FEAR

We fear nothing more than fear. Which prompts the question: is fear a simple psychological response, or something more fundamental? We fear predators because we don’t want to get hurt. But do we also fear them because they can hurt others?
This is an interesting point, suggesting that fear is more than something personal to us as individuals. At some level, it also has a social purpose.

OF THE SUPERNATURAL

Ghosts can be helpful here. We don’t know whether ghosts exist, but certainly people tend to see them. This could of course be nothing more than hallucination. But when seen, they tend to produce fear. Yet except for rare exceptions, a ghost doesn’t seem to be able to harm you.
Why do we fear them? The obvious answer is that they are unexplained. And we fear the unknown more than we fear predators that could harm us. Something about the unknown assaults our ability to reason.
If we were such great thinkers, WHY don’t we know what they are? This somewhat arrogant fear response could be very social indeed. For instance, in the deep past answers did emerge to explain what these supernatural visitations were.
They were spirits of the dead. And it is arguable that the seeing of such spirits caused ideas concerning afterlife. And from that point on, it was a small step to social organisation through religion.

SURVIVAL AND THE DARE-DEVIL

The most likely reason we experience fear is for survival purposes. Giving the feeling a deeply evolutionary purpose, we needed fear to give us the impulse to run or be on our guard.
Such a response at the instinctual level would have assisted the early hunter/gatherer to thrive. But in the modern world, the response could be causing us problems.
As with other abilities, they often need flexing to keep the ability honed. Hence, when real life reduces the things we need to be fearful of, we create daredevil activities such as bungee-jumping to continue to experience it. In some people, it becomes a drug, and the spills and thrills must continue.
Even with people who claim not to be daredevils, the roller-coaster and horror fiction offer two easy fear fixes.
Interestingly, such recreational fear responses only tend to come in peaceful times. It is as if we require a certain level of fear. So when real life doesn’t give us the shocks, we purposely invent them. However, sometimes this gets out of hand completely, and we develop fear neuroses such as phobias.

ECONOMICS OF FEAR

There is nothing on the planet that cannot become fearful to some people. The survival purpose of fear does seem to have adapted to modern man. Whilst it was essential in the wild, as man became more civilised, he seemed to invent plenty in everyday society to invoke the response.
Typically, we have a fear of failure or poverty. This is useful to society, as one of the principle determiners of a society is its economic standing. From early slavery, through the feudal society, to industrial society and its spin-offs of capitalism and communism, and even to modern globalisation, economics has defined what a society is.
Such use of labour and capital even separates the hunter/gatherer from the birth of civilisation in the agricultural revolution. So an in-built requirement to survive economically gives fear a definite survival purpose in the social systems we create.

IT’S A RELIGIOUS THING

Alternatively, we have already seen how religions could have begun because of our fears. And their ongoing evolution continues to manipulate the fear response.
Morality, for instance can best be seen as a requirement to be seen as good rather than bad. Good brings down social approval. Badness brings down loathing, scorn, even punishment.
Advancing religious impulses reflect this. Take reincarnation and karma in Hinduism. Your actions in life decide your place in the scheme of things in a future incarnation. Be good and you rise in social status. Be bad and you decline. The whole reincarnation belief can be seen to be grounded in a religious requirement to be good, prompted by the fear of a decline in your state.
The fear mechanism is even more pronounced in western monotheistic religions such as Christianity. In the Bible, Hell is simply a land of sleep. But as social forms grew into feudalism and the Middle Ages, images of Hell transformed into a fiery place of eternal damnation. It produced a stark fear response to do good.

HOW SOCIETY BEGAN

Fear began as a survival response in animals. We don’t know how they appreciate fear, but animals can be seen to realise when a dangerous situation looms. The response saves more animals than any other instinct.
But an instinct is not an emotion in human terms. At some point, when we moved out of the animal kingdom to become human, we took with us a new form of fear. And this fear could have been a central element in why we became civilised in the first place.
Imagine early man. He has begun to think in an abstract way, linking data before him into systems we call knowledge. On a dark night he would have looked up at the sky and seen the stars. They were awesome and told him a simple thing. The universe is vast, and you are such a small thing in it.
This would have been immensely fearful, making early man cower in the shadows. But it would have also birthed a need to fight his fear. And at some point he would have realised that he could become bigger through numbers. By creating social systems, man no longer had to feel fearful by himself. Society could assist him to be bigger.

A NATURE THING

In this way, fear could well be the propellant – the dynamo – of social interaction. And as the agricultural revolution got under way, he would find his new society had a lot to be fearful of.
In creating agriculture, man created property. And when one man has something you can guarantee another man will try to take it from him. Fear of such actions would have led to complexity in society to thwart, first, the thief, and then the invader. But early civilised man had even more to be fearful of than this.
With agriculture, man became slave to his environment. Hunter/gatherer wasn’t a slave. When his environment turned on him, he could move on to a new environment. But agricultural man had to stay put. He had to find answers to drought, to flood, and a host of other problems.
At first, he would have suffered and then found a remedy. But as he learnt, his fear would teach him how to predict when the environment could be changing. In this way, early man used fear in a precognitive sense, and it caused him to plan.

FEAR AND SUPERSTITION

Even here, fear also had its bad side. When something went wrong, man didn’t have scientists to tell him why it went wrong. Hence, he had to find his own answers. And these usually led to superstition – to the idea that other-worldly forces were involved. Such superstitions continued to produce additional fear and more than the odd atrocity for millenia, making us sometimes wary of classing such societies as civilised.
Today, of course, we think we are a scientific, rational people who have no truck with superstition. But I’m afraid we’re very wrong. As discontent grows over the problems with today’s society, a new superstition arises.
Of course, we are no longer fearful of other-worldly forces. So instead, we invent alien encounters and government conspiracies working in the shadows to hurt us. In conspiracy theory we have re-birthed superstition anew.

SOCIAL CONTAGION

Such superstitions are presently growing in other areas, too. Through medical science we are prolonging life. As such, our bodies become more important, more precious. And in this extra importance, we birth new fears. And we fear a flu pandemic and other apocalyptic diseases. And as medics discover reasons for illness anew, we lap it up, our fear turning us into a hypochondriac society.
This ability to invent new things to be fearful of is an epidemic in itself – a process I would call social contagion. The fear that caused us to create society in the first place never went away. And such fear causes us to find comfort in likeness.
This is why we join clubs, follow fashions, and generally act and think the same. So when things go wrong, our immediate response is to blame something in society that appears different.

IT’S HIS FAULT

Finding such difference is easy. Some people might have a different colour skin, or have sexual preferences that differ from the norm, such as homosexuality. So in a classic superstitious response, we decide it must be their fault, and society produces a scapegoat to make us feel better.
Often the real reason that society is going wrong is because of ourselves. But that would produce a different fear – the fear of our own fallibility. And that is too much to bear.
So the ethnic minority, or the gay, gets the blame. In our immature, fearful way, we class such persecutions as ‘evil’, a throwback to other-worldly concepts; we defend the processes of scapegoats when we would do better to understand scapegoatism and pogroms as a form of insecure virus, spreading out to infect us all.

THE VIRUS OF EVIL

Such scapegoat viruses break out because in the west we have a fundamentally faulty impulse nourished by fear. And it is all to do with that faulty word ‘evil.’ As well as seeing the stars, our ancestors also realised another fundamental fact of life.
During daytime the mighty sun brought light; and at night, the smaller moon brought darkness. And in darkness fears were compounded; but not to fear, for in the morning the sun would conquer the moon and bring back light.
It was a classic case of the forces of light and dark, played out daily in the sky. In eastern religious forms, this duality of light and dark was realised and turned into a holistic religious form that required the two forces to learn to work in harmony to bring balance.
The duality is found in Vishnu and Shiva, and in Ying and Yang. But in the west, a different impulse arose, fused not with religion, but politics.
Rather than being forces that needed to be balanced, light and dark grew into good and evil. This was politically useful, for a leader was able to brand any form of opposition as evil.
Hence, as western society developed, various internal, external and supernatural threats were marginalised to produce a ‘good’ society that bent exactly to the way a hierarchy wanted.
And within the concept of evil, it was guaranteed that fundamental political systems would rise, and would come into conflict with other systems, when they should have formed balance.
So fear, it seems, is our saviour. But also, alas, our nemesis.

© Anthony North, June 2007

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