The Fear Vaccine
The pandemic has revealed something: instilling fear is all that is necessary for a government to control its populous. Not only has that become plain to us now, the trouble is it has also become plain to those in power. We can be made to do almost anything if we are fearful enough. The object of that fear is largely irrelevant. It is the extent of the fear, the totality of it, the all-consuming, focus-grabbing nature of it, and its inherent ability to override logical, clear thinking that is so seductive to them. They convinced us to take an experimental, hazardous genetic therapy - something few of us would have done under normal circumstances. But we did it, and who would blame us? We were afraid of dying of Covid; we were afraid of transmitting it to our elderly relatives and killing them; we were afraid of the consequences for our children, and our income, if we didn’t get back to “normal”, if we didn’t get free from “lockdown”.
Would that there were a vaccine we could take that would liberate us from fear. What would that be like; to live totally without fear? Think about it for a moment - if all the things you are fearful of in your life, never came to pass, were just suddenly taken away? Would that be freedom? Free for the ultimate in self autonomy, and self control? (The issue then becomes whether our own self control is any better or worse than control exerted by an external party, but I digress…)
Fear has a purpose. Nature deigned that we should fear. It was a survival mechanism. When coming face to face with a 500 pound lion that could tear you apart, fear is not just an emotional, but an entirely rational response, in those circumstances! The adrenaline it provides gives our bodies every help it needs to get the hell out of there as fast as we can. Fear has validity.
But in our modern era, where we have few natural predators, our innate fear response looks for new purposes beyond protection from physical harms. That need to find a focus for our fear can itself can be exploited. We have transmuted actual fear of the imminent into fear of the immanent - fear of the unknown, the unknowable, even the improbable. Not even fear of the possible, but fear of the merely conceivable. If we can think of it (or be made to think of it), we can fear it.
Fear itself is not a real thing. It is an illusion. It is a feeling of dread at the consequences of some anticipated event in the future - an event that may or may not transpire.
The biological hallmarks of fear - the adrenaline and cortisol - in a non flight-or-flight scenario become fuel over time for a prolonged anxiety and stress condition in our bodies. It is ironic, that fear - used so adroitly on us by health experts during Covid - has been shown in multiple studies by the same health experts to be the thing that chronically damages our health the most.
So how are we to calibrate a healthy relationship with fear in our modern media-drive culture? Fear is what gives so-called conspiracy theories their power. We fear loss of autonomy, loss of control, loss of freedom - financial, mobility, rights, etc. To be sure, some of these fears are not without foundation. There are always possibilities to be concerned about, to be mitigated against, or even oppose. There are people or events that would cause us harm of some kind. Those who use our fear as a tool against us generally do so because of something else they fear. The toxicity of fear becomes an endemic driver of politics and social currents. Some fears are wholesome, especially fears of we ourselves may do or cause - fears that appropriately curtail our on behaviours. It takes discernment to determine which fears are valid, worthy, and likely.
The clue to the mystery of dealing with fear of the future (where our fear is always located) is to look to the past. History can warn us, indicate what is likely, but perhaps the greatest lessons from history, pertinent specifically to fear, come from those who knew the worst of fear, experienced what it can do, and emerged the other side of it with wisdom for us.
Two millenia ago a carpenter’s son enjoined us to “be not afraid.” He was a man who must have known something about true fear; he experienced it to the point of sweating blood. What his fear anticipated was not an illusion, but a prophetic prediction - things known that would happen - that he was tried, mocked, flogged, nailed to a tree, and would die for. Having experienced the worst of fear, he still encouraged us to “be not afraid.” Why should we heed it? Because, in spite of the worst of his fears realised, his encouragement not to fear was made after all that had happened to him.
Fear only the power it can have over us - to divert us from what we know to be right.