How Fear Controls You
Note that the image above was generated by ChatGPT GPT-4 DALL-E
Fear is the number one emotion that controls people. I define fear as an instinctive emotion that comes about when a person perceives some kind of danger brining great distress to the person depending on the level of fear felt.
A lot of questionable decisions by man can be attributed to fear. Fear of death, fear of what others think, fear of our close’s ones being hurt by others etc. Fear leads people to acting in silly and childish ways because fear clouds judgement and reason. People take action in the moment out of fear and look no further than the present moment. People don’t pay any attention to the long-term consequences of their own actions, because they are so focussed on the fear they are experiencing right now.
But fear is what makes us human. Fear is what should be driving us to take action. Without fear there would be chaos in the world, because fear is what stops people from doing sinister things, therefore fear is a good thing in the world is it not? Wrong. It says more about the person making these assessments that it does about the world. Fear isn’t the thing that stops chaos and disorder – people do. Most people generally don’t want chaos and disorder, we would rather live in relative comfort.
Marketing companies, world leaders, and anyone with a fair amount of intelligence recognise how to exploit people’s fear for their own benefit. They create the problem (something that makes you fearful), and then sell the solution (something that takes away that fear). The classic example of this is the false statements made to make the population believe that Iraq had nuclear weapons (which they didn’t), so the solution was to go to war with Iraq so that we could stop them from having nuclear weapons to stop a catastrophe. Yet by going to war with Iraq certain companies and rich people profited a great deal from the oil that was stolen from Iraq. Point being with this example is the world leaders made a false story about them having dangerous weapons (making people fearful) to justify them going to war with Iran (the solution) so that they could benefit for themselves at the cost of Iraq.
People also use fear against each other attempting to control their friends/relatives through fear. Let me just say that anyone that is controlled so easily by fear is a low-level human. Equally the people attempting to control others through fear are also low-level humans because the people they are controlling are low-level humans. Its like people are fighting over pennies – the pennies are not worth much, and yet so much time and energy goes into fighting over the pennies.
To lessen the fears that you face, there are some techniques and things that you can do. The first being meditation, because with meditation you learn to become more self-aware of your disposition at any given moment, and so when you notice you’re fearful you can snap out of it and say to yourself “I’m fearful right now, and therefore I know that decisions I make now will likely be based around this fear”, in other words learning to recognise when you are fearful and paying attention to how you feel in the present moment will lessen the effects of fear on you. I find that most people don’t know when fear is dictating their actions – they just act upon that fear.
Another technique for fear is taking action. This was recommended in this book I read called “The Magic of Thinking Big” published in 1959 by David J. Schwartz. In the book he looked at fear in men training in the military who needed swimming lessons. The technique used in the military was to have the men dive in the water from a 15-foot-high platform to conquer their fear. The men were naturally fearful of diving in the water, but Schwarz noted that after they had dived into the water from the platform, there fear of the water had lessened drastically. The point he made however was that action conquered fear. Therefore, if you’re fearful in some way, look to take the actions which will take away that fear.
A final technique is that you don’t need to accept the fear. The instinct that brings fear isn’t something that can really be changed. But you don’t need to accept that fear that you feel in the moment. With your own willpower you can deliberately push back that fear so that it doesn’t affect you as much. This technique as are the others are difficult to master, but with practice the techniques do work.
Another thing is often the fear of something is actually worse than the thing you are fearing. This isn’t always the case but most times. An example is spiders. Most spiders are harmless to people, yet these small 8-legged creatures bring a lot of fear to some. Point being is that all fear is unjustified.
I’ll also say that people also mistake fear as being apart of them. In that they identify with ‘fear’ they think that fear is what makes them who they are. Let me say that this isn’t the case. You can choose to identify when whatever emotion you choose to, but you don’t need to have fear be the emotion you identify with. fear is a very low vibrational state when compared with higher emotions such as love, peace and so on. Point being here is that emotions don’t identify who you are, therefore don’t think that you are “losing” who you are by becoming less fearful.
Furthermore, there is a valid argument to be made that love controls us, peace controls us, hate controls us etc. I agree that emotions control us to a degree. But because fear is a very low-level emotion, we shouldn’t accept fear as part of our makeup. We are humans and have far more potential than you may think, believe me. Conclusively aim to rise above fear so that you can allow higher emotions to influence your behaviours and reach more of your potential as a human being. God bless.