Petrified Forest

Fear, says Lewis Lapham, is America’s top-selling consumer product

‘The Temptation of Saint Anthony’ (detail) by David Teniers the Younger, 1640–60, via Rijksmuseum

By Lewis H. Lapham

Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.
— Franklin D. Roosevelt

Great self-destruction follows upon unfounded fear.
— Ursula K. Le Guin

Speaking to citizens of what in 1933 was still a democratic republic, Roosevelt sought to strengthen the national resolve in the depth of the Great Depression, “preeminently the time,” he said in his first inaugural address, to tell “the whole truth, frankly and boldly,” no need to “shrink from honestly facing conditions in our country today.” His fellow countrymen took him at his word, and the national resolve proved strong enough to emerge from the Depression, in 1941–45 to win the war against Germany and Japan, in the years since to bring forth the wealthiest society and the most heavily armed nation-state known to the history of mankind.