Fear the Pessimist

We are told to always be suspicious of anyone who laughs in the face of danger or scoffs at fear. Fear is a natural response to danger and this emotion has a way of increasing the adrenaline flow, heightening the senses, preparing the body for the worst.

Fear, as a defensive mechanism, can and should be manipulated and encouraged. It keeps people from getting too close to burning things and backs them away from slippery slopes. If a subject ignores the warning of fear, all kinds of injury can be expected.

The question is not why to fear or even how to overcome it. The question is what and when to fear. Too often, it seems, we may fear the wrong things at the wrong time.

Laughing in the face of fear isn’t so bad a response in some cases. There are so many things to fear, spiders, snakes, all manner of beasts in the night. We categorize the odd types of fear in many ways and it’s hard not to be amused with different symptoms. It is even considered healthy to laugh at our own panic, whatever cause we may attribute to it, so we find it oddly helpful to laugh at the scariest and most harmful of things.

But laughter is no cure. Perhaps the best medicine, laughter is still just an instinctively tense disguise for what we fear most.

There are people who don’t give fear much of a place in their lives. These people often have a certain sparkle in their eyes, a permanent grin on their faces. They plan for the future with the finest details, fully expecting to meet lofty goals and inevitable success. They rely on a vague faith in immutable truths and expect that victory will eventually come. They uniquely brush off any thought of hazard, speak of dark clouds with silver linings and vow to cross swaying bridges only after they come upon them.

There are others who are constantly aware of imminent disaster. The almost eager look in their eyes tells of a well-worn path through a dark, stormy forest full of predators and despair. They are suspicious of everyone and everything, especially the harmful fate that awaits them around every corner.

It is said that the average Joe’s greatest fear is speaking in public. Well, that is very dangerous behavior, isn’t it? Today, we may regularly witness the painful results of those who refuse to heed the warnings of that fear. In some places it is quite easy to speak out these days. But a casual disregard for the fear of public speaking usually contorts the body, miraculously introducing one’s own foot where it typically needs not go and unveils many souls to excruciating critique.

Some may say it is simple shyness that keeps people from speaking up. Others may say it is a purposeful, thoughtful regard for the risks involved. Before opening one’s mouth, the wise person calculates the costs and benefits. The price for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time can be huge in societal terms. Alternately, the cost of not saying anything at the right time can be equally expensive. It is a difficult decision but the proper action seems to address the timing, the sequence and the relative weight of the topic. And those who are prone to ignorantly misjudging their audience among these matters are those who quickly lose all credibility on the subject.

It may not be odd that fear, like hate, finds its roots in ignorance because the effects of fear and hate are similar. It is easy to hate what we do not know and some may describe fear as an overwhelming anxiety regarding the unknown. Fear of death, perhaps the Greatest Unknown, dwells in that realm. Unpredictable future, even a fate that can be surprisingly well accepted by the general public, still boils at the base of unreasonable fear. Conflicting with the simplest description of ignorance, an eventual state brought forth by the willful hands of a solitary man can make that same man very fearful of the intended result.

Perhaps this last effect symbolizes the most profound fear, a fear that many will not admit owning, the one which hides in the heart of those who wonder or worry about what everyone else knows. This symptom is ironic because, historically, most individuals are no more adept at knowing specific things than anyone else. Yet, if one person learns in some fashion that others know something that the one person did not know, then obvious clues to this knowledge were misread and the result is insulting and calamitous to the personality. The most dreaded fear, repeat, the most dreaded fear is to learn from others something that you did not know about yourself, or more devastatingly, something that you knew about but desperately tried to hide.

One could take a scientific viewpoint and say that all life on this earth is merely a grand experiment in fear. Perhaps the experiment is worth noting only because we repeatedly deal with fear in familiar ways. Tragically, whether through faith in unseen guidance or faith in the wickedness of other men, the result of our dealings seems the same.

Regardless how we view it, all people run headlong into the walls of human peril with equal force and regularity. We cannot deny that fear has its proper place in this cruel world. We are strange people with opposing, contradictory emotions and we are afraid of so many things including the facts about who we really are and what really frightens us.

Unlike public speaking, the self-destructive result of which we may discern some degree of certainty, the unknown hidden in the future regularly defies our prognostication. The future, we are told, is unlimited. While a well mapped-out past may define our present situation, while we may only witness a constant flow of states which have already transpired, the future seems to hold the sum total of all possibility. This possibility may incorporate all conditions of joy and pain, success and failure, life and death. We do not fear possibility, in fact we yearn for its positive outcome, but the cure for fear of it, or the deliberative adjustment to it, may be to take cautious movements in the present tense.

A complex lesson of life, then, seems to be that we will never know which sequence of steps, perhaps first taken moons ago with purpose or with randomness and then quickly forgotten, set in motion the most beneficial and desired result. And, the fact remains that once a step is taken within our cosmos in any particular direction it can never be taken in the same way ever again. That’s enough evidence to make many people not step out at all.

So, some exist frozen in a constant state of not knowing what the hell will happen next. For others among us, the gnawing fear is that they regularly misunderstand what has already occurred in front of us. But fear of these unknowns is misplaced. It’s always too late to worry about cards which have already been dealt. Fear may be a healthy temporary condition, expeditiously warning us and preventing us from taking unnecessary risks, but it is a bit tiresome as an endless concern.

It’s not that we become numb to the eternal warning signs that we and our world will soon end. We realize now that from the moment of our conception, like all things, we are programmed to eventually wither away and die. It’s just that sooner or later, most choose a moderate course for our predicament, between the extremes of insane delight and total gloom. As our short journey presents itself, we tend to suppress the fear of our own ends as best we can and take a calculated risk to dive blindly forward into an unforgiving future, all the while steeling ourselves for a routinely unpleasant outcome.

Given the alternatives, that middle of the road behavior seems reasonable. We learn new things about the universe and our world every year. We are feverishly, eternally dissecting every gnat’s ass to discover the clues to our existence. And as our knowledge of all things expands, we may overcome much ignorance to find there is less to be afraid of than originally feared.

But as long as we continue to fear any objective view of our own behavior, to fear knowing our own selves, then how can we claim to ever fearlessly know the real truth about much of anything else?

Cheers,
Mb