not to suggest to take

agency or empowerment away from people for the ability to change their lives in the meantime, but it's worth remembering that a lot of the issues, like many people cannot just change their lives by self-help. Anxiety is political, stupid. Thomas Hobbes. I'm gonna keep on workshopping these with you. Vertika, it's been so great learning about your research. Thanks so much for talking with us. This was great fun. Thank you so much. Thank you, Vertika. You were listening to an episode called Nasty, Brutish and Anxious, what Thomas Hobbes would tell democracies now. It's part of our series, Ideas from the Trenches.

The producers were Tom Howell and Nikola Lukzic. Thank you to Mauro Caraccioli and everyone at the 2024 Association for Political Theory Conference in Blacksburg, Virginia. Thanks as well to Patrick Howell for reading the words of Thomas Hobbes. Find and subscribe to Ideas on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. And check out our podcast archive.

It contains more than 300 recent episodes. Our technical producer is Danielle Duval. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Senior producer, Nikola Lukcic. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of Ideas. And I'm Nala Ayed. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.