The fear I am speaking of is not, of course, to be taken in the ordinary psychological sense as a definite, precise emotion. Most of those we see around are not quaking like aspen leaves; they wear faces of confident, self-satisfied citizens. We are concerned with fear in a deeper sense, an ethical sense if you will, namely, the more or less conscious participation in the collective awareness of a permanent and ubiquitous danger; anxiety about what is being, or might be, endangered, becoming gradually used to this threat as a substantive part of the actual world; the increasing degree to which, in an ever more skillful and matter-of-fact way, we go in for various kinds of external adaptation as the only effective method of self-defence…

The question arises, of course, what are people actually afraid of? Trials? Torture? Loss of property? Deportations? Executions? Certainly not. The most brutal forms of pressure exerted by the authorities upon the public are, fortunately, past history – at least in our circumstances…

Notoriously, it is not the absolute value of a threat which counts, so much as its relative values…For there is no one in our country who is not, in a broad sense, existentially vulnerable. Everyone has something to lose and so everyone has reason to be afraid…

People are thinking today far more of themselves, their homes and their families… They fill their homes with all kinds of equipment and pretty things, they try to raise their housing standards, they make life agreeable for themselves, building cottages, looking after their cars, taking more interest in their food and clothing and domestic comfort. In short, they turn their main attention to the material aspects of their private lives….

The authorities welcome and support this spill-over of energy into the private sphere.

But why? Because of its favorable effects as a stimulus to economic growth? Certainly that is one reason…. They see it for what it really is in its psychological origins: an escape from the sphere of public activity.

In the foreground, then, stands the imposing façade of great humanistic ideas and behind it crouches the modest family house…on the one side, bombastic slogans about the unprecedented increase of every sort of freedom an the unique structural variety of life; on the other side, unprecedented drabness and the squalor of life reduced to a hunt for consumer goods.