Fear

Fear is probably our biggest enemy, because it is an emotional response that results in many poor decisions. Fear is a response that is built into our instinct for survival, eliciting the fight or flight response in all animals. As humans with complex brains, we need to overcome fear by using our intelligence.

Many people seem to think that the world around them, their country, their cities, their neighborhoods are more dangerous than ever. There are certainly periods in which violence and criminal behavior increases or decreases. Most would agree that if violence decreased, but news reporting of the remaining violence increased, then the general population would think violence was increasing. What we perceive is usually what we think is true. 

News is a corporate business. Television networks and major newspapers are corporations with incomes in the millions or billions of dollars. The executives of these huge businesses fear loosing market share because every point lost represents the loss of millions of dollars. So, most news corporations follow the policy, “If it bleeds, it leads.” Stories about murder, deaths and injuries are often the headline. This is capitalism at work, for supplying what the public wants makes more money. Little attention is placed on the effect of this increased level of fear. Really, all that corporations and politicians do is to exploit it (see Corporate Media).

There is something within humans that causes us to overrate fear. For example, humans tend to strongly fear honeybees. This is a fear that is somewhat based in reality, as about 2% of humans are allergic to bee stings, so the fears are based in some fact. But, for most of us, a bee’s sting is just a painful experience. Yet, even though bees are NOT life threatening to 98% of us, we are still afraid of bees to the degree that many of us run away from bees and swing our arms to scare them away. If a swarm of bees appear in our neighborhood, we might call in an exterminator to protect us. I imagine that if bees didn’t do important things like pollinate flowers and make honey, that humans might attempt a war on bees, to totally eliminate them. After all, wouldn’t that war be justified since an angry bee (let’s not forget those Africanize bees) might attack an innocent person or child, and kill them? In a similar way, some humans overrate the fear presented by other humans. Also, they fail to recognize the value that other people have, so that they are willing to call in the exterminators to eliminate them (Hitler did this to gypsies, Jews and homosexuals; Bush did this to Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and anyone else he calls a terrorist).

Another example of over-reacting to fear is when insects come in a house. Many people get out the bug spray, and spray wherever they see any bugs. Although they kill the visible bugs, they inadvertently are poisoning themselves with the insecticide. Also, the spray does nothing to get to the reason the bugs are in the house. So, this process will get repeated again in a month or two. Don’t you find it disturbing that U.S. foreign policy is oddly similar?

Really, if you want to have less fear, you have to be more realistic about real life-threatening dangers. Instead of exterminating 95% of the Native American (the only good Indian is a dead Indian, was a common saying 150 years ago), we should have learned to live in harmony with them. But it was overrated fear (stirred up by propaganda and greed) that leads to policies which nearly eliminated Native Americans. Instead of exterminating wolves, we need to learn to live in harmony with them. Instead of eliminating Al Qaeda and terrorists, we need to learn to live in harmony with them. Exterminating people has become far too easy now, with all the sophisticated bombs, spying devices, and other weapons. For many in the military, killing people is not that different than a computer game. We must not let overrated fear (propaganda or greed or religious fervor) control our policies (see Security). 

The Northeast Blackout, in which 50 million people lost power, was not an act of terrorism. Six states/provinces lost electricity, which practically brought everything in the area to a standstill. People took it quite well, and managed through 3 days under difficult conditions. But if the same thing happened due to a bombing of a utility plant, the government and news agencies would have exploited it by promoting anger and fear. The cause would have been different, but the loss of electricity would have been the same. People need to reduce their level of fear by realizing that disruptions due to natural causes, corporate errors, and intentional reasons are all a part of life now. In all disasters, the government and the media should promote calm, but promoting calm doesn’t win votes or sell newspapers. A calmer reaction to 9/11 wouldn’t have plunged the U.S. into a recession, with the effective loss of more than a trillion dollars, but fear was encouraged in order to push forward the Neo-cons military agenda (see 9/11, Neo-cons). This is not to say that we need to be complacent. This is to say that we need to be intelligent.

There are about 600 phobias/fears that severely effect people, and the fear of terrorism isn’t even one of them. It would help to stop watching and reading about murder and death, and learn to experience the beauty of the world that we live in. For some odd reason, we are still drawn to those primitive drives like fighting (boxing and war), murder (news), killing (news and war), and death (car accidents, bull fighting and war). We need to be more aware of how propaganda is being used to “manufacture consent” (see Propaganda, Psychology). We need to realize that fear is a primitive emotion, and that we need to use intelligence to overcome fear. Fomenting anger and fear should almost be a crime. We could be in heaven and still we would be fearful that we would be kicked out for some reason (see Heaven and Hell, Things to Appreciate). Everyone needs to understand each other better, so fear and hatred can be reduced and minimized.

Everyone needs to think more about what is, and less about what if.

Everyone needs to live intelligently, recognizing that fear and greed are our enemies.