Fear and Terror

Dictionary.com defines fear as:

a distressing emotion aroused by impending danger, evil, pain, etc.,whether the threat is real or imagined; the feeling or condition of being afraid.

and it defines terror as:

intense, sharp, overmastering fear:

Ie, just more fear.

This seems incorrect. Not just in my personal parlance, but in how these words are used by people. For instance, from a TUOC post the other day about small towns dealing with opiod epidemics.

When a town mishandles its overdose deaths by criminalizing addicts and harassing people who call in overdoses and beefing up a police force with a record of violence, then I’m bothered by the senseless tragedy of the subsequent deaths but there’s a sense of ‘okay, we know what to do about this’. But when we’ve done all the things we know to do about this and things are still getting worse, then that’s just kind of terrifying. 

Fear is this anxious dread that something is coming to get you, that could be avoided or prevented. It's the worry that your boss dislikes you so he's going to ignore your effort and find some reason to fire you. It's the anger at puritans who are treating a drug crisis like a morality problem rather than a health problem. It's the anxiety that someone hates you and you're going to have to spend a whole party being in the same room as them. It's thinking someone has been trailing you this night for hours and no one will hear you if you scream.

Sometimes fear is overwhelmingly strong causing you panic attacks, and sometimes it's just a background presence that adds subtle anxiety to your interactions, ergo "size of effect" is not the way to define the boundaries of fear. It's more about the specificity of the emotion, and the belief that the bad outcome could be avoided if only people didn't do bad things. If only the small town bigots had listened to you about the costs of prohibition, if only your boss wasn't sexist, if only everyone had listened to you when you said a serial killer is loose...

Fear then serves a powerful purpose: it motivates you to fix things, and provides you with a visible emotion to get others on board with your goals. This doesn't mean that it isn't real, it is very, very real in your head, as real as love or hunger or anger. As they say, fear is the mindkiller.

Terror is even worse, but also more true, and therefore in some ways better. It's when we transition from an uncertain dread to an overpowering certainty. Certainty that something is wrong, and everything is wrong. Even if everyone in town had the most enlightened attitude, drugs would still destroy your community. Even if this stalker is thwarted, death will take you some day soon. Even if your boss relaxed about you, the entire industry is dying and you hate your job with every fiber of your being. Terror is the moment in a horror movie when a giant hand comes out of nowhere and smashes the brave hero.

Terror is realizing you never had a chance. It's no one's fault and there's nothing to do, because those options presuppose that other outcomes were even imaginable.

Fear is worrying Satan has a devil set aside for you. Terror is looking upon the glory of all Creation and realizing how small you are.

Fear is being upset that your children won't honor you in your old age and after you die. Terror is contemplating how long the universe will go on after you and everyone you know has died.

You get the point. Terror either drives us into depressive nihilism, or insanity. It is not nearly as helpful an emotion at accomplishing our goals as fear is. But it is more accurate. Fear is usually an illusion, often of self-importance, that covers up the true terror of the situation.

If you press through the terror, and accept it, then you can come out the other side with a realistic assessment of your situation. You can make actual choices. That is very powerful, and what more, is the cure for the original fear. Once you've accepted something a thousand times worse than what you were worrying about, then the original anxiety has less hold on you.

You could stop being afraid of Green Party voters who sabotage the Democratic candidate. The really terrifying prospect is the millions upon millions of voters who chose an idiot fascist, or who couldn't be bothered to choose at all. And that they are a tide sweeping many nations. Where is your anxiety at Jill Stein compared to all of that?

It is very hard. There's no denying that. There is a comfort in the old fear, that there was one really evil and ignorant bad guy who polluted the whole town into dealing with drugs badly. And pushing through something that looks for all intents and purposes like insanity, is not ever socially or personally pleasant.

But the true reward of existential freedom that is your sole birthright, lies on the other side.

Safety

This weekend some friends were talking about how theoretical discussions about their hobby had stopped being about the hobby, and were seminars on safety. People seemed confused, as how could you spend that much time discussing safety? Don’t let people get hurt, what else is there?

The thing is that being safe is not a simple technocratic concept of preventing danger. Ozy wrote eloquently about the difference between risk management, and that of fear. Those of us who want to drive take classes teaching us how to drive, and follow various regulations of the road designed to keep us alive. It is, frankly, boring all around. We know these machines can deliver death, but we deal with them rationally as a matter of cost-benefit analysis.

This is a far cry from the tactics of MADD, who can give whole classes on the culture of drunk driving, and have become consumed with the fear of how all intoxicants present a threat to our life.

Most MADD sponsors have of course undergone horrible tragedy in their life. I do not blame them for trying to find meaning in that and prevent others from suffering the loss they did. But it’s undeniable that there’s a difference here between how most people see cars, and how a culture of fear does.

“ The ethical struggle to sustain the meaninglessness of the catastrophe is the topic of Atom Egoyan’s masterpiece The Sweet Hereafter, arguably THE film about the impact of a trauma on a community. Mitchell Stephens, a lawyer, arrives in the wintry hamlet of San Dent to sign up the parents of children who died when their school bus plunged into an ice-covered lake. His motto is “there are no accidents”: there are no gaps in the causal link of responsibility, there always HAS to be someone who is guilty. (As we soon learn, he is not doing this on account of his professional avarice. Stephens’ obsession with the complete causal link is rather his desperate strategy to cope with the private trauma, which is sorting out responsibility for his own daughter Zoe, a junkie who despises him, although she repeatedly calls him demanding money: he insists that everything must have a cause in order to counteract the inexplicable gap which separates him from Zoe “ -Zizek

I wrote earlier how fear is a much more powerful ideological motivator than hate. Fear can drive us to as much extremism and inhumanity, but it’s considerably harder to question than blind hatred. Concern for safety is the polite dress of fear.

In our attempt to find meaning in catastrophe, we next conclude that to prevent catastrophe is merely a matter of obeying the rules in the ideological worldview we have created. Don’t say the wrong things, don’t hang out with the wrong people, don’t do anything that feels uncomfortable, and disaster can be kept from your doorstep like the spirit of death.

This is not true. The real spirit of death can strike any of us, no matter how much we prepare. Reality is cruel and coldly random like that. But once you’ve started down that road, the logic of ideology begins a spiral of “that last disaster was because we were insufficiently safe. We must become even safer!” There become whole new venues of our lifestyle we can use to explore safety. Ideology after all is a totalizing function, that seeks to explain everything about life, and so nothing you do - what you read, what you eat, how you interact with your parents or who you choose as clients - are outside the analysis of “how can we be safe?”

It also becomes a very didactic discourse. Ideology has no concern with objectively minimizing your risk, but with the feel of safety, so disagreement over different methods is useless - it only makes you feel less safe after all. Instead these conversations default to the Clickhole parody: Let’s Have An Open Dialogue About Sexuality That Completely Validates My Point Of View . It doesn’t get anything done, and you’re just as at risk as before, but it sure spends a lot of time doing so.

This is why “safety” from terrorism, to sex ed, to Americanitis , has always been such a byword for “there is ideological mystification going on.” If you’ve ever felt in a culture of “yet more discussions about safety” there was something bizarre and politely sinister going on, this is why.

Fear Trumps Hate

I don’t find hate interesting, in terms of understanding modern politics and society.

Yes, hatred of your enemy is bad. Everyone seems to know that. That’s why every ideological writer quotes and links to every hateful diatribe by randos on the other side they can find. “Look at all the hate spewed by that arab / trumpkin / black teenager / Republican toady!” And there are links to statements and actions that do seem very hateful.

But nowadays everyone knows this sort of gratuitous hatred is wrong, which is why we leap on it so quickly. Even the allies of the hate-spewer try to ignore it, or defend it as an “understandable” reaction to states of stress or frustration. Maybe it’s a tolerable indulgence, but that’s as respectable as we treat hatred. At least in modern liberal discourse, hatred by your side is an embarrassment and it’s hard to use it as justification for change in policy or convincing others. You can’t use it to convince or bully someone who doesn’t want to agree with you, not consistently.

If we want an emotion that can be used to dehumanize your enemy, ignore all logic and evidence, and demand everything you want without tradeoffs - well the effective emotion to use there is fear.

Fear is mainstream acceptable. If you show your fear of the Muslim terrorists or Republican racists or of not being able to walk on the streets at night, you’ll get sympathy. People may disagree with your fear, but they won’t delegitimize your emotions like they do with hate. They want to comfort you and calm you down. No one wants to get in an argument about facts or civil liberties with someone who is fearing for their safety!

(You’ll note the “not being able to walk on the streets at night” is a fear used by social justice liberals talking about men, or conservatives talking about black men.)

And there’s a fascinating amount of parallelism in the way people talk about fear. You all remember the clock-boy fiasco some years who, when a Muslim boy came into school with a clock he made, and was arrested for having a bomb. Did you see the letter the school used to explain its very dumb reaction?

We always ask our students and staff to immediately report if they observe any suspicious items and/or suspicious behavior. If something is out of the ordinary, the information should be reported immediately to a school administrator and/or the police so it can be addressed right away. We will always take necessary precautions to protect our students and keep our school community as safe as possible.”

There’s no justification based on evidence, or even an apology. There’s only the logic that “we felt unsafe. So that explains anything we did to protect our students.” The logic of exclusion no longer counts the accused boy within “our students” who are to be protected of course.

This is not to hate on conservatives. Look at the way some liberals are reacting to the 2016 election.

This is completely detached from reality, or from treating the object of your fear like a goddamn human being. In effect, it is just as bad as hatred. In our society, it’s even worse because people are much less likely to challenge it. Just imagine what this guy would justify doing to this phantom Trump voter now - segregation, humiliation, punishment, you name it. 

Sure your political enemies will laugh and laugh at your pants-wetting, but your allies and moderates will take it seriously. They are full of compassion and won’t stop to check evidence or follow due process when such palpable, painful fear is in play.

So you’re not going to find on this blog me making fun of other tumblrs that spew hate - that’s fish in a barrel and they are just minority outliers. I am much more interested in the logic of fear, and posts that try to argue based on that emotion. There is where ideology finds its power now.

And on a personal level, don’t pat yourself on the back so much for never being hateful (like your enemies.) Work on reducing how much you feel fear of them, and how often you use that fear as justification for attacks on them.

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(This is not to say that all avoidance of dangerous things is bad. There’s just a big difference between “I have weighed the risks and I decide I don’t want to do this” and “Look I don’t care what the numbers say, I just feel unsafe around people like X, and I want you to keep them away from me.” See @ozymandias271 on Risk Management.)