Democracy is demanded. It demands that you respect other people, give and receive and establish

relationships based on trust and reciprocity, which is of course what democracy is all about.

Hello, welcome to El Sir Clancho on the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Speaking of the Vox Media Podcast Network, we are looking for an audio engineer who will be working

on El Sir Clancho on the weeds. If you are a fan of these shows and you are a genius and engineering

audio, you should apply by going to VoxMedia.com. There's a careers tab there again, VoxMedia.com.

That said, this is a podcast that I actually think is pretty important. Martha Siena Spam is one of our

great living philosophers and she's been working in recent years to put emotions back at the center

of not just philosophy, but of how we understand politics. Her new book is called Monarchy of Fear.

I think it's particularly important because fear is the dominant emotion of our political age. It is

driving Donald Trump. It is driving reactions to Donald Trump and understanding it, how it's generated

in society, how it's generated in politics, how it's generated in individuals is necessary. It's a

precondition, I think, to understanding why politics is what it is and feels the way it feels.

The way she does this in the book is pretty interesting. She begins in infancy. She writes,

the discrepancy between the very slow physical development of the human infant and its rapid cognitive

development is in many respects a nightmare story. And she's saying there, we become able to know what

we want and what we need long before we're able to do it. We are trapped in a body that doesn't work.

For longer than we're trapped in a mind that doesn't understand. And that creates a real sense of

terror. And she goes on to say, we usually survive this condition, but we do not survive it without

being formed and deformed by it. Fear, genetically first among the emotions persists beneath them all

and infects them all, nibbling around the edges of love and reciprocity. This is a hell of a way

of understanding not just our politics, but our humanity itself. So as always you can email me at

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