1933年3月。从字面上和隐喻上看，美国仍然是冬天。失业率没有官方标准，但至少是25%。成千上万的银行关门了，数百万美国人的存款不见了。人们在纽约和华盛顿的帐篷城市扎营。欧洲陷入了同样严重的萧条，世界各地政府的每一次犹豫不决似乎都让事情变得更糟。
因此，当坐在轮椅上、意志坚定的富兰克林·罗斯福宣誓就任总统时，他的第一句话是:“让我申明我坚定的信念，我们唯一需要害怕的是...恐惧本身——一种无名的、不合理的、不合理的恐惧，它使将退却转化为前进所需的努力陷于瘫痪。”经济大萧条并没有随着这些话而结束，事实上持续了很多年，但是从那一刻起，最低点过去了，黑暗消失了，人们开始相信未来会有更好的事情发生。
说我们不仅可以使用这些词语，还可以注入希望和结束恐惧，这是轻描淡写。罗斯福明白——令人惊讶的是，考虑到他自己多少有些受宠的教养，但也许部分是由于他濒临死亡的脊髓灰质炎经历——恐惧摧毁了一切。他明白，不管威胁有多可怕，恐惧永远都不是出路和回头路的基础。它是麻痹的、分裂的，最终是自我实现的。他会认识到，今天的美国与1933年初非常相似，在病毒大流行的阵痛中，我们也深陷于一种心理疾病之中:我们被恐惧所控制，它正在麻痹我们。
这种恐惧正以多种腐蚀性的方式表现出来。“你可以扼杀经济，也可以杀死人”这种早期的两极化和党派性的说法现在已经变成了一个红蓝分界线。以不对经济生活造成进一步损害为名，在病毒达到顶峰或被遏制之前，共和党占多数的多个州已经推动重新开放经济，而在大多数民主党州，口头禅是，正如纽约州州长安德鲁·科莫(Andrew Cuomo)所言，“只要你有健康”，其余的都可以重建，没有什么比死亡更糟糕的了。
这两种极端的表达方式——在我们身体安全之前什么都不开放，或者开放一切，这样我们在经济上就可以安全——都是基于恐惧，要么是经济生活在试图抵御病毒时会被摧毁，要么是个人生活在没有极端措施的情况下会被摧毁。毫无疑问，这两种担忧都是合理的。从某种意义上说，两者都是真实的。除此之外，还有一个额外的有害信息:认为谁想加速开放，谁就是支持开放的信念”人类牺牲”，并坚信那些要求继续关闭的人是在侵犯生命和自由。然而，罗斯福明白的是，恐惧作为主导情绪，排除了艰难的选择和有效的有力、连贯的行动。
1933年春天，他特别想到的是，人们试图将所有的钱从银行取出，并将现金留在家中的持续趋势。在联邦存款保险之前的时代，“银行挤兑”是一种长期威胁。银行挤兑之所以如此命名，是因为人们在恐慌中跑向银行，他们知道如果去得太晚，钱就会不见了，因为那时和现在一样，银行贷出的钱比现有存款多得多。面对持续的经济崩溃，数百万人在大萧条的头几年试图把钱取出来，这加速了银行倒闭的数量，这加速了农场、住宅和企业的止赎数量，这导致更多的银行倒闭，这造成更多的失业，这使人们更加恐慌。
个人的恐惧是完全合理的:银行倒闭意味着你可能会损失所有的钱，把钱取出来是必要的。但集体恐惧是自我挫败和破坏性的，因为它加剧了危机，并最终自我实现。这是罗斯福知道需要停止的循环，他做到了。
今天，对治疗比疾病更糟糕的双重恐惧和疾病是可以想象的最糟糕的事情，正在推动各州相互矛盾的决定和全国范围的混乱，威胁着将我们留在最糟糕的世界。通过关闭(但还不够)，然后可能过早或半心半意地开放，我们有可能成为瑞典和巴西的结合体，而中国最不妥协的元素也加入其中。同样，每一种恐惧都是有道理的:充分和持续的经济破坏不仅仅是一个钱包问题，还会对生活造成持久的损害——我们知道抑郁、滥用、自杀和吸毒与任何疾病一样致命。病毒的继续无节制传播将会导致人类死亡，在美国有数十万人，在全球有数百万人。但是选择对这两种恐惧都采取行动将会导致更多的死亡和更多的经济破坏。
超越恐惧本身并不是解决办法。这是一个解决问题的空间。对这种疾病的恐惧导致一些人(正如我们的许多脸书帖子将会证明的那样)宣布他们打算在未来几年——不是几周，不是几个月——减少他们的联系，包括旅行和冒险，除了必需品。这是一种合法的方式，为我们所有人接种疫苗，防止致命病原体的传播。但是在这种恐惧中，决定尽可能安全的代价就消失了。如果每个人都认定这一点，以目前已知的死亡率来看，全球经济灾难几乎肯定会比疾病更致命:例如，整个柬埔寨国内生产总值的三分之一以上依赖旅游业和旅游业。旅游业占13%的工作岗位佛罗里达。许多旨在避免疾病的个人选择可能会变成旅行和旅游，相当于银行挤兑。
5月3日，在新泽西州巴约恩，当太阳落山时，一面美国国旗在911纪念泪滴上飘扬在纽约的地平线上。
美国一直是一个复杂的社会，没有多少共识，但恐惧的鸿沟阻碍了一切。你可以像瑞典一样，用较高的死亡率换取较低的永久性经济和社会损害，并提出合理的理由；你也可以像中国在武汉或西班牙在马德里等地那样，提出严重封锁的合理理由。你也可以指出一个更具破坏性的否认和咆哮的混合体，没有太多的连贯性，就像在巴西一样。但是，上述所有因素的组合是尽可能非最佳的，产生了一系列折中方案，最终破坏了每一个方案。
停止一连串的恐惧不会结束大流行，但它可能会缓解不彻底措施和不一致反应的恶性循环。一种方法可能是听从罗斯福的智慧；另一个可能是开始少关注现在被强调的卡珊德拉的智慧。就像2008-09年一样，预测危机的声音现在被视为有先见之明和明智的，就像他们在挡路一样。但卡桑德拉最强烈地提醒我们，我们可能已经为即将到来的危机做好了更充分的准备。一旦事情落到我们头上，他们很少是正确的声音。卡珊德拉的长处——忽视虚假的安全感，敏锐地洞察未经审视或未被承认的风险和弱点，对着风大喊大叫直到声音嘶哑——一旦危机显现，就会激起恐惧。
在紧急时刻，我们既要认识到正在发生的事情，又要有前进的愿景。接受没有没有后果的选择，没有没有痛苦的选择是很难的。在近乎歇斯底里的气氛中做那件事是不可能的。
扎卡里·卡拉贝尔是12本书的作者和进步网络的创始人。
这篇文章中表达的观点是作者自己的。
No Matter How Dire the Coronavirus Threat, Fear Is Not the Way Out | Opinion
March of 1933. It was still winter, literally and metaphorically, in the United States. There was no official measure of the unemployment rate, but it was at least 25 percent. Thousands of banks had shuttered, the deposits of millions of Americans gone. People were camped out in tent cities in New York and Washington. Europe was mired in an equally intense depression, and every halting move of governments everywhere seemed to make things worse.
And so when Franklin Roosevelt, wheelchair bound and determined, took the oath of the presidency, these were his first words: "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." The economic Great Depression did not end with those words and indeed lasted for years, but from that moment, the nadir was passed, the darkness lifted, and people began to believe that the future would hold better things.
It is an understatement to say that we could use not just those words but that injection of hope and the end of fear. FDR understood —surprisingly, given his own somewhat cosseted upbringing, but perhaps in part due to his near-death experience with polio—that fear destroys. He understood that no matter how dire a threat, fear is never the foundation of a way out, a way back. It is paralyzing, dividing and ultimately self-fulfilling. And he would recognize in the United States today something very similar to early 1933, that in the throes of a viral pandemic, we are mired in a psychological one as well: we are in the grip of fear, and it is paralyzing us.
That fear is manifesting in multiple and corrosive ways. The early polarized and partisan narrative of "you can kill the economy or you can kill people" has turned by now into a red-blue divide. Multiple states with Republican governing majorities have pushed to reopen their economies before the virus has crested or been contained in the name of doing no further damage to economic life, while in most Democratic states, the mantra is that, as New York Governor Andrew Cuomo put it, "as long as you have your health," the rest can be rebuilt, and that there is nothing worse than death.
The way both extremes are expressed—open nothing till we are safe physically or open everything so we can be safe economically—is grounded in fear, either that economic life will be destroyed in trying to protect against the virus and that personal life will be destroyed without extreme measures. Both fears are, without question, reasonable. Both are, in some sense, true. Added to them is an additional toxic message: The belief that whoever wants to accelerate the opening is endorsing "human sacrifice," and the conviction that those demanding a continued shutdown are intent on violating life and liberty. What FDR understood, however, was that fear as the guiding emotion precludes hard choices and forceful, coherent actions that are effective.
What he had specifically in mind in the spring of 1933 was the continued tendency of people to try to get all of their money out of banks and keep their cash at home. In an age before federal deposit insurance, "bank runs" were a chronic threat. And bank runs were so named because, well, in a panic people ran to the bank knowing that if they got there too late, the money would be gone, given that then, as now, a bank lent out much more money than it had on hand from deposits. In the face of continuing economic meltdown, millions of people during the first years of the Depression tried to get their money out, which accelerated the number of bank failures, which accelerated the number of foreclosures on farms, homes and businesses, which led to more bank failures, which created more unemployment, which made people panic more.
The individual fear was perfectly rational: Bank failures meant that you could lose all of your money, and getting it out was essential. But the collective fear was self-defeating and destructive, in that it intensified the crisis and ultimately was self-fulfilling. That was the cycle that FDR knew needed to be stopped, which he did.
Today, the dual fears of the cure being worse than the disease and the disease being the worst thing imaginable are driving conflicting decisions state by state and confusion nationally that threaten to leave us in the worst of worlds. By shutting down, but not quite enough, and then by opening up potentially too soon and probably half-heartedly, we risk becoming a combination of Sweden and Brazil, with the most uncompromising elements of China thrown into the mix. Again, each fear is in its way justified: Sufficient and continuous economic destruction is much more than a pocketbook issue and will cause lasting damage to lives well beyond livelihood—we know depression, abuse, suicide and drug use can be as lethal as any disease. Continued unchecked spread of the virus will kill people, hundreds of thousands in the United States and millions globally. But choosing to act on both fears is a recipe for both more death and more economic destruction.
Moving beyond fear is not itself a solution. It is a space for solutions. Fear of the disease leads some (as many of our Facebook feeds will attest) to announce that they intend to curtail their contact for the next years—not weeks, not months—including travel and venturing out for all but essentials. That is presented, legitimately, as a way to inoculate all of us against the spread of lethal pathogen. But in that fear, the costs of a decision to be as safe as possible get lost. If everyone decided that, the economic devastation globally would almost certainly be more lethal than the disease at current understood fatality rates: The entire country of Cambodia, for instance, depends on tourism and travel for more than a third of its gross domestic product. Tourism is 13 percent of jobs in Florida. A multitude of individual choices meant to avoid the disease could become the travel and tourism equivalent of a bank run.
A wind-blown American flag at the Tear Drop 9/11 Memorial flies over the skyline of New York City as the sun sets on May 3 in Bayonne, New Jersey.
The United States has always been a complex society without much consensus, but the fear divide hobbles everything. You can make a rational argument for trading the harms of somewhat higher deaths in return for less permanent economic and social damage, as Sweden has, and you can make a logical case for severe lockdowns as China did in Wuhan or Spain did in Madrid and beyond. You can also point to a more destructive mix of denial and bluster without much coherence, as is true in Brazil. But a mix of all of the above is about as nonoptimal as possible, generating a series of half-measures that ultimately undermine each.
Halting the cascade of fears won't end the pandemic, but it might alleviate a downward spiral of half-measures and incoherent responses. One way to do so might be to heed FDR's wisdom; another might be to begin to focus less on the wisdom of the Cassandras that are now being highlighted. Just as in 2008-09, voices that predicted the crisis are now seen as prescient and wise, as they were in their way. But Cassandras are strongest as reminders that we might have been better prepared for the crisis that was coming and came. They are rarely the right voices for what to do once it is upon us. The strengths of Cassandras—ignoring false senses of security, an acute eye for unexamined or unacknowledged risks and weakness, shouting into the wind until their voices are hoarse—stir up fear once the crisis has manifested.
In a time of urgency, we need both to recognize what is happening and have a vision for a way forward. Accepting that there are no choices without consequences and that there are no choices without pain is hard enough. Doing that in a climate of near hysteria is impossible.
Zachary Karabell is the author of 12 books and the founder of the Progress Network.
The views expressed in this article are the author's own.
