I’ve been thinking about fear a lot over the past couple of years, what it is, what it’s good for, when it becomes a hindrance, and as a result I’ve been looking critically at a lot of human behavior in general, and a lot of my own behavior specifically. It’s a hard thing to face, and may be a huge leap, but at this point I’d venture to say that fully 75% of everything people do is motivated by fear of one kind or another.
Fear of punishment is the basis for most of our legal system. More than not we don’t break the law not because we respect that the law exists to defend what is right but because we fear the cost of getting caught breaking the law. You can see this in practice every day in the way people “obey” traffic laws like the speed limit and the right turn on red after stop rule. If there is little or no chance you’ll be punished for breaking the law then why not disregard it when it is convenient for you to do so? No penalty equals no fear.
Fear can keep us in jobs we don’t like, eating shit from a bad boss who we can visibly see is incompetent, jumping through administrative hoops in the equivalent of a circus simply to get the benefits we were promised when we were hired, taking on more work than we are being paid to do because if we say no then we’re not “team players” and we might not get the raise we justly deserve simply for doing well the jobs we were hired to do. Because we fear the consequences of leaving a bad job, which could including unemployment or landing in a job where the conditions are even worse, we stay in a situation that is demoralizing at best and soul crushing at worst.
We’ll stay in unfilling relationships for the same reason: fear of the unknown. Is it better to stay with someone who doesn’t quite meet all your needs but meets some or most of them than it is to risk being alone? After all, our entire couple-obsessed, breeder-biased, wedding-crazy culture tells us that only losers are single, and only crazy losers are single and happy to be so.
Fear of ridicule or ostracism causes new college or high school students to wonder not “how can I get the most out of this experience” but “will I fit in?” and it keeps us toeing the line on social conventions that make absolutely no practical sense (someone justify for me, please, why it’s OK for men to be hairy but women “should” spend thousands of dollars a year and hundreds of hours on hair removal…there is no practical or logical reason for it). Homophobia, racism, the illegal immigrant debate, these are all social manifestations of fear of the unknown.
And while fear may be one of the three innate human emotions – anger and love being the other two – fear is simply a message. Conquering fear isn’t all that hard. It only takes accepting one tiny but very hard truth.
You’re already dead.
In America, at least, our medical industry, our fashion industry, our banking debt industry, our beauty care industry, and, increasingly, our government are based on the idea that if we simply make the right moves at the right time we can not just stave off the inevitable and prolong our useful lives but, and this is the sneaky, nasty, underlying psychology of human perception, that we can stay young forever (and perhaps never die at all). But the simple truth is that for each of us our death is out there waiting. Whether it’s a car accident, at home in bed of “natural causes,” in a sterile hospital room, or as a direct result of our own risky behavior (like drug addiction or sex with anonymous strangers in public rest rooms), each of us will meet death at some point. So why not proceed as if we already have?
Why do we cling so hard to the status quo trying to preserve what was instead of living in the now and dealing with what is?
If life is as fragile as all our persuasive industries tell us it is – for the love of God, don’t eat that Dorito! you might give yourself diabetes, or pre-diabetes which can lead to diabetes so you need to carefully monitor whatever you put in your mouth (I’m waiting for them to come up with pre-pre-diabetes, you know, for infants who nurse too much) – why then do we treat it as if it were permanent? Why do we hold grudges? Why do we figure that there is “always tomorrow” to do what we want, to travel, to follow our dreams? Why do we not say what we think and tell the people who annoy us to buzz off and the people we love that they’re important?
Why do we not treat our lives as a gift? We don’t really own them, after all, and their length isn’t guaranteed, so why do we let fear constrain us, push us around, and run our lives?
I wish I had the answers, but I don’t. Just questions and a growing comfort with the fact that I will cease to be eventually.
Ok – here’s my rather cynical take on all this: we are born animals, and the real journey is from that state to human being. Few make it. What’s the difference? Animals are dominated by and respond to material necessities. Humans have grown into that (human) state by boot-strapping themselves out of this domination – I think through choosing values other than the immediate and physical.
Of course the question is whether there really are such values, and whether we can choose them. I think at present there is a lot of pessimism about this possibility.
However – just as paranoia and hatred tend to arise out of guilt over one’s own wrong-doing, so, possibly, does pessimism over the possibility of being human arise out of very subtle guilt at consisantly choosing the immediate and material.
Just a thought.