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Part 1
It was one of Jesus’ closest confidants, the Apostle John (who appears in more biblical accounts than any of the other disciples) who professed, “fear hath torment.”
I believe we would all agree fear is one of the most debilitating and dangerous emotions when it invades the once-mundane rituals of daily life.
“When we live in constant fear,” says researcher Louise Delagran, MA, MEd, “whether from physical dangers in our environment or threats we perceive, we can experience negative impacts in all areas of our lives and even become incapacitated.”
The classic 18th Century Irish-born philosopher Edmund Burke asserted, “No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.”
Fear, in fact, has the capacity to cripple reasoning altogether. According to research from the University of Minnesota, “once the fear pathways are ramped up, the brain short-circuits more rational processing paths.”
Psychologist Robert L. Leahy, Ph.D., author of The Worry Cure, agrees, “Supercharged stress affects the parts of the brain that control abstract [indefinite] thinking, making productive worry, or problem-solving, increasingly difficult.”
In our present-day, it would seem the whole world is besieged by fear. We find ourselves on a “fear treadmill” 24 hours a day. Fear spawned by a frantically defined pandemic.
“One of the many challenges that makes anxiety surrounding COVID-19 unique is the deluge of worries coming at us all at once,” observes Leahy.
These intrusive fears hijack our thoughts.
Recall Franklin D. Roosevelt’s memorable words, delivered during his Inaugural Address some 88 years ago, “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”
Fearing “fear itself.”
I guess I never really understood, until now, the sageness of these words. Fear disarms, immobilizes not only rational thought but, as a consequence, any hope of a resolute response.
This is why “fear” is to be feared.
Roosevelt went on to suggest, “Small wonder that confidence languishes, for it thrives only on honesty, on honor, on the sacredness of obligations, on faithful protection, on unselfish performance; without them, it cannot live.”
Prophetic words, I’d say, in light of our current COVID-19 mootable crisis.
Consider for a moment fear as representing False Evidence Appearing Real.
Academy of Ideas: Free Minds for a Free Society, submits, in a November 29, 2015, post, “Fear and Social Control”: “The artificial construction and maintenance of fear in a population by a ruling class has remained pervasive from the time of Ancient Egypt up until the modern-day. Oppressive governments often maintain their grip on a nation by continually invoking fear, and then proceeding to claim that only they, the ruling powers, have the means and ability to protect the population from such a threat.”
“The whole aim of practical politics,” wrote cultural critic Henry Louis Mencken (September 12, 1880 – January 29, 1956), “is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.”
Lucius Annaeus Seneca, the Stoic Roman philosopher, who declared the dignity of the individual mind, wrote a collection of 124 letters at the end of his life. His pithy, insightful morsels of wisdom are every bit as relevant now as they were 2000 years ago.
Seneca pointed out: “There are more things… likely to frighten us than there are to crush us; we suffer more often in imagination than in reality.”
Next Week Part 2: “What if …”
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