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FEAR FACTOR:  Transcending Stereotypes
by John T. Crestwell, Jr.
12/12/04

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?”

Well, Davies words spoke to me this week and that’s why I shared them with you.  Davies said that we are afraid of making our religion real.  We live behind fears to keep us from facing the real world.  We live behind dogmas and creeds and a warped tribalism, and obscure beliefs; and all of this keeps us from the very heart of what religion is.  As Preston said last week, religion means “to bind”.  Religion should bind us together but the issue is if we live up to this reality then we might have to give up some of our comforts for the binding process to take place.  WE MIGHT HAVE TO SHARE!  We might have to feed the hungry in Africa and around the world.  We might have to create a first-class public education system in America.  We might have to allow AIDS to be cured and stop benefiting from the millions who suffer from it.  We might have to give up our superiority complex around the world; we might have to work with other nations and have true dialog with people, instead of monologue mentalities.  Yes, we might have to be fair and just and equitable.  We might have to really be religious!  So you see, the irrational fear…we need it to keep us a part.  We need it to justify the illusion that there are raw material shortages so we can hoard resources, we need to say that population must be controlled so we don’t have to share space with folk who don’t look like us.  We need the fear factor so that pharmaceuticals and the medical industry can cash in on our neurotic personalities.  We need the fear so we can continue to say that the Third World nations must stay unindustrialized because they will put too many fossil fuels in the sky and increase global warming, when in fact we Americans are the majority abusers. But we have to say it to keep the myth real!  Yes, we have to live this lie, this fantasy, because the truth shall set you free but we aren’t ready to be free.  And so we accept the dogma, we accept the Religious Right’s rhetoric; we accept the cultural stereotypes when we create fixed or distorted generalizations to others based in fear. Ultimately, we accept the “us against them mentality” instead of the “we are together reality.”  But somewhere I learned that true religion is not found in creeds.  True religion is not found in affirmations of faith.  True religion is not found in water and flower communions.  True religion is not found when you add names to the membership book.  It is not found in what you say but in what you do. True religion is found when the heart is strangely warmed and we realize that religion lives in the heart and soul; when we understand that we are all bound together in a single garment of destiny, as King said well.  Yes, this is the religion we need in our world, for it transcends the stereotypes and the fears.

 And so, we are called this morning to move beyond the foolishness.  Our faith challenges us to do that.  It calls us to look beyond the dichotomy (the Black/White, rich/poor) toward the individual who is a child of God, a child of the Universe.     

There is a story in the Bible when Jesus fed the multitudes with a few fish and a few pieces of bread.  Well, many say he multiplied the food.  Modern scholars say that something much more profound occurred…  When Jesus held the food up and explained that he would make the bits of food much more, the hearts of the people listening were touched and they began to take the food, they had hidden in their clothes, out to share with others.  The miracle on that day was not the magic of Jesus but the power of the people because they discovered the magic of sharing and the abundance it produces.  Yes, we need a Christmas miracle in our world.  And it will come when we stop scaring ourselves; when we stop living in fear, anguish and despair; rather in faith, and with hope and love and in that day, the new heavens and new earth will become real, and will no longer be utopian fancies.  We have the power to turn this system around.  But it starts right here in this church.  We must model the Beloved Community here.  Then perhaps we can model our love regionally and nationally…

If we can help somebody as we pass along.  If we can cheer somebody with a word or song.  If we can show somebody they are traveling wrong, then our living will  not be in vain.  If we can do our duty as servants of humanity ought.  And bring a message of truth to a world once wrought.  And spread loves message like the Sages taught, then our living will not be in vain.   Amen.

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