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How to avoid the temptation of fear

2022-04-07T19:02:51.605Z


When the fear that the present has brought to the surface passes, we will have to continue fighting against the fog of anxiety


Borges said that the Russian novel seems determined to show that no one is impossible: suicides for happiness, murderers for benevolence, people who separate for love... Well, the latest installment of this distinguished literature seems determined to add that human beings are reassured to feel afraid.

I know it sounds counterintuitive, but I think, with Chesterton, things get more paradoxical the closer we get to the truth.

To understand in what sense I say that fear calms us, we need to distinguish between fear and anxiety.

The person dominated by anxiety does not know exactly what he fears, nor what he must do to avoid it.

Anxiety is like the shark, which takes a bite out of you and leaves you to bleed to death on your own.

Hence, anxiety hurts the distressed person more than fear, which has a more precise cognitive style, since it tells us where to run or who to fight against.

More information

Mental health, the great challenge of public health at the limit

The narrative of fear is comfortingly simple.

It is a bad children's story in which everything is very clear.

Anxiety, on the other hand, is a very long novel in which we do not fully understand what is happening.

That is why, as Jean Delumeau explains, in Fear in the West, anxiety-worn individuals and societies tend to break it down into concrete, simple, and manageable fears that give them a deceptive sense of control.

With a mixture of fear and hope, they hope that a good universal deluge will cleanse the overcast sky of restlessness.

Hence the desire for this to happen once and for all, if only to know what to expect.

Hence the mystique of war as a hygienic and invigorating activity, which tempts us in a cyclical way.

Anxiety is like those babies who only fall asleep if you shake them.

Who tried it knows.

But at the moment of truth, fear cures us of anxiety as much as changing beds without leaving the hospital.

Because when we feel fear, bullfighting fear, we miss that good time when our lives were barely clouded by the mist of anxiety, which, forgetful that its enveloping and lasting nature made it more exhausting than fear, appears as a glitter scare.

This

Course-Navette

from anxiety to fear and from fear to anxiety would be hilarious if it didn't have horrifying consequences.

Because, when the devil that we have chosen to fear comes to save us from the darkness of anxiety by dividing it into a region of light and another of darkness, the foxes of fear soon arrive shouting that the wolf is coming.

Then, as in our worst nightmares, the Homeric sirens become anti-aircraft sirens, and fairy tales, recounts of Hades, with its dead and ghosts.

That is why we must resist the temptation of fear.

And we must do it on at least two fronts.

In the objective factors, fighting against precariousness, injustice and ignorance, with the aim of reducing anxiety.

And in that of subjective factors, striving to get to know the world better, as a complex and ambiguous place, with the aim of avoiding simple explanations and magical solutions.

But what can we do once we have given in to the temptation of fear?

To begin with, knowing our enemy well, which is fear itself.

Understanding that it distorts our ways of knowing, because it distorts our perceptions, confuses our reason, alters our memory and locks us in cognitive bubbles as self-sufficient as they are unreal.

And that, faced with this, the best thing is to curb, by suspending judgment and using reason, the horse frightened by our dogmatism, in the hope that, as Alexander did with Bucephalus, it would suffice to make him look towards the sun of the knowledge so that he stops being afraid of his own shadow.

We must also understand that fear leads us to reduce our contact zone with the world, to the point of locking ourselves in a kind of panic room in which information and air are scarce.

Therefore, to overcome fear, it is necessary to open up to the world and expand contact, looking for the similar in the different and the different in the similar.

As Emerson said, every day we should force ourselves to do at least one thing that scares us.

And there is nothing that scares us more than seeing the world in its devilish complexity.

We must also keep in mind that fear is the Celestine of sad passions, which are as seductive and deceitful as he is.

William Hazlitt spoke of the pleasure of hating.

Victor Hugo said that melancholy was the joy of being sad.

Resentment consoles us by making us believe that all justice is on our side.

But, despite his promises, this type of passion diminishes our lucidity and our power, which in turn increases our fear.

That is why it is better to encourage contrary joyful passions, curiosity, admiration, trust or friendship.

My inner brother-in-law tells me I'm cowardly or naive, but I'm not saying that these passions should be encouraged out of weakness or naivete, but because I believe, with Spinoza or D'Holbach, that they make us stronger and more resistant.

Finally, we must be aware that fear erodes the social fabric by impregnating everything with mistrust and aggressiveness, and that this is precisely what the powerful most want.

That is why it is urgent to restore political, family, neighborhood, associative and political ties, and nurture democracy understood in terms of reasoned public debate, in which the truth is a common objective to which we all submit our wounded egos and our unbridled interests.

My inner brother-in-law protests again.

It is not with dressings that the nonsense of war will be solved!

And it is true that we are locked in a kind of escape room, or escape boom, and that time is running out.

But it is also true that, while we do the firefighter hummingbird, knowing the mechanisms of anxiety and fear can help us not to overinterpret and not overreact as well as not to get confused and paralyzed.

What is clear to me is that, when all

this

is over —it will be, as everything else is—, and the darkness of fear once again disperses into the fog of anxiety, we will have to continue fighting, with renewed strength, to reduce on all fronts the anxiety caused by ignorance, precariousness and injustice.

Because, otherwise, fear will tempt us again, and that will always be fearful.

Bernat Castany Prado

(Barcelona, ​​1977) is a philosopher and professor at the University of Barcelona.

His latest book is 'A Philosophy of Fear' (Anagrama, 2022).


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Source: elparis

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