What Scares you the Most
That time when your minding your own business, just walking down the street and a dog unleashes a snarl through a cracked car window and your fucking heart jumps into your mouth. Or when you are lost in your own travails on your commute home and the deafening sirens of an ambulance blasts rudely past like a sledgehammer thumping your brain. Maybe work, sitting at your computer banging out your new strategy while enjoying the melancholy rhythm of the rotating fan and the fire alarm shrieks to life causing a mild transient ischemic attack.
Maybe that is different than our deeply rooted baseless fears. Perhaps those are examples of what wakes us up — raises our blood pressure, increases cortisol levels, raises cholesterol, makes our hearts race. The constant pressure to be more, to consume more, and to conquer more. Bigger cars, bigger houses and bigger boats and vacation homes, win at any cost. Victory being the end result of consuming more than your neighbour.
But I constantly query, what are we winning? And maybe even more importantly what are we sacrificing? Our family? Our children? Our health? Our lifestyle? And my personal favorite when your struggling with life and a friend says “you’ll get there.” And I scream inside my head “where the fuck is there?”
I spent some time researching the top 10 fears our species shares. It might surprise you what we fear the most. Depending on where you look, and the research, these can vary slightly.
1- Speaking in front of a group
2- Heights
3- Insects & Bugs
4- Financial problems
5- Deep water
6- Sickness
7- Death
8- Flying
9- Loneliness
10- Dogs
As Jay Leno Joked “I guess we’d rather be in the casket than delivering the eulogy.”
Our fears are not founded so much in rationale but on emotion. Take shark attacks: one of my biggest fears. There has not been a fatality from a shark in the US since 2012 and every year in the US alone 30,000 fatalities from car accidents. Most of us think nothing of getting behind the wheel everyday and this is our best shot at premature death. Fear of a cockroach scurrying across our leg over being deathly ill. Or falling from a tall building over flying in the safety of a commercial airliner. It makes no sense when we try to work it out inside our heads. But does anything make sense when we look at our sociology and the psychology of the human race.
I was reading a column yesterday from a leading innovator and Cognitive Scientist, Joe Brewer. Here is a small chunk of what he shared.
“The global civilization that arose in the last 500 years now teeters on the brink of collapse. It’s structural fragility can be seen in the patterns of rising inequality, systemic political corruption, and an unraveling biosphere. Humanity is on the brink of another Dark Age and we had better prepare our knowledge stores for what is coming.”
Here is the full story. I highly recommend.
This is probably what should scare us the most, loss of knowledge, loss of our history. Not that we have a great track record of learning from that History. But losing our literary libraries, would mark; in my opinion: the greatest tragedy for mankind. As been said before, knowledge is power. But beyond that statement, literature holds our children and their children’s hopes and dreams and the fabric that gives voice to those dreams.
I have been reading 1984 the classic by George Orwell. A whitewashed world projected well into the future. What strikes me the most in grasping this dystopian world Orwell creates is the denigration of writing and the abolition of literature. Actually beyond criticism: it is a crime punishable by death. Orwell captures an apocalyptic world were those that have control eradicate any hope from memory or any hope from past history. What remains is no memory, only an evaporated past; with a present and a promised future stamped with conformity ad nauseum.
Our fears today and tomorrow will doubtfully change. Our actions today and tomorrow will also unlikely change. But what will change indefinitely is our planet and the rising problem of pollution and our lack of action. Not because we don’t care but because we are creatures that are motivated by emotion not knowledge. Our fears help spell out this universal truth. Not in judgment but an allegory that helps paint an image of a much different horizon than Orwell’s dystopian one. But that too is exactly a literary example of how desperately we need to protect the knowledge we have.
Because if we don’t we may find a world in which our children and their children are living in a real state of fear. The one Orwell so artistically crafts shortly after World War II ended. I wonder if that world was created because of war torn England, just surviving a Nazi regime that desecrated London. Reading 1984 today — is alarming at it’s potential accuracy 67 years later. It took a war strewn landscape to paint an Authoritarian society with alarming precision. My generation has not endured a war on the scale of Vietnam or World War II. Comfort has softened the alarm bells ringing the freedoms our ancestors fought for.
The fear Orwell elegantly describes is once again circling back with a different face but the same machine is cranking out the same rhetoric. This time its terror and our need to surrender privacy, for our protection. The same protection promised from a Nazi face that sold fear while stripping human rights. Building walls historically promised safety while isolating nations and civil liberties. Walls build faceless enemies and those are the easiest to kill. Tearing down walls builds relationships and strengthens our common good that we are all in this together. This big wet rock we all walk on needs not another wall but rather a bridge connecting nation to nation country to country and heart to heart.
Todd
February 2017
