Look into the face of your doom! Behold your master! You are compelled to obey! The thought of summoning its wrath is too terrifying to entertain. If you look closely, you can even see bits of human flesh lodged in this demon’s teeth. She is, indeed, like a scaring machine.
I am convinced that the most damaging human emotion, the one that’s even worse than hatred, envy, or any of the other old standards, is fear. Fear makes us stupid. Fear makes us compliant. Fear turns us into monsters and slaves. A person living in fear is less than a whole person.
When I say “fear,” I’m not talking about the piss-inducing adrenaline rush you get when you see that truck bearing down on you at full speed. That’s an important and valuable psychochemical reaction that makes it more likely that you’ll jump out of the way.
No, I’m talking about those things that make you want to hide even when you aren’t directly faced with them. Fear of tomorrow, fear of what could happen, fear of ideas, fear of the intangible, fear of the unfamiliar, fear of that which you have no control over. These are the most common fears we have, and we have them on purpose. It’s our chief weakness, and is exploited to control us.
All advertising, at root, is based on fear. Make people afraid of something, and they’ll want to buy a product/ideology/philosophy that will make the scary thing go away. Each of the seven standard marketing/propaganda approaches really play to fear, be it fear of ill health, bodily injury, social rejection, appearing stupid, ugly, or whatever, we will go to great lengths and swallow huge quantities of bullshit to make the fear stop. It is a compulsion, a kind of mental illness.
When we live without fear, we end up making better decisions. We think more creatively. We stop refusing to look at the realities of our circumstances. We start enjoying life more. In short, we become more whole.
Be like Jacqueline. Be scary. Be human.
“However desperate the situation and circumstances, do not despair. When there is everything to fear, be unafraid. When surrounded by dangers, fear none of them. When without resources, depend on resourcefulness. When surprised, take the enemy itself by surprise.” — Sun Tzu, The Art of War.
(Thanks to Exploding Aardvark for telling us about the terrifying tot.)
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Isn’t paranoia a fear also?
Oddly, I’m in agreement with this and the previous post.
It’s not so odd, really. I don’t think there’s a real contradiction between this and the prior post. The last post encourages an assessment of the potential downsides of cell phones and offers one way to mitigate them for those who want to. In this way you can gain a sense of control over your environment, and a feeling of lack of control is a major source of harmful fear. So I count that post to be an antifear one as well, in its own way.
Paranoia is not fear, exactly (psychologically speaking, paranoia is a form of self-aggrandizement or egotism. “I’m so important or special that the forces of the world are concentrating on defeating me.”) Of course, paranoia breeds fear. The mark of paranoia, though, is that it’s unrealistic fear. The notion that the government (and other parties) is interested in tracking and eavesdropping on common, everyday communications is not paranoia at all since we know for a fact that this is being done. The only question is what, if anything, one wants to do about it.
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