[T]he most salient political fear, the one that most pervasively structures our lives and limits our possibilities, is the fear among the less powerful of the more powerful, whether public officials or private employers, far-off agents of state or local, familiar elites. ... For all our talk today of the fear of terrorism, or, before that, of communism, the most important form of fear is that which ordinary Americans have of their superiors, who sponsor and benefit from the inequities of everyday life. This kind of fear is repressive, constraining the actions of the less powerful, enabling the actions of the more powerful. It ensures that the less powerful abide by the express or implied wishes of their supervisors, or merely do nothing to challenge or undermine the existing distribution of power. Such fears are critical to power holders, enabling them to pursue their agendas with a freer hand, ensuring that they will enjoy their position for some time to come.

Writing in Fear: The History of a Political Idea, Corey Robin continues:

Consider the experience of a group of female employees at a Nabisco plant in Oxnard, California, maker of A-1 steak sauce and the world’s supplier of Grey Poupon mustard. In a 1995 lawsuit, these workers complained that their supervisors consistently prevented them from going to the bathroom. Instructed to urinate into their clothes or face three day’s suspension for unauthorized expeditions to the toilet, the workers opted to wear adult diapers. But incontinence pads were expensive, so the workers downgraded to Kotex and toilet paper, which pose severe health risks when soaked in urine. Indeed, several workers eventually contracted bladder and urinary tract infections. (Hearing of their plight, conservative commentator R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. advised them to wear special diapers used by horses in New York’s Central Park carriage trade.)

Not until April 1998 did the federal government, under pressure from labor unions, even maintain that employers had to grant employees an ill-defined “timely access” to the bathroom. Since then, employers have managed to evade the law. As of 2002, for instance, managers at a Jim Beam bourbon distillery in Clermont, Kentucky, were still keeping spreadsheets monitoring employee use of the bathroom, and forty-five employees were disciplined for heeding nature’s call outside company-approved break times. Female workers were even told to report the beginning of their menstrual cycles to the human resources department. These are just some of the more notorious cases of workplace coercion that have been publicized; it is anyone’s guess how many more workers suffer from similar constraints, but are too afraid to speak out against them.

Fear is an effective tool. The powerful use it to coerce compliance from the less-powerful without having to resort to physical coercion. Sometimes, those without power use it in order to gain power. Terrorism is a good example of the less-powerful using fear in order to become powerful and achieve their goals. If we are concerned about fear and coercion, however, terrorism may be a minor issue.

As outrageous as the treatment of the women at the Nabsico plant may have been, even more outrageous — and informative — is the reaction of outsiders like Tyrrell. Rather than experience any sympathy for their situation, he and presumably others accepted the existing power structure and abuse of power as perfectly legitimate. For them, there is nothing untoward about trying to establish control over others’ basic bodily functions in order to better control them while they are on the job.

These actions deny the basic humanity of the workers in question — they aren’t human beings with human needs and human biology, they are tools on the factory floor which need to be managed and even coerced into functioning in a manner acceptable to management’s production goals. Terrorism also denies the basic humanity of those victimized or at least just terrorized: making others feel afraid is a means to achieve the goals of altering public policy — nothing more, nothing less.

Whereas the political coercion and fear created by terrorists becomes the subject of a “war” designed to end it (as if the tactic of terrorism could possibly be eliminated), the social and economic coercion and fear created by some employers is ignored or even justified. Terrorist acts kill few people — the purpose of terrorism is to create fear in large numbers of people, not kill them. A government which genuinely cares about eliminating fear from people’s lives would take a broad view and tackle some of the many sources of fear which exist.

Read More Book Notes from the Book Reviews on this site.