Musings on Fear
My Good Life
I’m sitting in a chair, feet up and hanging out into the sun at the edge of my front porch. My dog - you know him by now - is lounging in the grass and watching the world go by, an example of in the present moment if ever there was one. One thing I’m doing out here is going over some of the things I’ve written in the past; if you didn’t know, there are three different ways to read various essays, performance tips, and a newsletter archive, all on my website.
Anyway, as I was perusing the past, I came across a two-part essay that I wrote around the 4th of July in 2023, about freedom - both as it’s portrayed in media, politics, and American mythology, and also what I believe it really is (SPOILER: They’re not the same thing). While there are some specific references to world events at the time, much of the analysis I leveled at our systems of governing, foreign policy, military-industrial-technological aggression, informational control, and scarcity-driven othering not only applies today, but has gotten worse.
As I sit here on an unseasonably warm Spring day, living the life I want with people and the aforementioned canine who I love, in good health and gainfully employed…even with the daily atrocities, cynicism, and inhumanity in the world, mostly what I feel is grateful.
Nothing that’s happening in the world now is fundamentally new. Are the technologies better, the weapons more advanced, the abilities to spread hate far and wide more robust? Of course they are. Are we, as my grandfather would have said, driving ahead of our headlights? Also, yes. And yet, there have always been “times like these” in the sense that every human empire has gone through the same cycle of birth, growth, prosperity, dominance, degradation, and eventual collapse; the names have changed, but the game remains the same.
That doesn’t mean that what’s happening now isn’t unconscionable; just because the media stopped covering Gaza doesn’t mean that genocide is over, and just because ICE hasn’t murdered anyone this week in broad daylight doesn’t mean they’ve stopped disappearing people off the street. It’s hard to keep up with the horror abroad, let alone the sometimes quieter (but more insidious, more accepted, more systemic) brutality at home.
But humans have a short lifespan, and therefore a short, survival-focused memory. My ancestors fled what would become the Holocaust, yet there are people today who don’t know about or have just decided that the Holocaust didn’t exist. Generations after World War 2, there are swaths of the American population that don’t know that Japanese-American citizens were put in internment camps out of the same government-manufactured fear that led to witch hunts for Communists in the 60’s, the politically-expedient crack epidemic of the 90’s, and the fake WMDs of the early 2000’s, not to mention the co-opting and weaponization of Jesus’ name and teachings to justify crusades and inquisitions against brown and Black people (and other non-Christians) since the formation of the Catholic Church.
Fear of what?
According to a white supremacist conspiracy theory called The Great Replacement, popularized by right-wing French author Renaud Camus in a 2012 book, white people are being systematically replaced by non-white immigrants, degrading our demographic and cultural status. As has been the case with other racist and anti-semitic tropes, this theory has made its way into the mainstream; narratives about “invasion” and “voter fraud” and “a cabal of Jewish Democratic elites orchestrating the erasure of the white race while trafficking and eating babies” are present to varying degrees in U.S., European, and Canadian right wing media and conspiracy circles.
Fear of disappearing, or being erased, taps into a deep and primal mechanism that exists in both the human psyche and in our evolutionary, genetic makeup: Our instinct for survival. We have a built-in negativity bias, which in pre-modern times (think tens of millennia ago) helped us survive by allowing us to quickly identify - and then avoid - threats in our environment. Although many of us don’t live with imminent mortal danger - while some definitely do, just ask the Palestinians, Lebanese, Iranians, Ukrainians, Sudanese, and the list goes on - this mechanism is still present. Although we appear to be a very advanced species, it’s mostly our technology that gives that impression. From an evolutionary standpoint, we are babies in the lifespan of the world and haven’t evolved much in the last 12,000 years, not nearly as fast as our technology has. The truth is that we are relatively primitive, we just have fancy toys that allow us to play at dominance and destruction.
Fear is a powerful motivator, and since the beginning of modern human civilization has been used as a tool for convincing, coercing, manipulating, lying, forcing, and encouraging people to behave, interact, believe, live, and vote in certain ways. In today’s America, people that try to appeal to logic, reason, and morality don’t get nearly as far as those who work to trigger people’s emotions; one thing that the people currently in power understand is that this appeal to emotion is the surest way to convince someone that something is true/right/a threat/necessary. Of all those feelings, fear is the most direct line to influencing someone’s behavior because it is so inextricably linked to our drive for short-term survival. This is also known as fight-or-flight.
The more a person stays in fight/flight/freeze/fawn mode - our built-in stress response system - the more easily manipulable they are: Survival will override everything, so if someone says to you, “you’re in danger of being replaced and I can save you, all you have to do is report your neighbors/employees/students to ICE,” you’re not in a place to think about the validity, source, morality, ethics, agenda, or human impact of that mandate. Your brain is just telling you to LIVE, by any means necessary. Hence, our current situation.
I’m not excusing abhorrent behavior as the natural outflow from some unavoidable biological function; rather, I’m merely pointing out that the callousness, cynicism, cruelty, dishonesty, indecency, and short-sighted negligence that is being allowed to happen here and abroad is not random. The people in charge understand that as long as enough people stay afraid, they stay looking at the extremely imminent through a lens of fear - the hallmark emotion of fight-or-flight - rather than considering what’s going on behind the curtain, and rather than being able to actually THINK, which exists in a different part of the brain whose function decreases as our survival/stress mechanism ramps up.
This exploitable short-sightedness, layered systems built on scarcity and exclusion, a health dose of insatiable greed, and some very sneaky fatalism (we’re already fucked and nothing I do will help so I might as well do whatever I want), are why the same things keep happening empire after empire. They’re why we can’t stop going to war with and oppressing and killing each other, why we spend so much time trying to dominate rather than collaborate. Why we still drive internal combustion cars when we know that we are in the midst of environmental catastrophe driven by fossil fuel extraction and burning AND when there are ubiquitous, cleaner, cheaper, safer ways to power our lives.
We humans struggle to look past the moment we’re in; our short lifespans ensure that we are unlikely to feel the direct consequences of our current choices, and we are naturally ego-driven and therefore selfish. We want to live - and enjoy it - more than we want to support the longevity of the planet and even our species. This is because the state of the earth for my children and their children is more abstract than my desire to drive a gas-guzzler that “fits my lifestyle” or brings me “smiles per gallon,” and because for those of us with the privilege to buy our way out of the worst of it, it can be a little “out of sight, out of mind.”
This is not criticism, exactly. Or if it is, I’m not attaching a personal value judgment to it, of myself or anyone else. All this is more an observation and an explanation - one explanation, anyway - of why we find ourselves shaking our heads every time a new climate study comes out or another stupid war is started or another child dies in ICE custody, but doing little to move the needle with actions: We don’t do well with the abstract - and by abstract I mean “not in front of me this second.”
Saving the Human Experiment
Early in this essay, I mentioned that Beau, my dog, is a master of present-moment engagement. When he lies in the sun, he really LIES THERE. He is, like I am, concerned with moment-to-moment survival; when he’s hungry (which is pretty much always, just like me), he lets us know and he’s not interested in anything else besides having that need met. He only wants to eat, not get his belly rubbed or go for a walk. This is an example of the same evolutionary survival mechanism that I discussed above, just without ego. He has fear, but he doesn’t ruminate on it of become consumed by it the way humans do - and I believe that this points to a key change that we can make in our (hopefully not futile) quest to save the human experiment: We can treat fear as a source of information rather than a guiding mandate.
Fear, like hunger, thirst, exposure, or tiredness, is part of our biological and psychological makeup. Like those other sensations, fear exists to bring our awareness to some innate need or something in our environment that requires attention. Food, water, sleep, shelter, and safety are all basic needs that underpin a creature’s ability to live and eventually thrive. So, when I feel afraid, that inbuilt mechanism is really just giving me a warning that some basic need is in danger of not being met. At this point, I have a choice to make: I can fight or run away - sometimes necessary, like in cases of actual imminent danger - or, if my life is not being mortally threatened, I can ask what the fear is really trying to show me.
Treating fear as a source of information rather than a 5-alarm fire allows me to think critically about where it’s coming from, what it’s showing me, and whether I want to actually follow it or not. I can’t always choose to not be triggered - though I can decrease the frequency though therapeutic work - but I CAN learn to choose how I respond. With a little bit of calm, patience, and perspective (gained though the aforementioned therapy, or mindfulness practice, or some cognitive skills training) I can avoid reacting out of my negative bias. Then, the next time someone tries to manipulate my actions, behaviors, or my vote by tapping into my human tendency towards negativity and survival, I can stop and consider rather than just doing what I’m told.
This is not about ignoring the things that are real threats; it IS about practicing discernment, in my choices and beliefs and evaluations of the information I’m choosing to take in. It’s about being judicious with those sources of information - where am I getting my news? It is NOT about adding to my suffering out of some obligation or out of empathy with humanity, by reading everything; I don’t believe we have to accept the “cost of caring.” If I did that, I would be miserable and afraid, putting me right back into the fear-run life I’m trying to change.
I also don’t buy the “if you’re not enraged/afraid, you’re not paying attention” mandate that you hear from a lot of people on the “left,” because if everyone is just living in a state of rage or fear (or both), how does that help us find peace and alignment as a civilization? It’s not about full immersion, and it’s also not about willful ignorance. There is a middle road, where I can be both grateful and appreciative of my life, AND aware enough of the urgency of what’s really going on in the world to use my privilege to elevate others and try to effect meaningful change, however small.
Winston Churchill said that “fear is a reaction; courage is a decision.” Although he was talking about a war, we can apply it: If we want things to change, we have to have the courage to change how we view - and behave in - the world. We have to breathe to create space, consider what’s real and what’s not, discern the best course of action, and choose for good rather than reacting out of the fear that is stoked daily by those who would like nothing better than to keep us uneducated, unbalanced, and afraid. While the big system is dying - as it always does, violently and inevitably - let’s learn from the countless examples throughout history and maybe try to start doing things differently on the individual level, which is where all true, transformative change starts.
Doing so doesn’t mean I no longer have my good life; it means I’m not operating from the fear of losing it.