A Culture of Fear. The Influence of Fear and Anxiety on our Economic Thinking and Acting

Bachelor Thesis from the year 2020 in the subject Business economics - Miscellaneous, grade: 1,0, Munich University of Applied Sciences (Fakult酹 f Betriebswirtschaftslehre), language: English, abstract: Nietzsche complains that the world has lost much of its charm because we no longer fear it enough. This diagnosis hardly seems to apply to our age. The emergence of a culture of fear can scarcely be said to have made the world more charming, either. Fear is dark and heavy. It laces one's throat, takes our breath away, freezes us. Fear is a feeling everyone knows and nobody wants to have. Those who are afraid can no longer think clearly, mainly because they are afraid to lose something: their face, their money, their child, their safety. Whatever our fear may be directed to, whether rational or irrational, diffuse, floating, object-related or chronic: it is, in any case, existential. It shows us what we could lose-and at the same time hinders us from preventing that loss. In uncertain times, individual fears are often raised to a general social mood, an attitude to the life of an entire society. Given the increasing complexity of a world in which everything is interwoven and news is pouring on us in real-time, one might feel that fear is the predominant emotion in our culture. In this study, Dominik Stojkovic examines the concept of fear and anxiety in order to explain its impact on people living in Western culture. In particular, the effect of fear and anxiety on people's economic thinking and decision-making is analyzed to understand what possible economic loss may come with growing fear and anxiety. The author finds that the fear instinct of people living in Western cultures can harm them by distorting their worldview and influencing their decision-making process. People, then, seem to allow emotional, instinctive reactions instead of adhering to rational logic. This work is divided into four main chapters, each of which has several subchapters. In Chapter