Fear
Mark Greathouse
(2/2022) Fear…suffocating scared-to-death fear…surrounds us, crushes us, snuffs out the fires of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Some even fear fear; that’s phobophobia. And the greatest fear that folks hold is described by Publilius Maximus in Maxim 511 (1st Century B.C.) who noted, "The fear of death is more to be dreaded than death itself."
Most fears are rather contrived; like fear of not getting our "fair" share, fear of injustice, etc. that are mostly attributes of self-love, ego, and selfishness driven by fear of personal discomfort. Most fears or phobias are conquerable with a little effort.
Arguably, there are plenty of justified fears. We are surrounded by things to be fearful of, including death, rejection, the unknown, change, uncertainty, disease, natural disasters, job loss, and more. There’s even fear of failure which – amazingly – is topped by fear of success. Too often, fear rules our lives and we feel helpless to overcome them. Mostly, folks who succumb to their fears have never been taught the means to overcome them.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt famously spoke to fear in his March 4, 1933 inauguration speech, "This great nation will endure, as it has endured, will revive and will prosper. So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself - nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance." Powerful. Citizens were rightly fearful of the nation’s terrible economic woes. In addition, Adolph Hitler had begun to loom as a threat to world stability by using fear in the form of mass formation psychosis (aka, crowd hypnosis) to take over the Weimer Republic.
Today, we face a host of conquerable fears like merchants fearing looters and rioters, corporations caving to fear of a "woke" minority, local governments taking down statues for fear of cancel culturists, and citizens fearing for personal safety as criminals command our streets.
Fear has often been "weaponized" over the centuries to attain and sustain power and control. It’s the "do this or else" mantra. Such fear is often sustained by controlling information through misinformation, disinformation, and lack of information as impacted by ideological or selfish motives driven by greed and lust for power.
Even many well-meaning Christians use fear as a religious conversion tool, e.g., fear of not going to Heaven or fear of living a meaningless life unless you accept Christ as your savior. There’s no salvation through fear.
A very real fear that folks face today is COVID-19. It’s a rational fear. Many folks have died. Yet, arguably, much COVID fear is irrational. Media, academia, big-tech, and government seem to have manipulated information to induce irrational fears in many folks. Thus, millions of perfectly healthy citizens stayed indoors, wore mostly ineffective masks even while outdoors or driving alone in a car, and endured lines to get marginally effective vaccines. All this was caused by irrational fears stoked by conflicting data, unknown outcomes, changing health mandates, spewing of meaningless categories of data, and the like. Folks actually wanted to know how many were surviving and how they managed that, but such data wasn’t released. Don’t survival statistics make a lot more sense than death statistics? What preventive measures truly work? What are the effective therapeutics? They still don’t know…or won’t tell. Result: fear.
Our universities present a great Orwellian example of COVID weaponization through overt virtue signaling. Several "elite" institutions require masks, vaccinations, and testing; restrict student travel; and incentivize students to snitch on non-compliant fellow students. Students complacently knuckle under while fearing reprisal.
COVID fear has been stoked by mixed messages. We’ve worn masks and social distanced to "flatten the curve," locked everything down, gotten vaccinated, gotten a booster, double masked, gotten another booster, been threatened with mandates, gotten tested, waited for pills, and on and on. Citizens are rightly scared and confused, as big-tech offers dire often-inaccurate health warnings attached to social media posts, government healthcare bureaucrats constantly change requirements supposedly in the name of science but actually for political advantage, teacher unions stoke fear with outsized power, and practicing physicians argue for and against the efficacy of masks, social distancing, and vaccines. And natural immunity, ostensibly the best protection from COVID, is ignored mostly because it generates no financial gain for big pharma or for political campaigns.
There’s plenty to fear besides COVID. Death. War. Economic loss. Fear is arguably more powerful than reason, and, when it is stoked by ideologically-driven media, academia, politicians, bureaucrats, and big-tech, it is horribly destructive to our health and our freedoms. The likes of CNN, Fox, OAN, MSNBC, and Politico regularly skew opinions masked as facts that in turn stoke fears. They offer pieces pulled from select sources that permit them to render opinions posing as facts that they feel are justified to support their ideological slants. Often as not, they belatedly retract and correct their misshaping of the news, but its often long after the fear-mongering has already been wrought.
Bertrand Russell in An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish (1950) noted, "Fear is the main source of superstition and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom." Where has the wisdom from media, science, and government been? International collusion…racism…global pandemic…insurrection…riots…we seem indeed to be victims of the age-old political adage, "Never let a crisis go to waste." One of the dilemmas of many politicians was expressed well by Niccoló Machiavelli in The Prince (1532), "Since love and fear can hardly exist together, if we must choose between them, it is far safer to be feared than loved." Far too many politicians choose the fear route and find love only from their sycophantic inner circles. Fear? We might ask ourselves what mind-numbing fear will be conjured up after the pandemic? Who’s controlling whom? Why?
Deciding rationally whether or what to fear is critically important to the quality of our lives and that of the society in which we live. One of our nation’s beauties was its founding upon principles of opportunity, including overcoming loss, injustice, and more through peaceful, lawful processes. In America, we enjoy freedom of choice. We are free to choose to confront fears head on, ignore them, or be ruled by them. We can place our trust in faith, as 1 John 4:18 tells us, "There is no fear in love; instead, perfect love drives out fear, because fear involves punishment. So, the one who fears has not reached perfection in love." Hope, wisdom, trust, love, and faith are surely powerful antidotes to many fears. They offer enough confidence in the future that we might choose to freely set our fears aside.
But, be no fool; don’t naively and blithely accept the largesse of any government that claims solutions – many false and biased – aimed at supposedly assuaging our fears. We alone are first and foremost charged with guarding our freedom to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Well-founded, rational thought about the threats before us can give us an edge over the fears and fear mongers that would control our existence. Choose wisely.
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