Fear factor

I’ve been thinking a lot about fear lately. Not unusual for someone who has been wrestling with an anxiety problem to be thinking about fear, how it motivates, what triggers it, how to get rid of it. In truth, when you’re trying to deal with random and overwhelming anxiety that shows up with little or such subtle warning symptoms that they can be ignored, fear is pretty much all you think about. In many ways it is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Given all of this thinking about fear, and all of the looking around I have been doing at other people and how they live their day-to-day lives, I know no better way than to talk about the conclusion I’ve reached than laying it right out in the open.

Americans have a fear problem.

I’m not talking about the overamped, unrealistic fear of terrorism which is fed to us every night both by our government and our news media, though that is a factor. No, I’m talking about a more basic set of fears, one that has led to the generalized meanness and lack of participation in society that seems to characterize American culture today. A fear so basic that it cuts us off from our neighbors, one that makes us rigid and unable to accept anything except a very narrow world view.

I’m talking about the fear that there won’t be enough.

Competition is, theoretically, at the heart of American culture. We live in what is purported to be a free market, one in which the quality of products drives the economy. Consumers, we are told, have the power to control the economy through rejection or acceptance; good products for a good price are bought, and, hence, accepted while bad produces languish on the shelves and, theoretically the companies that make those products either make better products or go out of business. Competition, though, is undercut by corporate subsidies and by advertising which tells us that if we don’t go out and buy product X right now we are going to miss out on something. That something could be the approval of our peers or the chance to attract a mate but whatever it is that we miss out on if we miss it we’ve blown our one and only chance.

The fear of missing something is why a lot of mediocre movies have huge first weekend box office numbers that drop off precipitously the second week the film is open.

The fear of missing something is what keeps us wired, connected to our Blackberry devices and constantly checking e-mail, always on the phone text messaging or talking with someone in conversations that most often consist of little more than “Hi, where are you? Yeah, I’m on the subway on my way home.”

What sort of fear of quiet, fear of ourselves really, keeps us from looking inward for our entertainment? Are we so afraid that if we look inside, if we spend some time with ourselves, that we will discover that we’re shallow, egomaniacal creatures with absolutely no purpose in the food chain or place in the natural order of the planet that we have to spend every waking minute somehow in touch with another being, or in some cases, purposely ignoring other beings?

The fear that there won’t be enough when we get there drives road rage. It motivates the reckless disregard for law and life that lets someone justify doing 60 miles per hour and bobbing in and out of traffic in a residential neighborhood. What else could it be that causes the idiot behind you to pass at great speeds on the wrong side of the road only to end up exactly in front of you at the stop light the next corner? He’s not gaining any time by moving through life so hard, so what is it he’s afraid he’ll miss?

Americans are afraid, or have been made to be afraid, of things that very rarely occur. You need only go through a grocery store to see this. Condiments, peanut butter, boxes of cereal, cookies, and a host of other products – though, oddly, not toothpaste – are protected by “tamper evident” seals. A 1982 survey (pdf) taken immediately after the Tylenol poisonings in the greater Chicago area revealed the consumers were more likely to purchase a product with this type of tamper evident seal around the package’s opening. With enough time and thought, or enough observation to simply walk down the dental products aisle and pick up any one of the dozen brands of toothpaste with no such packaging, contaminating a commercial product would be relatively simple. Yet, I could find evidence of only five instances of product tampering in the last 25 years, including the Tylenol case in 1982, that resulted in consumer deaths.

Should we fear terrorism? Absolutely. But we should also be aware that the second largest death toll from a “terrorist,” and I use the quotes deliberately, event on American soil was perpetrated by Timothy McVey, who was a homegrown whacko with, he said, a grudge against the government for a particular reason. Whether the Oklahoma City bombings were terrorism or not is to be debated (I fall in the not category), but it doesn’t really make any difference to the people who died. Our fear of these events, though, is disproportionate to their likelihood. After all, when was the last time there was a suicide bombing in Los Angeles at a crowded restaurant or a farmers’ market in Chicago?

The simple fact, though, is that life inherently involves a certain amount of risk. Every time you get out of bed you take a risk that you’ll fall and slip, hit your head and die in the dark in the middle of the night because you drank too many beers before you went to bed and had to get up to pee at 3am. Every time you get in your car you’re risking that someone in another vehicle who may not be paying enough attention might slam into you. Every time you put a pill in your mouth you’re placing a bet that some reviewer at the FDA wasn’t distracted by problems at home and paid enough attention to the study materials submitted for approval by BigPharma to see whether or not the side effects from said pill could kill you or worse.

We have let fear get the best of us. It keeps our children on tethers, unable to make even the most basic decisions as young adults. Fear lets us believe the fiction that 3mm plastic window sheeting and duct tape will keep us safe in the event of a wide release poison gas attack (something that has never happened in a civilian arena I might add), or that huddling in a 160 year-old brick building will protect us from a radioactive bomb.

Without question, fear is used by our government to control us and to manipulate public opinion. The current administration has successfully used fear of a terrible event to justify undermining the most basic foundation of our society – our Constitutional rights – while simultaneously doing little or nothing to guard against another attack of the magnitude that took place on September 11, 2001 (honestly, does anyone really believe that the next attack will be by someone who hijacks a plane? If not, then why do we put up with constant violations of privacy (nsa domestic surveilance anyone? what about those internet searches?), the right to free speech (don’t expose that corruption, what ever you do!), and the right to be free of unreasonable searches and seizures in the name of “safety?”

Fear is used by advertisers of all kinds, pharmaceutical and car companies being the worst offenders, to get you to buy their products, for without them, after all, you might have breath that isn’t minty fresh, or you might not be perfectly comfortable all the time, or you might observe the natural changes of aging in your own body. You might, in short, suffer from this condition that we call life.

Do I have any answers about the fear that pervades American culture today? I don’t. All I do know is that unless we start controlling our fear, start realizing that fear, like pain, is just a message and that it’s what you do about it that matters, what was one of the world’s super powers will devolve into nothing more a nation that produces nothing and consumes way more than its fair share (a state we are fast approaching), its citizens reduced to blubbering balls of goo by the sight of their own shadows.

The article was also published on Amphetameme.org