“Liberalism and illuminism want to insinuate us in a world without fear; they promise to do away with every type of fear. They wish to eliminate every dependency on another and its intimate tension. This search for security is founded on a total auto-affirmation of the self which denies the risk of going out of oneself and entrusting oneself to another… When one tries to completely eliminate fear, without any residue, repressed fear shows up in many guises, as a fundamental anxiety…In our time, these new anxieties germinate and assume in many ways the form of collective psychoses.”
Carlo Bellieni writes about why many in our culture “believe that life is acceptable only if we can control all of the details (here one could cite another widespread example, among many, the desire for physical perfection). When something escapes our control, some people rationally take cover whereas more often, psychoses is induced, sometimes on a collective basis. ”
Bellieni is writing in the context of epidemics … what he writes is pertinent to the “worried well” Diane Meier refers to – those who want control at the end of life in the form of assisted suicide.
Bellieni “Anatomy of a Catastrophe” in l’Osservatore Romano