Fear Is Your Enemy

The degree to which we filter our life experience is by magnitudes far greater than we can really comprehend. As a human being we are designed to survive in a world where mortality is real, and can even come from ways as simple as stepping out into the street without looking or succumbing to an invisible pathogen we never saw coming.

Because of human nature and the way we evolved as human beings we also evolved the tendency to engage in conflict with one another, with the stronger usually coming out on top. This is often referred to as survival of the fittest, as if it is morally superior to be the victor, but our world used to have freaking mammoths roaming the plains and forests. Their absence is definitely to our detriment, as is the many other species of humans which have died out alongside us, probably from competition with a fierce and merciless variety which preys upon and exploits those which are weaker.

This interspecial tendency for conflict also comes with a heightened fear of one another. When our basic, tribal instincts come to the fore it portends the likelihood that some of us may actually perish. Our other primate relatives engage in the same kind of warfare that we do, fighting over resources, territory, and even mates. Some other species like lions and tigers also demonstrate this kind of behavior, but others such as zebra, sharks, hippos, seals, and penguins do not, but instead congregate in large groups which work together to support the whole. Because we are one of those animals which do exhibit strong interspecial conflict, our tendency to see others as enemies is also exaggerated. Over the last several years I have been dealing with parents who increasingly regard me as a geopolitical adversary rather than their son who comes to cook with them and gives his time and insight willingly to address their serious health problems. I do not belong to any organized social groups, political parties, or ideological movements and yet I am treated as if I do, because they are afraid, and fear turns on human beings’ individual and collective survival instincts, which is where our more undesirable traits such as racism and bigotry originate.

But even those of us who feel we are above such base behaviors are strongly influenced by fear, to the point that we do not even function autonomously, and acting on fears, even or especially when we are not conscious of them, more often gets us the very problems we are afraid of, because we do not act rationally when we are afraid and this in turn causes us to make uninformed choices. When I was a young man I was so afraid of being a failure that I settled for a sleazy, disloyal, and dishonest romantic partner who not only wasted many years of my life but saddled me with infectious diseases that greatly burdened the rest of my life and robbed me of the energy and vitality I had. These kinds of experiences are valuable, because through them we experience things that are the most important parts of life, as long as we pay attention and don’t simply resent them. But in truth there was a direct line between my fears and my inability to fulfill my dreams. A lot of simplistic, pithy social media motivation might include a picture of a skydiver and something about fear. But this is part of the problem—is that we think fears are larger, big, adversarial problems when in reality they are quiet, subconscious, and have nothing to do with skydiving. For most of us the fears which captain our lives have to do with who we are as a person. We fear being liars, being unwanted, being miserable, lonely, poor, untalented, unworthy, making mistakes, or being lost. Reacting to these fears we do things like lie even more, preemptively reject suitable friends and romances, fight and argue with those whom we are supposed to love, isolate, spend more money that we really have, engage in projects we can never truly realize or which are not good for our long-term wellbeing, and wander through life constantly grasping at any possible good news or glimmer of hope.

The reality of dealing with fears is not actually in neutralizing them, which is what we usually try to do. If you’re afraid of being poor we try to earn tons of money and succeed at a career, even if this means compromising our integrity, putting up with really shitty people, exhausting ourselves and neglecting our family and friends. But because the fear does not actually come from being poor, achieving wealth never serves to remove the fear, and in fact the more wealthy one becomes the greater this fear also. Many people have lots of money, but they aren’t rich. They lack happiness, intimacy, knowledge, joy, calmness, and ironically, freedom. If we fear an oppositional political candidate we spend time and energy trying to defeat them, but in reality this tends to sustain political conflict, even heightening it. Conversely, the opposite of fear is also not really experiencing the thing you are afraid of, though it sometimes can happen it really only helps us to learn the true opposite of our fear. Part of my fear of rejection included being fat and thus being undesirable, and I got sick and and fat and my partner left me, not because that happens to fat people but because I chose a shallow and insecure person as a partner. Though the experience helped me learn that my self-worth does not originate from how I look, I did not need to go through that experience to learn that. Most relevant to the state of things are the political fears which are roiling our country (as they have done so often as to actually be boring if you’re at all aware of this). The right fears losing their money, comfort, and control while the left fears being dominated by authoritarians and persecution by empowered bigots and xenophobes, and because these things can and do happen we strive with all our emotional and physical energy to neutralize it, unless we’re too young or naive to understand there is a threat.

Fears serve the purpose of making us more attuned to potential threats to our wellbeing or even our existence. There are even very effective political strategies centered on stoking and provoking fear, though it is assumed that those in power do this on purpose instead of simply through their own human instincts for it. But because this heightened, hyperawareness is instinctual and reactionary we do not really understand what it is we are really afraid of, and mistake the fear with the persons or groups with which they are associated, and spend exhaustive amounts of time, energy, and resources trying to neutralize that threat. People on the right fear poverty, powerlessness, and sharing, and as such view those without (such as minorities or the poor) as threats to their prosperity, even when their own members steal from and cheat them, because in their view the person whom they are following demonstrates the very same behavior as they are—fear of poverty, loss of power, and sharing—regardless of how reality actually benefits them. Those on the left fear power, injustice, and bigotry, so we hold up figures who share power, promote justice, and fight bigotry, even when those leaders entrench systems which oppress and burden us. As an example, Governor Newsom of California championed and implemented the same oppressive health care tax which made the right so apoplectic over the Affordable Healthcare Act and even though that tax originated from Republican Governor Romney when he led Massachusetts, which was a compromise from Obama during creation of the legislation and is not at all a left or liberal policy, but because Governor Newsom is a Democrat (and a very liberal one at that) we support things like this even though it actively oppresses us because our fears motivate us to align with those we feel most alleviate those fears and not, in actuality, the reality of their effectiveness.

Truly neutralizing fears simply requires one, easy strategy, which is to try to look at the real reasons behind them. When we are afraid of conservative, gun slinging Trump republicans what are we actually afraid of? The fact that they would kill us without a moment’s remorse, the way that Kyle Rittenhouse did in Wisconsin? Kyle Rittenhouse was just a young man conditioned to respond to his fears, and saw everyone as enemies to shoot, instead of neighbors and fellow countrymen. But his fear has now turned him into a murderer, which can never be undone, and which seems to be something he and his parents never considered throughout the entire course of buying guns, engaging in political malice and antagonism, and traveling to participate in a contentious protest. The reason they want to shoot us is because they too mistake us for their fears, seeing competition where in reality there is none, perceiving brothers and sisters as enemy combatants, and because we do the same in return we function to validate their fears rather than assuage them. This does not mean abdicating truth and justice—it means probing beyond the superficial and acting in spite of fear, not because of it. Biden does himself no good by campaigning on how terrible Trump is. It merely serves to amplify the reasons Trump is in power in the first place. During the cyclical nature of power, politics, and control there is no right and left, no corporatist and socialist, but instead those who empower fear or those who neutralize it. Both are achieved by strong leadership, and Biden being an author of many of the institutions which have created this climate, in reaction to fear, is not that great at neutralizing it, instead too fixated on his own, so he will probably, sadly, lose.

In our own lives we can stop sabotaging our own happiness by looking at the real reasons for our fears. If you are afraid of being poor it’s not because you’re afraid that you could lose your job or money but because you don’t know what you would do if you didn’t have security, or because you know deep down that security is always just an illusion anyway and would rather not admit that, since it makes us powerless. If you’re afraid that your husband or wife doesn’t really love you and might leave, you are probably really afraid that you’re kind of a loser that nobody likes, and maybe you are, but you don’t know it’s okay to be a loser because you spend all of your time trying to neutralize your fear, even to the point of killing every last ounce of spontaneity and fun in your relationship, turn your partner into the bad guy, and by your own hand undermine the relationship anyway. Maybe, like many people you are desperately afraid of death, so you spend all your time trying to just eat right and diet and get that one supplement which is going to cure you when in reality you are simply afraid of the truth that we have control over almost nothing in this life, not even our own fate, and could otherwise be finding the joy in what you have right now and leave the rest of it to the powers that be.

In my book there is a great deal of psychological therapy and insight to more fully neutralize fear and self-defeating behaviors (which are also supported by a good diet), with specific, easy writing practices which help to actually accomplish resolution of the past pain and trauma from which fears originate. Fears are in reality a coping mechanism we develop to survive life, and understanding where and why they originated helps us to actually neutralize the fear and not the thing we are afraid of. Sometimes fear comes simply from ignorance, so if you’re afraid of COVID-19 you can read Improving Resistance to Coronavirus (COVID-19). If you’re afraid of not being beautiful you can read Are You Beautiful?. If you’re afraid of things like cancer you can read I Survived Cancer and So Can You. Racism is one of the more insidious products of fear, and to better understand why it exists and what can be done about it you can read The End of Racism.