As I was trying to find the best example of fear for this article, my dog started barking at a strange car parked in the neighbor’s driveway. That’s fear, for you, a watchdog that can’t tell the difference between a burglar and something harmless. I tried to reason with my dog, but you can’t reason with fear. Now that I had an example, I started to worry it wasn’t good enough. Worry is another type of fear. It’s also another example. If I got on that train of thought, I’d end up feeling like a failure as a writer and my life would be meaningless. That made me worried about worrying. Is fear, in all its varieties, behind everything my dog and I say, do, and think? Is my aspiration to be a good writer and have a meaningful life nothing but a fear of being a bad writer and having a meaningless life? Since both fear and desire give me the same measure of how much I avoid or want something, I could replace every fear word with a positive one, mean the same thing, and completely change my outlook. Here’s the reason I don’t. If I say I aspire to a meaningful life, I’m saying the same thing as when I say I fear a meaningless one, but it feels different. Isn’t the purpose of stating a feeling to state a feeling? Desire and fear are two sides of the same coin, but one side is valued more than the other. What is Fear?Fear is the body’s alarm at certain physiological changes, a rapid heartbeat, redirection of blood flow to the gut, tensing of muscles, and a general mobilization to action. You don’t need to be conscious of fear for it to take control of you. As I was saying, fear could be the hidden driver of everything, even your most exalted aspirations. But, when you do become aware of it, it becomes a feeling, in the way we’ve been using the term, and you can identify its subtypes. Fear proper, when not describing the class of feelings, has an object; whereas with angst, you don’t know what you’re afraid of. Worry and rumination have an object, but you’re not sensing a threat, you’re narrating one. Anxiety faces the future. Trauma reactions are based on the past, but anticipate a recurrence in the future. Other words for fear cover course and intensity. Startle and fright are instantaneous and reflexive. Alarm sets in when you’ve had time to register what’s happening. Panic is short lasting and overwhelming. Terror is more sustained. A phobia is a persistent fear. Horror combines fear with revulsion at something transgressive or unnatural. Nervousness and apprehension are low-grade and extended. Trepidation is apprehension with hesitation built in. When fear settles in and becomes part of your personality, it’s called timidity, shyness, or cowardice. Social anxiety is a fear specifically of others’ judgement. It has as much to do with shame as fear. What is Fear For?Fear seems to have evolved as a fast threat-detection system, responding to real, statistically relevant cues like a loud noise, growly voice, sudden movement, or a steep drop. It’s a form of perception that registers danger before slower deliberate reasoning catches up. Fear is quick judgment, made by the gut rather than the head. You can see the benefit of having a hair trigger fear response to give you a jump on whatever is after you, but the cost is many false alarms. Fear gives too much weight to vivid, salient threats like plane crashes and shark attacks, over statistically more likely ones, like car crashes and drowning. It persists in trauma and phobias long after the threat is gone. Fear narrows your attention on survival, blocking the very reasoning that could correct it and making it hard to take in other perspectives. That’s why politicians exploit it. They don’t need to give you an argument to make a bad conclusion. They just need to evoke fear and the narrowing will do the work. Fear is clearly an irrational response that sometimes is the right answer when you need it the most, like a clock that’s stopped at the time you need to leave to keep an appointment. I would rather my dog barked at every silly thing than barked at nothing. Fear is a mental robot programmed to tell us the worse case scenario and not listen to what you have to say. It’s designed to be separate and autonomous from reason so you can’t talk it into letting its guard down. However, you can cultivate other feelings, like courage, to override it. Courage is not the absence of fear, it’s the correct judgement about what is worth fearing. For example, it was not worth it to worry that a single bad example would make me a bad writer and my entire life meaningless. I had more to fear from going down that rabbit hole. I was more alarmed that my dog’s barking would disturb my concentration than concerned about the car in my neighbor’s driveway. If you do have a persistent fear that makes little sense, there’s basically two things you can do about it. You can avoid it or confront it. For example, I have a fear of snakes. If a snake walked in here right now, I’d be outta here. That should have been the example of fear I first thought of. I could get some therapy for my snake phobia, but why bother? I don’t come across snakes that often. I can easily avoid them. However, if I couldn’t avoid snakes, like if I got a job as a snake charmer, I would need to confront my fear. That doesn’t mean I should jump into a snake pit. Oh, the horror! No, that would give me a panic attack. It would be counterproductive. What I should do is begin by looking at pictures of snakes until they stop giving me the willies. Then I should go to the zoo and see them behind glass. Next, find a snake that’s not behind glass and look at that. The final step would be to pick one up and invite it to slither across my shoulders. If I go through the process of slowly confronting myself with what I fear, I’m not reasoning with fear, I’m habituating my fear to snakes. The same thing happens when the car remains in the neighbor’s driveway. My dog gets used to seeing it and stops barking. ReferencesSince both fear and desire give me the same measure... You don’t need to be conscious of fear for it to take control of you… Martha C. Nussbaum, The Monarchy of Fear (2018). Fear proper… has an object; whereas with angst, you don’t know what you’re afraid of. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (Sein und Zeit, 1927), Sections 30, 40. Fear gives too much weight to vivid, salient threats. Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, “Availability: A Heuristic for Judging Frequency and Probability,” Cognitive Psychology, 1973, 5(2): 207–232. Fear narrows your attention on survival... That’s why politicians exploit it… They just need to evoke fear and the narrowing will do the work. In The Monarchy of Fear (2018), Martha C. Nussbaum writes that fear makes people “indifferent to truth,” drawing them toward an insulating peer group and a leader who offers “womb-like” safety in exchange for their judgment. Courage is not the absence of fear, it’s the correct judgment about what is worth fearing. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book III, roughly 1115a–1117a. What I should do is begin by looking at pictures of snakes. Joseph Wolpe, Psychotherapy by Reciprocal Inhibition (Stanford University Press, 1958), the book that introduced systematic desensitization as a clinical technique used for phobias. You're currently a free subscriber to The Reflective Eclectic. For the full experience, upgrade your subscription.
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