In my 40s, I spent a few years on sabbatical, living on a boat and sailing to some relatively remote islands. Life was simple, largely self-reliant, primitive, and a little bit dangerous. It was also very quiet. Paradoxically, when I came back to ‘civilization,’ all I could see was fear, fear, fear. I had not seen it when I was immersed in it before the sabbatical, but after withdrawing for a few years, I could not miss it on my return.
The entirety of modern culture seems to be powered by fear: fear of failure, of attack, of constraint, of abandonment, of crowds, of loneliness, of ugliness, of not having the right clothes, of getting some dirt on your clothes, of being too fat or thin or liberal or conservative or cynical or naive or militant or passive or…you get the picture. How can there be more fear in the cushy, coddled, safe, and convenient US than I experienced alone on the ocean?
Fear Factories
We can thank Madison Avenue. As it turns out, Fear sells a lot of toothpaste. Professional marketers discovered long ago that FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) is a powerful technique for manipulating people by making them insecure about themselves and their knowledge, often by feeding them misinformation. Essentially, FUD is intended to scare consumers, so that they will buy (from the person who scared them!) the thing that promises to keep them safe.
For example, advertisements for beauty products often imply that good companions want to be with beautiful people; thus, you will be lonely if you do not use the product. Such an ad is designed to create a question in your mind: “Am I alone because I need to become more beautiful, because I have not used this product?” The technique works just as well on seemingly macho types: innumerable huge pickup trucks have been sold to buyers who never haul anything more than groceries, because ads associate weaker vehicles with weaker owners. Marlboro used images of the Marlboro Man to get people to admire retro-rugged independent prototypes, an association that made them more likely to ignore the emerging warnings about cigarettes’ health consequences for fear of appearing weak or dependent themselves.
Advertising companies have been fantastically successful at making us fearful of being alone, left out, old, hungry, irrelevant, stupid, ugly, invisible, or impotent. Similarly, social media and cable news outlets have made us fearful of irrelevance for not knowing what happened in the last five minutes, not trying the latest album, not vacationing in the latest ‘hip’ destination. Politicians have made us fearful of losing whatever it is we think we have, of not getting our fair share, of anyone who looks or acts differently from our team, or of losing the power and respect we once enjoyed. In each of these cases, the person injecting the fear is the same person offering to sell the antidote. It is a scam, but we still fall for it regularly.
Mr. Hyde
One of my dear friends is the kindest man I have ever met. Everyone who knows him loves him. Oddly, he started behaving pessimistically and selfishly a few years ago and began alienating some folks. When we dug into what was going on, it surfaced that he felt trapped in a situation where his business partner was taking advantage of him, such that he would never be able to achieve his life goals. He feared that the partner would prevent him from having the life he wanted, and it turned him into a crazy version of himself. But, once he admitted that he had the power to walk away (if the partner would not negotiate a healthy relationship), he no longer felt trapped, and he immediately turned back into himself, into the wonderful person everyone loved. By looking directly at his fear and seeing that it was hollow, he banished Mr. Hyde.
Compared to the peaceful, self-sufficient, proud, grounded existence of which we are capable, our fear-laden lives look ghastly. Fear drives us to make decisions completely out of character; we behave more selfishly (fearful of being shorted), more cynically (fearful of appearing naïve), less selectively (fearful of being alone), less adventurously (fearful of looking silly), and more.
Maybe this reminds you of a book often read in middle school: Lord of the Flies. In this darkly profound story, boys stranded alone on an island see some weird-but-harmless things they do not understand, which trigger fears that bring out the worst in them. The moral of the story is that fear creates monsters, not the other way around. We think that monsters make us fear, but actually, our fears make us into monsters.
If someone you know (including yourself) behaves in seemingly bizarre ways that directly contradict who you know them to be, fear is probably at work. Forget about the behavior; figure out what the fear is. Fix the fear to banish the monster.
Just say no to fear. Do not use it. And do not let it be used on you.
CONTEMPLATE
A fear carefully observed loses its power.
ADAPT
Is there an area of your life in which you are not being true to yourself? When you describe why you are behaving that way, do you see any fears as causes or contributors? Write careful descriptions of those fears and discuss your descriptions with a trusted friend. You will likely find that the fears lose power over your choices.
Article by More to Life Elder – Scott Davis
Article published in More to Life – Edition 64
