If we do not have something to fear we will invent something to fear .....
After living for many years in quite a few Third World countries I have long been curious about the level of fear which is apparent in the developed world compared to those countries, which, because of their circumstances and nature have good reason for most to fear many things, much of the time and yet, where the Fear Factor is less.
After living for many years in quite a few Third World countries I have long been curious about the level of fear which is apparent in the developed world compared to those countries, which, because of their circumstances and nature have good reason for most to fear many things, much of the time and yet, where the Fear Factor is less.
What is it about developed nations which has them scrambling
to gather together and maintain, a myriad of potential fears along with a host
of imagined ones?
Is it that the archetype of Fear is and must be a part of
human life, to lesser and greater degrees and when we have little to fear in
any real sense, we must invent things to fear? And is it also that in a world
where most have little faith and no trust in any God and little or no trust in
those ‘authority’ figures of the past who could be seen as trustworthy, that we
feel more vulnerable and frightened?
I am not arguing either for faith in God or faith in
authority figures, in fact, quite the opposite, but merely exploring the source
of such largely irrational and unnecessary fears and ultimately questioning why
it is that we are drawn to fears and then to the need for some authority figure
to quell those fears.
There is no doubt that ‘real’ and tangible fears are easier
to deal with in some ways because they are identifiable, and we are always more
comfortable with certainty, however much of an illusion it might be, than
possibility.
Perhaps finding something to fear, which can be called real,
whether it is or not, diminishes the fear factor because we know and can see
quite clearly with what we are dealing. And if society agrees this is a real
fear, we feel even more comfortable although the fear may only ever be
something ‘agreed upon’ within the society which is why it exists in the first
place.
So, while living in a literal war zone, or amongst severe
poverty and oppression, will always bring demonstrable and real fears in ways
that living in a civilized and secure nation does not and cannot - in the
absence of fear, so we may feel comfortable, fears must be found.
Perhaps, without real fears and subjected to ‘free-floating
anxiety’ with fear being a natural part of the human condition which kept us
‘alive’ and ‘safe’ from monsters, mastodons and marauders throughout millennia,
we are therefore driven, albeit unconsciously, to invent fears in order to
assuage the underlying anxiety and create an ‘illusion of certainty’ in regard
to what we feel but do not understand.
And of course, when we invent fears we must then find ways
to handle those fears, because to live with fear and do little or nothing, is
for most intolerable. And for that we also have an innate impetus – we need to
find someone or something we trust to save us.
God was very useful for this in the past because God in
various forms was more powerful than we were or than mum, dad, or the king
would ever be and was good at multi-tasking. God could pretty much take care of
any fear, anywhere, anytime, or, at least offer the illusion that this was
being done depending upon one’s ability to have faith.
The question in the modern age, in those nations which have
least to fear, seems to be: Where can that fear be ‘hung’ in the first place so
we can tell ourselves we know what it is we fear, and who, or what, can we
summon to deal with it and save us from its threat? And there must be a ‘place’
to put our fear, whether real or imagined, and there must be someone or
something who can save us, for without either, the path leads only to madness.
That too being a part of human nature which we sense even if we do not know it
as a literal truth.
In times past people put their faith and trust in God,
priests, kings, queens, lords, leaders, politicians, teachers, lawyers, bank
managers and those supposedly reliable and trustworthy bastions of society. But
those days are gone and these days the ‘person’ it seems who is generally most
trusted, is likely to be a medical professional, a nurse or a doctor. And also up there will be those who are
involved in the realms of keeping us safe in some way, as research into who it
is, or what profession is it, that we most trust.
The evidence is that Americans are the most fearful people
on the planet it seems, fearing their Government in ways that other developed
nations do not, despite being the most religious of developed nations, so
clearly having God around does not help much.
The Americans invented the Preppers, a group of people, numbering
millions, who are so fearful of what might happen and the potential dangers
they may face, that they feel a need to
dig a hole and bury themselves along with huge quantities of guns, water and
baked beans!
Although, to be fair,
the religious belief in the main in the US, is invested in a God of fear and
retribution so there is little comfort and more fear added to the equations.
But the Fear Factor seems to be part and parcel of modern life in the developed
world to lesser and greater degrees, everywhere.
Finding out the source, and/or the focus of our fears can be
aided by knowing which professions are most trusted. Human nature being what it
is, we are going to need to trust those whom we consider to be most useful to
us.
Americans trust doctors and nurses most of all, swapping
around with the number one spot. The British also trust doctors or nurses the
most with teachers second and scientists third, so one and two fall into the
‘save us from death, disease and danger category.’
Australians are a bit more pragmatic with, in 2013, doctors
coming sixth on the list of professions we trust and nurses at number four.
However, Firefighters, Paramedics and Rescue Volunteers at one, two and three,
are also connected with death, disease and danger, as are Pilots at number
five- and who would get on a plane if we
did not trust them - and Pharmacists at number seven, and so equate in general
with the new religion and faith in the ‘medical’ profession, or rather, those
professions and systems which we believe can keep us safe and alive.
And Europeans are more akin to Australians with 1.
Firefighter | 2. Nurse | 3. Pilot | 4. Pharmacist | 5. Medical Doctor, but the
common factor in all is that trust is placed in those professions involved in
the areas of death, disease, danger.
Given where people choose to place their trust it is not
surprising that the most prevalent fears revolve around disease and death in
ways which are delusional when one considers the circumstances in which most
live in developed nations. Most people do not face starvation or even
malnutrition and neither do they face a threat of deadly epidemics given the high
levels of sanitation. If they are injured badly in an accident they have ready
access to a hospital which offers surgical and trauma skills of which people in
the past and still in the Third World, can only dream.
There is no denying that the greatest skills of modern
medicine are in surgical and trauma! Living in the Third World requires a
degree of acceptance and pragmatism where a car accident where you are injured
is likely to have you transported, as I learned from experience, to a clinic
some hours away where a doctor might be on hand and where the décor is largely
blood-spattered concrete and the X-Ray machine, if it exists, is broken, or
there is no-one around who knows how to use it.
And yet, with less certainty, and perhaps because of it,
people living in such circumstances are less consumed with fear than those
cossetted by First World standards and care.
We have never been better fed, living in more secure, safer
and more sanitary conditions and we have never faced less threats and yet
people living in the developed world seem to live with more Fear than those who
still do face such real threats as famine, war, poverty and disease.
It is as if we cannot help ourselves. If we do not have
something to fear we must invent something to fear. It is as if we do not have
a God in some form that we fear we must invent a God that we fear. It is as if
we do not have some terrible threat in the form of advancing hordes of
murderous barbarians or the Black Death breathing in the gutters of our
streets, that we must invent some terrible threat.
The wailing and raging and moaning and fearing now goes not
into the sight of ‘fires burning on distant hilltops which signal the enemy is
near,’ nor in’ pustules appearing on a neighbour’s face as rats scurry around
the kitchen’ but in what we eat or do not eat, how often we exercise or do not
exercise, whether we have obeyed the instructions from the health professions
which we are told ‘will save us’ and had the myriad countless tests, the modern
version of Christian absolution in ages
past, which means we have been good enough and have been obedient enough, to
have been ‘forgiven’ for the countless sins we must surely have committed as
members of this new crusade against the heathen enemies of disease and death.
It most certainly keeps many, perhaps most, distracted if
not obsessed and as pious and as righteous in their faith as people have been
throughout history. There is still religion, it is just a new religion. There
is still God, it is just a new version of God. And there is still the most
terrible fear driving it all.
Plus ca change….. or, the more things change the more they
remain the same. We remain, as human beings, not much different to that which
we have always been and forgetting this fact means that we will not have
beliefs so much, as beliefs will have us!
And the new belief, faith and trust has been vested in
science/medicine – for good and for ill.
As Olivier Clerc so insightfully articulated in his book,
Modern Medicine – The New World Religion, the imagined fears are mostly fixed
on health, which really means an obsession with death, and where the new God to
be placated and pacified, is modern medicine in the form of your doctor!
As Clerc says:
“Medicine, then, has become the new world religion. The
specific myths, beliefs and rites of Christianity have been unconsciously
projected over medicine since Pasteur. As I explain in detail in my book, we
can establish a very close parallelism between the catholic religion and modern
medicine, although, for lack of space, I cannot go into all the details of each
comparison in this article. In brief:
- physicians have taken the place of priests;
- vaccination plays the same initiatory role as baptism, and
is accompanied by the same threats and fears;
- the search for health has replaced the quest for
salvation;
- the fight against disease has replaced the fight against
sin;
- eradication of viruses has taken the place of exorcising
demons;
- the hope of physical immortality (cloning, genetic
engineering) has been substituted for the hope of eternal life;
- pills have replaced the sacrament of bread and wine;
- donations to cancer research take precedence over
donations to the church;
- a hypothetical universal vaccine could save humanity from
all its illnesses, as the Saviour has saved the world from all its sins;
- the medical power has become the government’s ally, as was
the Catholic Church in the past;
- "charlatans” are persecuted today as "heretics”
were yesterday;
- dogmatism rules out promising alternative medical
theories;
- the same absence of individual responsibility is now found
in medicine, as previously in the Christian religion;
- patients are alienated from their bodies, as sinners used
to be from their souls.
