In Monarchy of Fear, you write of the epiphany you had on the night Trump was elected president in 2016.
在《恐懼的君主制》中,你寫到了2016年特朗普當選總統(tǒng)當晚你的頓悟。
I was in Japan, isolated from my friends and unable to express my upset and fear in the usual way—by talking to and hugging them. There was this churning of panic as the news came in. I already knew the electorate was divided, so why was I so terrified? I realized people were feeling that way all over the place. Some fear can be good, but this was a seething current of emotion preventing people from getting together and talking to each other about what we should do to fix the nation’s problems.
當時我在日本,沒和朋友們在一塊,無法用通常的方式表達我的不安和恐懼——交談和擁抱。消息傳來,一片恐慌。我早就知道選民們意見不一,所以為何我那么害怕呢? 我意識到到處都有人有這種感覺。有些恐懼可能是好事,但這是一種強烈的情緒,阻止人們聚在一起,討論我們應該做些什么來解決國家的問題。
How do you define fear?
你如何定義恐懼?
It is the most primitive emotion, and the first one felt by an infant arriving in this rather painful world, in desperate need of someone to protect them. When we feel helpless later in life, fear makes us scapegoat others. Instead of fixing the problems, we say, “Oh, it’s all their fault—those women or immigrants are infesting our country.” Rather than useful protest or constructive solutions, we get angry at these handy targets.
這是一種最原始的情感,是一個嬰兒來到這個相當痛苦的世界,迫切需要有人來保護他們的第一種感受。當我們在之后的生活中感到無助時,恐懼使我們成為別人的替罪羊。我們并不是解決問題,而是說,“哦,都是他們的錯——那些婦女和移民在我們國家出沒。”我們對這些便利的目標感到憤怒,而不是采取有用的抗議或建設性的解決方案。
Fear is also behind disgust, a visceral reaction to our own mortality and animality—feces and bodily fluids and such. This is true across every single society; we project grossness onto a racial or gender subgroup or caste. A big part of social subordination and discrimination is to ascribe hyper-animality to other groups and use that as an excuse for subordinating them further. And then we feel better about ourselves; we can be the angels, and they can be the animals.
厭惡的背后也隱藏著恐懼,厭惡是對我們自身的死亡和動物性的本能反應——糞便和體液等等。每個社會都是如此;我們把粗俗投射到一個種族或性別亞群或社會地位上。社會從屬和歧視的很大一部分是將超獸性歸因于其他群體,并以此作為進一步從屬他們的借口。然后我們自我感覺更好;我們可以是天使,他們可以是動物。
Women, with their menstrual periods and childbirth, have always been targets of this in all cultures. They have come to stand for the disgusting body. There’s the long-standing trope of racism, that black people are more animal. And Jews were often compared to insects; Kafka’s Metamorphosis was about how a man suddenly turns into a cockroach.
在所有文化中,月經(jīng)周期和分娩都是這方面的目標。他們是來代表那令人作嘔的身體的。長期以來一直存在種族主義的說法,即黑人更像動物。猶太人經(jīng)常被比作昆蟲;卡夫卡的《變形記》講的是一個人如何突然變成一只蟑螂。
Disgust is something that rears up at times when we feel helpless or fearful. All of a sudden, you find people talking in ways that we thought we had given up. Consider Trump, who talks about African nations as shitholes and immigrants as infestations, like insects.
當我們感到無助或恐懼的時候,厭惡就會出現(xiàn)。突然間,你會發(fā)現(xiàn)人們在用我們以為已經(jīng)放棄的方式說話。想想特朗普吧,他把非洲國家說成是地洞,把移民說成是害蟲。
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