Preamble: In today’s
world we identify a variety of “primary” emotions, and many shades of the
primary ones. We even lay out an emotion
wheel like a color wheel and sometimes bend the wheel into a cone to model both
the quality and quantity of emotion. But
like the color wheel there are basically two forms of emotion just as there are
warm and cool colors: the emotions of approach/attraction and the emotions of
avoidance/rejection – this is how we live, how life functions; we try to move
toward objects and situations that benefit the living condition and try to move
away from (or remove) objects and situations that endanger the living
condition: the rest is enigmatic detail.
The primary emotion of approach is a feeling of wellbeing. The primary emotion of avoidance is
fear. And just as successfully
negotiating an approach can morph into whole varieties of related feelings,
situations that first and foremost begin with fear tumble through a number of
related states depending on how events progress.
Human bodies do not
bring the whole profusion of emotional states into the world, rather we bring
relatively simple patterns of motivated approach and motivated avoidance to the
new complexities of “modern” life; it is these complexities that organize our
basic emotional simplicities into the apparent patterns of emotional expression
exhibited today. Emotions have always
been the interaction of a few physiological states with a variety of
environmental events; the formation of emotional states without immediate and
clear environmental referents is, at base, destructive and pathological.
There is slow fear
and there is fast fear. There is
unforeseen fear and there is strategic fear.
Yet, all move in the body and mind similarly, through the basic design of
this physiological ‘emotional’ state.
Fear is simply the organizing force and design of the body, mental
processes and (for social animals) community for response to potential
damage. Danger that has no premonition
only has consequences: a floor collapses from under you and you control your
fall as best you can; “fear” comes later.
Slow fear and fast fear are part of our evolutionary
history. Dangerous animals, plants and
situations are in the world – dangerous meaning that animals and plants are
either adept at protecting themselves or are adept as predators, and that physical
forces, like gravity or lightening, can create harmful situations. Slow fear
mediated caution and fast fear organized immediate personal and social action,
importantly, (almost always) in response to real dangers.
Unforeseen fear and strategic fear are largely new, meaning
that these origins of physiological fear states were not a significant part of
the evolution of the fear response. Having a deep and intimate knowledge of
one’s environment and the highly probable patterns of life obviates unforeseen
fear, and the “all for one and one for all” adaptive structure of hominin tribal
communities greatly limited strategic fear as a social device.
The balance of reality based fears, formed from
recognizable environmental sources, to undefined fears has been turned on its
head. There are few occasions today of
environmentally perceived slow fears organizing caution within a community,
rather amorphous states of fear predominate for which no meaningful action is generally
recognized as effective. Fast fears have
few predicable sources and few appropriate responses – often the most effective
response is to be unafraid; not an especially natural response. “All we have to fear is fear itself,” is a
recognition of the existence of strategic fear.
A major consequence of this is that fear has gotten a bad
name. Environmentally based slow and
fast fears are perfectly fine emotions, tuned to the conditions and occasions
of ‘normal’ life. This is so true that
many people would not even call much of what is motivated by fear in these originating
forms as fear at all. More and more
today the idea of and word fear is restricted to the “unnatural” fears,
unforeseen and strategic; we are afraid of what we do not know, what we cannot
see coming and what we are told to be afraid of. Just how unhealthy this is for individuals
and societies is increasingly clear.
Physiologically, fear is not designed to be a constant
condition, but rather a transitional state that motivates action and, thus,
dissipates the fear response through adaptive behaviors. Two examples: (1) Slow fear: I learned as a
small child to walk in the swamps and palmetto/pine barrens of central Florida
with great caution; there be dangerous snakes in remarkable abundance! And yet,
I, and my friends, walked and played there with ease. A tiny rush of cautionary fear would color
the moment if the ground could not be seen ahead of the next step forward, and
immediately and completely dissipated when a palm leaf was moved or other
action was taken to disclose the area around the advancing footfall. (2) Fast
fear: I once surprised a sleeping mountain lion in the New Mexico wilds, both
of us on foot. The quality of my attention and speed of thought was pushed up at
least an order of magnitude for the ½ an hour or so that the lion and I played
primal tag through the juniper/piñon woodlands.
By the time it quit following me – when the ground cover became more
open – I was spent; all that was left was exhilaration, and I had never felt
any emotion that I had previously known by the name of fear.
Unforeseen fears are things like the random acts of
“violence” for which no meaningful precautions can be taken; it is especially
these fears that are useful strategically.
The essence of strategic fear is not that nothing can be done, but that ‘you’ can do nothing while
some ‘other’ can mitigate the danger.
This is a most unnatural condition; living things have always had the
tools to take on environmental realities, individually or as social collectives
and, when as social collectives, individuals were full partners in the
responses to the dangers. This is
obvious from the simple fact that living things exist as individual phenotypic
representatives of their genotype (think it through)! Unforeseen and strategic fear pervert this 4
billion year old reality.
The essence, therefore, of strategic fear is the separation
of individuals from the information needed to evaluate and prepare for
dangers. This allows two options to
those who position themselves to use the fear response of others for their
advantage (the nature of strategic fear).
The first is to control information about real situations and the second
is to manufacture dangers that do not exist in reality.
There is simply no natural reason that the realities of the
situations that we face cannot be made clear to all the participants in society
– the only reason is that strategic fear is so useful to a select few. If the people cannot act individually and as
communities on the actual slow and fast dangers that face us, as individuals and
communities, then there will be no future.
(The next essay soon to come: populations in states of
strategic fear vs. populations in states of wellbeing.)
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