We have little need to question life when we are happy,
but if we hurt, we know something is wrong, and not all sources of hurt
can be resolved. We starve. We are murdered. We zig when we should have
zagged to avoid the concrete bridge abutment. We get cancer. We die of old
age. Even the problems we can fix prove terminal if the fix is not
apparent in timely fashion. Our powers of reason are limited. Some
solutions will always lie just outside our reach.
Hurt takes one of two forms, tactile pain and emotional
suffering. Pain is warning that injury is occurring in the immediate
moment. Anguish is a repercussion of a psychological ‘need’ that has been
lost in the past, is missing in the present, or cannot be attained in the
future. Fright is a physiological reaction to a stimulus that has occurred
in the immediate past. A frightened kitten, as an example, will arch its
back and hiss, and return to immediate calm if no threat continues.
Fear, however, is an act of the imagination and
experienced only by minds with the ability to extrapolate. Fear is
anticipation of pain founded upon memory of past events. Fear, like
fright, stimulates us to take action, but before any danger exists in the
immediate moment. If the fear is ill-defined, so is the action needed to
prevent injury. We use the term 'worry', or 'anxiety' to denote our state
of indecision in the face of our vaguest of imagined fears and indecisive
need to act. The only action we can take is reduced to fidgeting,
nail-biting, and pacing.
Unfortunately, possibilities of injury are endless in
number. We cannot defend against, nor plan for, each and every scenario.
And to top it off, when we imagine a threatening enemy, or a harmful
situation, we must ourselves create the imaginative drama within which the
injury takes place. We must assign a certain part of ourselves to play the
role of the characters within this imaginative drama, villains and victims
alike.
Fright is justifiable, but fear is an error born of
confusion. The limbic system cannot tell sensory reality and imaginative
reality apart. For the neocortex, there’s no way out except to stop the
unnecessary dramas that spring up in the imagination throughout the course
of the day and stir up useless emotional agitation. For those deeply
embedded in the old mammalian brain, individuals who, when angered or
frightened, use everything about themselves that is human to either
self-destruct or turn themselves into vengeful monsters, there is no
escape. Consequences lie in store for the quagmire we have created for
ourselves. It is a plight we all suffer at some part in our personal
evolution as we step across the chasm between the animal and the human.
The way out of the confusion is a long and arduous
process. The imagination is a tool for survival that generates worst case
scenarios from facts at hand. It works with past material. It cannot see
into the future, which is why most science-fiction movies are ultimately
stories of war, strife, conflict, and destruction. We know what can go
wrong. How can we possibly imagine what may go right and result in
unimaginable wonders?
Much of the appeal of emotional reactivity lies in the
poor reputation of conscious presence and the cold intellect to resolve
social issues, which are often emotional issues. In the public’s eye,
thinking is a heartless process. Clearly reasonable products of the
intellect, our technology, are respected, but those who are ruled by
emotion cannot always follow the stark logic and abide by the behavioral
discipline required of the rational thought that has built our
civilization. After all, how do we rationally stop a war if everyone
involved most passionately wants to kill the other party? Emotions are
simple to express and interpret and our skill at crossing swords with one
another is eons old. Emotional interaction is a highly ritualized cultural
affair. We’re both familiar and comfortable with the process despite the
pain and suffering it causes.
That cold and heartless intellectual world-view is, of
course, culturally Newtonian, the only scientific view available to us
previous to this century, that of a clockwork universe slowly running out
of steam. This is the source of our cultural admonishment that we see
ourselves as ephemeral, mortal, and the world as ‘solid’, independent of
our existence and more or less eternal.
Human frailty does seem to be a fact. Our sensory view
of our mortality gives society the leverage in needs to control
‘anarchists’ who won't sacrifice to maintain the self-defensive fabric of
common belief. We are nothing. The collective is everything. We die. The
nation will live on.
Limited to emotionally reactive perceptions of the
world, the Newtonian ego would imprison us, and has imprisoned many, in a
gray and empty fantasy-world of fear, fear of death, fear of a mindless
environment that can inflict unending suffering on survivors, and
ultimately fear of the total futility of life. In the end, all living
things die. Once gone, it is as if none of it had ever happened, or so we
imagine. No echo of our existence remains except in the minds of other,
equally ephemeral beings.
Many of us struggle desperately to escape this
existential dread, this apparent all-encompassing dead-end. We search,
always in vain, for answers outside of ourselves. We look in the wrong
place for the key to our escape.
We'll certainly never find that escape in the grip of
fear. The key to resolving fear is at least partially the need to
understand its dynamics. To the extent we fail to understand the nature of
our personal fears, fear poisons our relations with others, our social
interaction, and our ability to be of mutual benefit in our societies.
Fear is actually the very foundation to our lives. We
can't imagine new ways in which our lives may change qualitatively for the
better, but we can always imagine ways we can be harmed. We erect our
defenses against the negatives using all available personal resources. We
choose, or are influenced to accept, certain self-defensive ways to
interact with the world that is natural to the way the human brain is
wired. We employ a blend of these techniques and attitudes in our own
unique fashion. When they work, we call these techniques and attitudes
'personality styles'.
Personality styles are defenses against imagined
dangers, largely social. They are complex variations of the primal theme
of how to confront and disarm or defeat a danger. We have a choice of
freezing in place in hopes we are not seen, fleeing, or fighting. If our
more complex human coping mechanisms fail, if our personality styles are
not up to the task of providing a sense of security against the perceived
hazards of existence, or if the pressures of our lives become too great
for any mind to withstand, then our defenses crumble and we become
dysfunctional. Our personality styles taken too far become recognizable
personality disorders.
The American Psychiatric Association publishes a book
called the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
In a nutshell, there are currently fourteen basic ways to suffer a
psychological disorder. Fifteen percent of us suffer these disorders.
Animals have no perception of the world beyond the
moment and experience no more than fleeting confusion and a sense of loss
when a close associate dies. A dead animal is decomposing meat, no longer
an animal at all in the here and now. Human beings most certainly do see
beyond the moment and immediate circumstance. We see friends, family, and
allies, beings of our own kind, die and decompose, but we remember them as
they were. We see them fall prey to predators and die screaming. We
personally associate with that fate, unlike the animals. If it is their
fate, ultimately it is ours, and this knowledge is not easy to live with
on a daily basis. To live is to simply survive for as long as we can. Good
health is dying at the slowest possible rate. But life is ephemeral, and
we will die.
With our naked eyes, we cannot see beyond our natural
horizons, the limitations of the sensorium of the limbic system.
Intellectually, however, we have most certainly moved beyond some of these
sensory horizons. Our purely sensory imagination once told us men could
fly if we had wings like angels, but it was conscious presence and its
focus upon abstracts that defied common-sense and built those wings of
metal. We can now see the dark side of the moon. We know the ways in which
our senses can be fooled and compensate. We know about bacteria,
radiation, and the hazard unseen asteroids pose.
We know at an increasing pace and intensity that
pitfalls and limitations infested our old way of life. We know it is in
need of revision. We can do better than the animals have done. We cannot
afford to be as blindly emotionally reactive as they, because we can no
longer afford to lash out without thinking, not if we can strike an enemy
with more than a fist, say with a thermonuclear warhead that will poison
our own homeland.
Common-sense doesn’t cut it anymore. Too much of it is
in error. Blind and unreasoning belief no longer provide us comfort and
security. Knowledge substantiates an idea, or the idea is shelved until it
can, or is dismissed, if knowledge disproves its worth, which is the
scientific method. Technology works only with certainty, and we learn to
provide certainty quite effectively in our machines.
The human mind is not a machine, but in a matter of
speaking, the human mind harbors machines. Machines are born of ideas and
understandings of the nature of the world. Machines of steel are born
within the recesses of the deepest information processing systems of flesh
and blood.
Do we need fantasies to soothe our fears of the
unknown? In reality, the unknown is our only true source of opportunity.
Despite our common conviction of the validity of Isaac Newton's
description of physical reality, the definition and nature of death remain
unwarranted assumption. Anything that lies beyond sensory perception is
territory for the intellect to explore and should not be fodder for
emotional reactivity toying with the powers of the imagination. When that
happens, we conjure, not science, but Thor and his thunderbolts, gold
streets stained with milk and honey, and pathological places of torture
beneath the earth.
We cannot assign emotional qualities to the unknown
without shooting ourselves in the foot. Civilization and technology are
derived from the unknown, the electric lights we flick on at night, the
toilet we flush and the sink where we get our fresh water, the stove where
we cook and the corner grocery store where we buy safe and nourishing
food. Everything of use in our lives is derived from the unknown. Only
when we purposely employ technology to harm others do we have the gall to
call it and not ourselves instruments of 'evil'. Emotion is useful for
making and raising babies. Emotion may be involved in the decision to
unleash an atomic bomb on the city of an enemy, but it had nothing to do
with the understanding of nuclear energy in itself.
Death, injury, disease, misfortune, many negative
events, leap at us from the unknown, but even so, they can be seen as
opportunities for growth. How much thought does it take to realize that
the bad things that happen to us provide the motivation to improve upon a
situation? Humans were once hunter-gatherers. They went hungry now and
then and could not gather in large social groups without stripping the
land bare of food and game. How did they resolve such horrors of hunger
and social deprivation and yet provide the security of greater numbers?
Does farming and agriculture ring a bell?
So, how many of us simply decide to stop being afraid
when we see that it's counterproductive? Nope, it doesn’t work that way.
Our imagination is far too useful to abandon, and it's always employed
with good intentions, as long as we can control it. Try negotiating a
jungle, or a ghetto for that matter, without safeguarding one's self by
anticipating what awful things might happen and taking precautions. Try
building a skyscraper, or traveling to the moon without a dry run in the
imagination where all the ways to fail are worked out beforehand. Getting
to the moon has been the supreme act of the human imagination, but we’d
never make it to the grocery store without the use of imagination, not
just anticipating things that go right, but conjuring from realms of
probability things that may go wrong. It takes memory to know where we
left the keys and the car, where the streets and the store are located,
but it takes imagination to organize what needs to be done and put it all
into dynamic and coordinated motion.
We live with fear of things that may go wrong, and the
adrenalin it generates winds us up tight. We alleviate the discomfort by
manipulating the imagined scenarios that generated the fear to begin with.
We walk a dark street at night and imagine an assailant stepping from the
bushes with a knife, demanding our wallets, or worse, our clothes. To
defeat the imagined fear, we have to rewind the 'film' a bit in our
imagination. Then, when the assailant steps out with his knife, we pull
out our can of pressurized mace, our stun gun, or our .357 revolver and we
turn the tables on the imagined manifestation of our personal nemesis.
If only we could consistently put the imagination to
nothing but good and effective use, but we chatter to ourselves in our
heads all day long in an effort to hold petty fears at bay, running
through our minds relatively innocent scenarios of confrontations with the
everyday people in our lives, cops, bosses, family, friends, and personal
enemies. We anticipate countless ways we may be threatened, and form
complex schemes to get what we want. We imagine ways to disarm, overpower,
charm, or simply to cope with potential problems.
And if we catch a soap opera on afternoon television,
or go to see our movie that evening and identify with a hero or heroine
engaging and defeating our most pressing concerns in life, we get some
outside help with the process. Fiction slips into the equation like a
ghost. Telling stories. Fiction is what extrapolation is all about.
Fiction is imaginary and arbitrary circumstance.
Fiction is fantasy based upon fundamental social and environmental truths.
Extrapolations are imaginings of things that could happen, perhaps, but
haven't.
Fiction is the socialization of the human imagination.
If a threat isn’t immediate and intimate, learning how
to cope with dangers and challenges in the arena of our imagination,
between the pages of a book, or on a movie screen, can be fun as well as
educational. We imagine scary circumstances and are presented with
strategies and techniques with which to triumph. We create synthetic
realities in which we implement defenses and offenses and reign
victorious. Or we fall harmlessly in defeat and live to do better the next
time.
If we are not aware of how fear works in our lives, we
succumb to its dark seduction. Much of the chatter that goes on inside our
heads during the day is an effort to manipulate the facts of a problem
rather than deal with the problem head-on, to pretend a problem out of
existence rather than resolve it. We hide our dishonesty behind
intellectualizations, justifications and rationalizations, or we whine and
growl in an effort to manipulate others into resolving our problems for
us.
Fear can be harnessed to serve a useful purpose. Fear
serves not only useful purposes, but is a critical necessity. Left
unchallenged and misunderstood, however, fear rules our world.
