FEAR ENDANGERS BY DECEIVING
THE FALSE PROMISE OF CONVENIENCE OR ESCAPE TEMPTS US TO BE AFRAID & INFLAMES TENSIONS
27 July 2006

The fear and uneasiness that provokes human beings to conflict is never what it seems to be; that is its nature and its method: to take hold by way of complex deceptions. Fear wages a coup d'esprit by deceiving the mind into thinking it promises clarity and intellectual comfort, peace of mind, justice and the healing of wounds, that it may actually generate the only feasible path to physical or political safety.

In fact, it operates in a space where everything is oriented toward exacerbating the elements of discomfort and crisis that create real trauma and the risk of permanent damage; it operates there because it depends on such mechanics for its survival, for the victory of its logic over our own.

Fear is as much a danger as it is a utensil: hard, sharp, unforgiving, it is meant to penetrate, to rule out other considerations, to claim territory and to redefine the whole landscape before there is any negotiating, and so it summons forth ill-advised strategies and a brittle defiance too delicate to lift any weight, too unwavering to know or recognize change.

The whole scope of this analysis could be applied to a geopolitical conflagration, the seeming bloodlust that spills out of and tightens a spiral of violence, artful negations of the rights or innocence of rival factions, actually standing in for and propagated by the false promises divined from the logic of fear.

The pattern is consistent, global, ancient: village, a tribe, a region, a cultural identity, a nation and its government come to believe another specific entity poses a direct and imminent threat not just to peace, but to its very existential order of rights and identities. It acts on this fear, puts on its bravest front, postures on the ready for the confrontation which will decide its right and capacity to define the present, the past and the future.

Its actions are imagined as defensive and there is rhetorical beauty, virtuosity even, and real power of argument, in using the language of the target, the innocent, the victim, all of which may be to a greater or lesser extent true. But however true, such rhetoric also has a purpose: it is designed to bring —appropriately or not— non-participants to the speaker's side, often a very much needed support.

But, this analysis of fear's deceptive logic can also be applied to personal life-planning and emotional relations with the world. Often, it serves the psychological motives of the individual to find a way to extricate oneself from one or another type of human bond, though this type of project as a whole can often have a damaging long-term effect, both psychologically and in pragmatic terms.

The desire to avoid contact, with certain people or certain types of people or situations or categories of challenge or obligation, can be as overwhelming a desire as, and even more irrational than, the desire to make contact, with certain people or types of people or situations or categories of achievement or shared resonance.

In such situations of necessitated or preferred avoidance, fear often enters in as an ill-equipped but ready-made formula for "understanding" and defining the other. It offers convenient rationalization of what is essentially a peculiarity with sometimes relevant, often irrelevant roots in the lived experience and the circumstantial idiosyncracies of the systemic avoider.

The result of this application of fear to difference and to the other, against whom one has come to define oneself, is a debilitation of the self seeking to avoid that particular other and the burgeoning of a hatred for that other, be it an individual, a group or a conceptual reality. Once this transition into hatred occurs, the false promise of fear takes over the logical mind of the subject and individual sovereignty is reduced radically.

The fear will then control the individual reducing most importantly that individual's ability to see, quite rationally, the humanity held in common with the other, and thereby reducing equally the essential human dignity of the self, now reorganized by hate.

Obviously, here there is a joining up of the logic of fear in its effect on communities and individuals; the two processes often feed into one another, exponentially dramatizing the false promise of fear, and leading to an exacerbation of the individual isolation people can feel which drives the attraction to such flawed reasoning.

But fear can also apply to the individual realm in a less antagonistic way: it can enter in as an apparent means of more easily shaping one's own future, one's ambition, potential and ingenuity. That's because the same false promise works to assist the individual seeking to avoid or forestall the kind of defining moment in which life choices are made; the logic of fear dictates to the reluctant seeker that in fact it would be dangerous or counter-productive to take a step forward, explore the unknown or decide to test the waters of a dream.

Here, too, the effect is dehumanizing, driving the subject into a cycle of lost opportunity and frustrated self-analysis, an eventual sense of regret that a good thing was needlessly extinguished by avoidance. Fear does not change the dehumanization, but exacerbates it, by deceiving the individual into adopting the comforting untruth that holds that actually nothing was lost and much was gained, while in fact it is the fear and the reduced fulfillment that have come to fill the space left empty by a departed hope.

This is not to say that there aren't good reasons, reasons that humanize instead of dehumanizing, for opting not to take a risk or follow a whim of the heart. There is no obligation to ignore fear or even to discount the important evidence it can help us see and consider. It's a question of how we make choices and why we do so as we do.

Utlimately, it's a matter of whether the individual abandons the life of the mind, choosing the trap of fear's promise of an easy explanation, which can often marginalize more real and more compelling evidence. It is there, in opting for fear as tonic, taking on the false promise of the determined, uncurious "realist" —which often simply means a person who prefers to believe that reality is defined in a particular way, rather than checking the facts of a situation and applying evolved reasoning— that fear boxes out one's humanity and leads into bigger lies and an expansion of human suffering.

What to do then? Isn't it a Catch-22, where if one sets out to avoid falling into fear's trap, the fear of doing so will lead straight into the very same trap? As in the Buddhist koan: how does one concsiously empty one's mind of thoughts of the pink elephant? How to confirm the achievement without negating it?

Well, first of all, it's instructive to classify fear not as a defining state of being, but as an emotion, which is not the same thing as a thought, and which cannot in itself contain the conceptual solution to a complex problem or a life-choice. Like any emotion, it has an irrefutable role to play in the life of the mind and in how we come to an understanding of the shape of reality.

But, it is a mistake to pretend that conscious agency has occurred, that the mind has worked through the best and worst angles of a dilemma, when the only evidentiary basis is fear, and its still less useful fellow traveler, hatred. Even where emotion is the driving component of a given experience or relationship, it is unhealthy to subjugate one's mind to only one emotional reality: where there is fear, there may be self-doubt, humility, joy, giving other clues, or attraction, or a long-standing love.

It is unfair and unwise, and ultimately, dehumanizing to all involved, to allow fear to act as evidence, to allow fear to become the prevailing logic in social reasoning, be it legislative, personal or military planning that is affected. Fear is only one of the basest tools available to the human intellect to crafting apt solutions to the most seemingly intractable crises and situations of impending or overarching risk, and it should not be treated as anything more than that, if we are to live as human beings in a free, dynamic and humane world. [s]

© 2006 Joseph Robertson
Essay to be included in the forthcoming book, Cave Painting
to be published by Casavaria