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In Monarchy of Fear, you write of the epiphany you had on the night Trump was elected president in 2016.
在《恐惧的君主制》中，你写到了2016年特朗普当选总统当晚你的顿悟。
I was in Japan, isolated from my friends and unable to express my upset and fear in the usual way—by talking to and hugging them. There was this churning of panic as the news came in. I already knew the electorate was divided, so why was I so terrified? I realized people were feeling that way all over the place. Some fear can be good, but this was a seething current of emotion preventing people from getting together and talking to each other about what we should do to fix the nation’s problems.
当时我在日本，没和朋友们在一块，无法用通常的方式表达我的不安和恐惧——交谈和拥抱。消息传来，一片恐慌。我早就知道选民们意见不一，所以为何我那么害怕呢? 我意识到到处都有人有这种感觉。有些恐惧可能是好事，但这是一种强烈的情绪，阻止人们聚在一起，讨论我们应该做些什么来解决国家的问题。
How do you define fear?
你如何定义恐惧?
It is the most primitive emotion, and the first one felt by an infant arriving in this rather painful world, in desperate need of someone to protect them. When we feel helpless later in life, fear makes us scapegoat others. Instead of fixing the problems, we say, “Oh, it’s all their fault—those women or immigrants are infesting our country.” Rather than useful protest or constructive solutions, we get angry at these handy targets.
这是一种最原始的情感，是一个婴儿来到这个相当痛苦的世界，迫切需要有人来保护他们的第一种感受。当我们在之后的生活中感到无助时，恐惧使我们成为别人的替罪羊。我们并不是解决问题，而是说，“哦，都是他们的错——那些妇女和移民在我们国家出没。”我们对这些便利的目标感到愤怒，而不是采取有用的抗议或建设性的解决方案。
Fear is also behind disgust, a visceral reaction to our own mortality and animality—feces and bodily fluids and such. This is true across every single society; we project grossness onto a racial or gender subgroup or caste. A big part of social subordination and discrimination is to ascribe hyper-animality to other groups and use that as an excuse for subordinating them further. And then we feel better about ourselves; we can be the angels, and they can be the animals.
厌恶的背后也隐藏着恐惧，厌恶是对我们自身的死亡和动物性的本能反应——粪便和体液等等。每个社会都是如此；我们把粗俗投射到一个种族或性别亚群或社会地位上。社会从属和歧视的很大一部分是将超兽性归因于其他群体，并以此作为进一步从属他们的借口。然后我们自我感觉更好；我们可以是天使，他们可以是动物。
Women, with their menstrual periods and childbirth, have always been targets of this in all cultures. They have come to stand for the disgusting body. There’s the long-standing trope of racism, that black people are more animal. And Jews were often compared to insects; Kafka’s Metamorphosis was about how a man suddenly turns into a cockroach.
在所有文化中，月经周期和分娩都是这方面的目标。他们是来代表那令人作呕的身体的。长期以来一直存在种族主义的说法，即黑人更像动物。犹太人经常被比作昆虫；卡夫卡的《变形记》讲的是一个人如何突然变成一只蟑螂。
Disgust is something that rears up at times when we feel helpless or fearful. All of a sudden, you find people talking in ways that we thought we had given up. Consider Trump, who talks about African nations as shitholes and immigrants as infestations, like insects.
当我们感到无助或恐惧的时候，厌恶就会出现。突然间，你会发现人们在用我们以为已经放弃的方式说话。想想特朗普吧，他把非洲国家说成是地洞，把移民说成是害虫。
译文由可可原创，仅供学习交流使用，未经许可请勿转载。
