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By John T. Crestwell, Jr.
December 1, 2004
The network N.B.C. has a show
my mother loves—“Fear Factor”. The goal of the show is to be
fearless, and if you are, you stand the chance of winning $100,000.
Now, to win, one must not be afraid of heights, closed-in spaces,
water, all the elements, bugs, rodents, and the like. And with that,
you have to be willing to eat very odd delicacies. Actually these
things are quite gross and are normally related to eating parts of
animals we thought were thrown away… If you’ve seen the show, you
know what I’m talking about. The program’s producer’s knows all too
well the power personal fears and phobias have on people and they
push their contestants to their limit.
In the same vein, I was reading the Parade Magazine, a small
newspaper that comes in the Washington Post and there was an article
by Michael Crichton, the author and creator of the TV series “ER”.
He has a new book coming out Tuesday called “State of Fear”. The
article in the Parade gave an excerpt from his new book. It talked
about how prevalent a role fear plays in our society. He mentioned
how scientist's worried in the mid 40’s to late 60’s about
temperature decreases and an inevitable new ice age. Of course the
trend stopped. Now he says there’s been a complete reversal as we
are now decrying “global warming” which researchers say threatens
our atmosphere. He mentioned the cries of population expansion and
the need for control measures and how this talk started in 60’s and
70’s, but when you look at the numbers, he says, overall fertility
rates have not continued to go up but have gone down steadily. He
wrote about our cries that the earth’s raw materials were running
low but as it turned out this is not the case. He mentioned the
varying moans from researchers who send stories to the news-
channels telling us that beef and bacon and hotdogs and power lines
and deodorant and saccharin all cause cancer when later it was found
that some do but most of these things do not. And what about those
year 2000 prophesies and projections, did anything happen? No. It
was all a hoax. Let me not forget the cell phone and that it causes
brain cancer as it puts radiation into our heads. This is a new one
but it has not been proven to be true to date. We hear about the
cities murder rate. The District of Columbia in 2002 had 262 murders
with a population of 600,000. This is not even a 1% murder rate and
yet the media show us the one or two murders around town and have us
believing our city is a bad place. Yes, we live in a state of fear
don’t we? What is this abnormal obsession we have as a culture with
fear? Why do we allow fear to be our master? I will tell you…
First, biologically and physiologically we need some anxiety and
fear and apprehension. This is natural and helps us to function. It
would probably be hard to do what we do daily without something
pushing us… And so, the anxiety or fear motivates us to do what we
need to do to the best of our abilities. The eye lid blinks to add
moisture and protection to the eye and like this, the emotion of
anxiety and fear protects our lives by alerting us to possible or
imminent dangers. Fear in a very basic sense is quite instinctive
and we need a bit of it to survive. But, irrational fear that is
something else, as is anxiety disorders are to normal everyday
anxiety. There is difference.
Therefore, there is a distinction that
must be made between basic fear of the unknown and that narcissistic
tribal fear that pervades our culture and causes us to loose our
humanity as we walk in a state of fear, and we paint with vary broad
strokes and color the canvass of humanity with pictures and words
that pass subjective judgments unfairly and leave us with a skewed
perspective of our world. It is one thing to be cautious but it is
another to be fearful to the extent that we are afraid to live and
this mindset causes us to pass judgment on whole groups of people,
places or things, because of what we see and hear on the news or
read in the paper. This is irrational fear at work. This is tribal
fear. This does not “bind together”, it tears us a part.
Fear defined is a feeling of agitation caused by the presence or
nearness of danger, evil or pain. Fear is dread, terror, fright, or
apprehension. It is a feeling of uneasiness or concern. So you see,
if we need to finish a project, it is okay if we are uneasy or
concerned and apprehensive. In this light, fear or a better word is
stress and anxiety is working to get a task accomplished. But in the
sense of stereotyping and dealing with our cultural prejudices and
biases, this fear is counterproductive and does more to create chaos
than community. This is irrational fear and this is the fear I want
to focus on now…
In many ways, irrational fear deals with our perception of reality
and our perceptions could be real or created. I like what
Elizabeth Gawain said, “Fear is created not by the world around us,
but in the mind, by what we think is going to happen.” So
misperceptions and misconceptions prevail as a result of irrational
thinking.
You see, my thought today is that if we do not master our irrational
fears, our irrational fears will master us. Robert Anthony said it
best: “The thing we run from is the thing we run to.”
Now why should we transcend fear of the other? I believe very
strongly that there are powers in our world that understand how the
mind works and because of who they are and the power they have, they
can construct mediated realities or even perceived mediated
realities and get us going and all frenzied up with a few scary
statements sent to the press.
.
In Michael Moore’s movie Fahrenheit 9/11 there were many good parts
but one particular portion of the movie talked about how our
emotions were played with post 9/11 when our leaders would move the
homeland terror alert up and down the scale. We’d go from blue to
yellow to orange and we’d get close to red… If the government
released a message in the positive and the alert went down, one
could notice an obvious jump in the stock market, gas prices lowered
and folk you met weren’t as uptight. But if the alert went up to
orange with red threatening, the stocks would fall, gas went up and
people were scared. This is irrational fear at work in our society.
This is a mind game and it is a shame that we allow it to do what it
does to us.
Yes. We live in a state of fear. And there are other things used to
keep us from being united as children of humanity. People use things
like skin color. Or we hate a group because they are of another
culture, or dislike a practitioner of another religion or have
problems with someone who has a different sexual preference.
Irrational fear creates an irrational response.
Now, the Physiologist, Biologist and Psychologist would know that if
they want to get the animal-human’s emotions going, he must
stimulate certain aspects of the brain. He would know that he must
get those neurons firing because they get the nervous system going
which gets the adrenaline kicking and arms swinging and hands
raising and mouth yelling; there are things that can be done (with
outside stimulus) to get your insides (your brain) to do a
particular thing and to think in a particular pattern. A scientist
would know this because he’s tested many thousand lab animals and
probably humans too, along the way, and he knows the brain operates
in a certain fashion. Therefore I can create “shock and awe” and
expect you to respond a certain way. I can do specific things to you
and trigger the fight/flight response. If you aren’t thinking, which
most of the world is not; they’re hypnotized, then you will be
pretty much like a robot or a Pavlovian dog.
Most scientists are good and their work is used improperly but a
“mad scientist” would also know that humans operate basically as
self-preservation beings. They know that Maslow had it right when he
said that humans need food and water, a home to feel safe in; love
from family and friends; recognition for work done; and finally if
all this is achieved, the person will be a well adjusted
self-actualized individual. But if any of the bottom needs are not
met, the human can’t progress toward the higher things of life. That
is, he or she cannot focus on the common good because the lower
level needs are not met.
Thus, I would know that if I can combine irrational fear of the
unknown with fear of loss, I have a lethal combination to get my
group fighting against your group if necessary. I have a dangerous
combination to keep you submissive and controlled. And I will use
the same tactics over and over and over until you figure it out. I
will keep my subjects in this matrix like state until they break
free from it then I’ll have to go back to the lab and come up with
something else…
Now, if I’m a leader of a country, I’d be smart and hire this fellow
who understands the mind. I would surround myself, in fact, with the
most intelligent “brain doctors” in the world so that they could
tell me, “If I do this, psychologically, how will the people
respond. Will they still vote for me if I do that? Okay what about
this? What will happen?” You get it yet? You see how it works? Yes,
I could lead effectively if I knew people did not think for
themselves and that they were hypnotized.
I hope we are more complicated than this. I hope that we are not so
basic that if you take away our food or make us think our food is
threatened, we will respond like Pavlov’s dogs, and when the bell is
rung we will come out fighting with whomever and wherever the fight
takes us. Michael De Montaignee said it best: “The man who fears
suffering is already suffering from what he fears.” And we are
indeed suffering from what we fear today. It is not pushing us
forward as a culture, as good stress does, but it is pulling us back
to an irrational past when human freedoms were suppressed.
And so, where are we as Americans? Are we Pavlov dogs? Are we living
at Maslow’s lower-level of needs, as a culture? Are we operating
today as primitive animals and not thinking rationally when it comes
to those fears our society throws at us all the time? I don’t know
about you but it seems to me we are a scared country! What are we
afraid of: suffering, death; or perhaps the wages of our sins across
the globe? What creates all this panic and hatred? Could it be our
mental fight to stay as far away from “real religion” (as Davies put
it)? What is keeping us in this fearful state?
Yes, here we are with the rise of fundamentalism as the answer to
the fear. But the answer cannot be in our going back thousands of
years to days when religion taken out of context, got folk burned at
the stake because they had differing views and special gifts. God
forbid if we are going back to those days! So where are we? How can
we create the Beloved Community when we are afraid of each other?
Christians hate Arabs, Arabs hate Jews, Jews hating Palestinians.
As Rodney King said, “Why can’t we all just get along?”
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