There is a lot of fear in the world. It seems to be ever increasing. In the psychological context of fight or flight this increase in fear could do a lot of harm. The increasing complexity of the world and at the time more and more control over your world can feel like it is being taken from you. This can lead to scary thoughts.

To a certain degree fear is used against us and to control us. Parents will at times even use fear as a motivator in educating. "If you keep doing X then Y is sure to happen to you." I actually found myself using it in a little reverse psychology on one of my grand daughters a few minutes ago. I told her "Your body needs that food so you can grow, and it uses that food to build more muscles and bones." She looked at me and did her thing and I hear them telling her to eat her cereal again. A little while later I walk out talking to her dad (my son) and another daughter and grand daughter and said "Do you guys see that?" They said "What?" "I think Mia is getting smaller, her body doesn't have enough food" She started eating, how long that lasted I didn't actually stick around to find out. That was actually not something I intended to write about here, but I realized I myself had used fear as a motivator within the last hour.

This technique is not used on just children. It is used to keep us content with the status quo. "We can't do that thing that has never been tried before because X might happen. X is scary." "How will you solve Y if you get rid of this thing?"

But, what if?

First we can WHAT IF and think up scary scenarios unto infinity. Many humans have powerful imaginations. Some humans are more enslaved to their imagination than others. Why do I say this?

Imagining things is extremely valuable. It gives us choices. It let's us consider possibilities and find new areas to study and explore whether they are physical, abstract, mental, or any other kind of things. We have a powerful ability to speculate or as it is called in the scientific method hypothesize.

The problem I see today and it may have been there all along I was just not aware enough to notice it. People will so often imagine a thing, speculate about a thing, or form a hypothesis and with a passage of time they will treat it as REAL. It doesn't seem to matter to them that it was them thinking up WHAT IF and letting their imagination work. They forget that step and now their imagined idea is suddenly their view of reality.

This is a big problem. Yet why does it happen? Could it be because unless you intentionally study things during your education that emphasize logic, scientific method, critical thinking, problem solving, etc then you really don't have the mental tools to help you separate the idea that your imagined scary things are not necessarily true just because you imagined them? I don't know if this is the case or not. I would not be surprised at all to find that it is a factor.

So many of these things are tied to fear. If a person proposes a new thing that has been spoken of before but never actually attempted do you immediately begin tossing out all of the hypothetical bad things that could happen? Does the idea stall there and remain something that was never attempted? It dies on the vine of the mind simply due to any fear that you could define. We still do not know if those imaginations will happen, how often or rare they might be, etc. We still don't know if it would actually be better than the status quo environment we are currently in but afraid to step out of. The status quo is a known factor and it is our mental safety blanket that we latch onto and are afraid to explore the world without.

Source: Charlie Brown

This can get even deeper as our imaginations fly. Let's attack the new untested ideas with "If you do X then Y will eventually happen." The funny thing about that is that sometimes Y already happens in the status quo that they are afraid to let go of. So if Y is already happening why should we let the fear of Y possibly happening if we try X stop us from trying X? If Y happens it would be no different than Y happening within the status quo. There is the possibility that Y may not happen, yet if your world view is so driven by fear motivators you may be unwilling to take that risk.

Taking risks is like exploration. Some paths may lead you to a trap riddled ruin where you are quickly felled by poison darts, pit traps, or big rolling stones.

Source: Raider's of the Lost Ark

Other paths may lead you to a garden of abundance and places of magic and wonder.

Source: Journey to the Center of the Earth

There is no certainty as to which it ultimately will be. The only certainty is that if you stand there refusing to walk new paths because bad things might happen then you should become satisfied with the status quo and not speak up against it. If you want to change the status quo that also means you need to be willing to take risks, you need to be willing to change yourself, and you need to be willing to deal with failure during the times it occurs rather than simply stopping because you might fail.

We live in a society that is very much controlled by fear. The media uses this to great advantage. It is very rare to see the news these days tell society something that gives them confidence, inspires bravery, etc. Instead it is almost always news about things that make us afraid. So like people who really enjoy a good horror movie (myself included) society seems addicted to scary news and being afraid. The old saying of "If it bleeds it leads" in journalism is very much alive. It has morphed substantially and is heavily propagandized these days "If the news disagrees then that should be silenced, if they cannot be silenced they are racists, terrorists, treasonist, etc." None of those labels even have to be true today. They get away with slander on a regular basis and that is only accelerating as there seems to be a class of untouchable people and being held accountable is no longer the same for all classes. Yes, we live in a caste system and it is beyond simply lower, middle, and upper class. Yet most of that caste system is fueled by fear and the careful wielding of it to manipulate the masses.

Another thing we are addicted to is the EASY PATH. Note I did not say the Best past, the good path, the moral path, the ethical path, etc. I said the EASY PATH. We are addicted to finding the proverbial biggest largest red button we can smack to solve our problems. So when we do explore and are presented with choices for most of us it is that easy path we pick.

In an actual exploration situation I can give you an example of this. Let's say we found a new island never before explored and we land on the beach. We can go into the jungle and up the hill sides, or we can walk along the beach. If we always choose the easy path we would walk along the beach and in theory we'd come back to where we started. It is unlikely we would find much beyond simply more beach and the ocean. We might get lucky. We could risk the harder path of going into the interior where we might find fresh water, food, knowledge, or possibly our death.

In terms of ideas people imagine fears and WHAT IFs and they will tend to stick with the easy path. There are some cases where the WHAT IFs are more probable. These would be for example if the idea being discussed had actually been tried historically before. The more times it has been tried then we get a more and more probable likelihood of being able to predict its outcome. So in such cases there may be good reason to consider it a bad idea. Yet this is not always what holds us back. It is the fear of the unknown, the fear of letting go of our safety blanket, the fear of leaving our nest for the first time and jumping off of the branch and hoping we manage to learn to fly.

I'd like to close with some well known quotes from Dune by Frank Herbert.

I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.