It is not a recent revelation that modernity comes with a peculiar form of loss of humanity. We are lost in fear, subject to anomic and anonymous forces claiming for themselves the name of Society. In this context:
“Anxiety can mount authentically only in a Dasein which is resolute. He who is resolute knows no fear; but he understands the possibility of anxiety as the possibility of the very mood which neither inhibits nor bewilders him. Anxiety liberates him from possibilities which “count for nothing”, and lets him become free for those which are authentic.” (Martin Heidegger)
This is very carefully explained by James Magrini as follows:
“If, on the one hand, Angst is interpreted in an inauthentic manner, as a constant threat to one’s healthful existence, Dasein flees in fear from anxiety’s disturbing effects to the safety and familiarity of the interpretations of the status quo. If, on the other hand, Angst is perceived as the bridge to a unique form of understanding, which connects Dasein to the finite realities of its Being-in-the-world, then as opposed to prefiguring horror and passivity, anxiety announces itself as the harbinger of Dasein’s authentic enactment of freedom for its possibilities. As anxiety is disclosing the insignificance of the world, authentic Dasein is reinterpreting the meaninglessness and impossibility of existence as revelatory. This radical conversion of the inauthentic view “signifies that one is letting the possibility of an authentic potentiality-for-Being be lit up,” i.e., one is behaving philosophically, awakened by the sense of wonder.”
(J. Magrini, “Anxiety in Heidegger’s Being and time: The Harbinger of Authenticity”, 2006 – http://dc.cod.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1016&context=philosophypub – Magrini quotes from “Being and Time” in the Macquarrie and Robinson’s translation, 1962)