(Please, read the
previous essay, Fear
as Adaptive Device…, before reading this one.)
While our experience of life in the present world says
otherwise, human societies are very unnatural structures. We talk of nations, religions,
mega-corporations and other vast collectives as though they have substantial
existence and understandable definition; they do not. In another of the many paradoxes that attend
our present “realities”, the bigger and more complex the structures of our
organization, the simpler, more primal and less generally adaptive must be the
principles holding those organizations together – the less full human
expression and experience can be manifest in them. These large collectives are
organized around single emotional/behavioral states like greed, fear, and
illusory wellbeing; whole societies can be characterized by the primary emotion
of their structure. [1]
It would seem that this should make social collectives
understandable and give them substance, but no; each individual unit, the human
animal, that makes them up has all the complexities of the evolved species and,
thus, is both diminished by the acts
that fit them to their society and floundering
in their struggles with the unavoidable demands of their biological complexity. Ultimately, a huge collective must adapt to
being organized around some powerful biological/emotional element that has
predictable consequences on the collective’s participants: that emotion is
almost always fear; just as, it was said, ‘all roads lead to Rome,’ all
large-scale social organizations have adopted fear as the central principle.
This has been going on for a very long time, for as long as
human social collectives have been numbered in the thousands or more. Fear-based social organization is so
ubiquitous, and our projection of fear-based processes onto the world beyond
the social is so complete, that it is almost impossible to realize another
option.
Wellbeing is the other option, but because wellbeing is
based in a gestalt of needs satisfied, the structural principles are diametrically
antithetical to fear-based societies; there is no paradigm of transition from
fear to wellbeing in the structure of large collectives even though these two
conditions are (were) completely mutually supporting in their origins. How to deconstruct, then reconstruct those
relationships and apply them to larger social organizations than the tribal
communities of our origins will be the measure of our future as a species.
First, fear-based societies: How is a fear-based society
recognized? It is simple; make a list of what you are afraid of. Here is a sample: crime, being cheated,
losing a job, being slandered, being devalued, the power of authority, police,
taxing agencies, other drivers on the road, the anger (really the fear) of
others, disease, costs of medical and legal services, lack of accurate
information, strangers, the “enemy,” loss of freedom, economic or social
collapse, people who believe differently, people who don’t like you, environmental
collapse, random violence, sexual perversions, God’s wrath, the elderly, the
young, the future and all the specifics and variations that can be made of
these.
Such societies tend to have a fear du jour. The habit of fear makes this a simple
process. In fact, without a fear of the
day the free-floating fear state would not have a ready reference, and could
become dangerous to the economic and political elites that use fear as a
controlling principle since the focus of ‘national’ anxiety might turn on the,
actually, easily observable, dangerous actions of the elites.
Now make a list of how society supports your sense of
wellbeing. This is a more difficult
list; don’t let it be only a list of how fears are limited or relieved (see the
footnotes). Here is a hypothetical
example: my neighbors and I share resources so that no one is forced to face
dangers alone; I can express my ideas and concerns freely knowing that I will
be heard with respect; the principles and forces of social order are designed
to respond to my interests, not to enforce my obedience to some arbitrary
standards: Since we live in a fear-based
society, these are more wishes than statements of our condition!
I leave it to the reader to fill in specific examples of how
the fence lines and corrals of fear control daily movements and actions, for
both themselves and for the sub-communities of which they are a part. But these will most likely involve money,
credit, social prestige, loss of material standards of living, militarized
authority and an amorphous physical fear of the desires and powers attributed
to “others” beyond our immediate experience. The sense of wellbeing will come
from close association with trusted friends and from illusions of protection
supplied by religious and related pathologies. [2]
* * *
In modern societies only human action seems significant;
biophysical processes are seen (if they are realized at all) as substrate
conditions upon which “real life” occurs or inconveniences to be overcome. This is amplified by the fact that many real
dangers do come from the effects of our human numbers, the design of our
economics and vast influences of our technologies. But, even though these
dangers are certainly real, the use of strategic fear by economic and political
elites has been to increase them rather to diminish them. In other words, the fears of the general
society are used to make societies more dangerous rather than less.
This last has been, until now, very difficult to see from
the position of the so-called middle class societies of North America and
Europe. These centers of illusory
wellbeing were organized around the relief of fear, not genuine wellbeing; and
we are beginning to see how easily the transition is made to the direct use of
fear in those societies as the power elites move to globalized control of
populations and resources.
There are primarily two real dangers to fear, and to act on in
the natural pattern of this essential emotion: (1) the disruption of the
biophysical systems that allow complex life to exist and (2) the insanity of a
power elite that works assiduously to maintain their authority and their incredible
excesses of resource use. The plethora
of dangers we are told to fear – the fears du jour – focus our attentions in
the wrong direction, with purpose. We must
find our sense of real wellbeing in supportive community, refuse the strategic
fears delivered to control us and realize the real dangers from the power elite
and the destruction of environment (the two are closely connected).
The redirecting of fear is itself frightening – changing
old habits of such great consequence – but it is beginning; one need only look
to the real attitudes of your neighbors and friends. And since the refocusing of attention is
beginning we can expect the quality of the dangers served up to us to increase,
both in illusion and reality. But, the
nakedness of the attempts to control societies by fear will only become more
and more obvious as the dangers are made more and more real.
[1] Fear and wellbeing are primal motivational (emotional)
states; temporary relief from fear is not
wellbeing, though it has come to be seen so.
The full emotional state of wellbeing has become rare. Greed is the infantilization of the normal
developmental process, an emotional neotony.
[2] Religious behavior has not always been pathological,
though it has always been illusory. When
humans lived in intimate contact with biophysical reality, the details of which
were beyond their understanding, adaptive processes adjusted behaviors to
function effectively. Explanations for
the behaviors were most often fantastical, both because detailed understanding
wasn’t possible from the existing knowledge base and because the fantastic
could have poetic power. In today’s
world, religions are madness driven by biological impulses with only circular
self-referencing as guide; they are a perfect vehicle for the delivery of
illusory fear and illusory wellbeing – the very essence of strategic fear.
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