A new year - Reasons for guarded optimism

In 1933 when American president Franklin D Roosevelt declared in his first inaugural speech that “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself” he was speaking in the context of the Great Depression and efforts to revive the US economy.

In 1968, Martin Luther King spoke similar words in the cauldron of the battle for civil rights and racial equality.

Both men were echoing a remark made 400 years earlier by the English philosopher Francis Bacon, who spoke of fear as the inner enemy and said: “Nothing is to be feared but fear itself. Nothing grievous but to yield to grief.”