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Fear is a powerful motivator, and since the beginning of modern human civilization has been used as a tool for convincing, encouraging, coercing, manipulating, and forcing people to behave, interact, believe, live, and yes, vote in certain ways. In today’s America, people that try to appeal to logic, reason, common sense 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 appealing to emotion is the surest way to convince someone (scare them into believing) that something is true/right/a threat/necessary, the most effective method for gathering followers. Of all the so-called “negative” emotions, 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. Some Neuroscience 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 and we can stop the invasion,” you’re not in a place to think about the validity, truth, morality, ethics, source, agenda, or human impact of that mandate. Your brain is just telling you to LIVE, by any means necessary. Hence, our current situation. The more people are kept in survival mode - also known as sympathetic nervous system activation - the more desperate they will be to get out of it and the more susceptible they are to influence. This is true for the mortal, imminent sort of danger, and also for the more subtle type; the body responds more or less the same way to Instagram-induced FOMO as it does to being chased by a bear. The mechanism for response involves various hormonal and neurological processes, but the upshot of it is that when stress is up, emotion is up and logic is down. 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 are being allowed to happen in various places on Earth are 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 being able to devote attention to what’s going on behind the curtain, and rather than being able to actually THINK. The Human Experiment might be failing This exploitable short-sightedness, combined with multi-layered systems built on scarcity and exclusion, a healthy dose of insatiable greed, and some very sneaky fatalism injected into enough people (i.e. 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 (me included) 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 our species, let alone an entire planet. This is because the state of the earth for my children and their children is much more abstract than my desire to drive a gas-guzzling truck that “fits my lifestyle” or a badass hot rod that brings me “smiles per gallon,” and because for those of us with the privilege to buy our way out of the worst of it (for now), it can be a little too “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 - I am, like you, also a human being who struggles to reconcile what I know about the state of humanity and my desire to change our collective trajectory with the impetus to make choices that are both pragmatic and pleasurable for what’s happening in my life right now. 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 or in a missile strike on a school or hospital, while also doing little to examine how it’s all intentional and interconnected, and less 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.” Can the experiment be saved? Early in this essay (last week), 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 even if those are his other two favorite things. This is an example of the same evolutionary survival mechanism that I discussed above, just without ego. He has fear at times, but he doesn’t ruminate on it or 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. Since we have cognition that Beau does not, we can treat fear as a source of information rather than a determinant mandate. Fear, like hunger, thirst, exposure, or tiredness, is a feeling that is part of our biological and psychological makeup. Like those other sensations, fear exists to bring our awareness to some innate requirement that is unmet 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 fundamental 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 when I’m being chased by the earlier-mentioned bear - or, if my life is not being mortally threatened (social media FOMO, for example) I can ask what the fear is really trying to tell 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 - DO run from the bear, DON’T let Instagram run my life. Though I can’t always choose to not be triggered, I CAN learn to choose how I respond. With a little bit of calm, patience, and perspective (gained through therapy, 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 emotional reactivity, negative bias, and survival, I can stop and consider rather than just doing what I’m scared into. 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, with my attention to them, and with my belief in them. It is NOT about adding to my suffering out of some perceived obligation or out of empathy with humanity at large. I don’t believe we have to accept the “cost of caring” about EVERYTHING; 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/terrified, you’re not paying attention” mandate that you hear from a lot of so-called activist 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, unity, and transformation 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 the good in my life, AND aware enough of the urgency of what’s really going on in the world while I use my privilege to elevate others, trying to effect meaningful change, however small. The Middle Road Winston Churchill said that “fear is a reaction; courage is a decision.” Although he was probably talking about a war, we can apply it differently: If we want things to change, we have to have the courage to change how we view - and then behave within, and in relation to - the human diaspora. 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 use that knowledge try to start doing things differently on the individual level, which is where all true, transformative change starts. Perhaps we can start to get it right so that our children, and theirs, don’t have to live in the same cycle that we do. Doing so doesn’t mean I no longer have my good life; it means I’m not operating from the fear of losing it.
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