From the time we are born we are taught to fear. Much of that teaching is sensible and there is no argument with it, because a small child does need to be kept away from fire and traffic and deep water, and no amount of philosophy replaces that. But the teaching does not stop at the sensible part. It continues, and it widens, and by the time we are grown we are carrying a great deal of fear that nothing in our own experience ever justified.
Fear of what people will say. Fear of being different in any visible way. Fear of asking. Fear of anything unfamiliar, purely on the grounds that it is unfamiliar. None of these came from anything that actually happened. They were given to us by people who had been given them, and who passed them on in complete good faith, believing they were passing on protection rather than a limitation.
And then we do exactly the same thing. The same set is handed to our children with the same care, in almost the same words, usually without noticing that we are quoting somebody. That is how a fear can travel through four generations without anybody once stopping to examine whether it still applies to anything at all in the present world.
What fear grows into
Fear does not stay fear. It becomes other things, and this is where it does its real damage, because the other things do not look like fear and are not treated as fear. Is it not fear that produces hatred? Is it not fear underneath contempt, and underneath the need to keep certain people at a distance, and underneath the absolute certainty that our way is the correct one and the others are dangerous?
A person who is not afraid does not need any of that. There is nothing to defend and therefore nothing to attack. It is fear that requires an enemy, because fear needs somewhere to point, and the world becomes much easier to bear if the thing that frightens us has a face and lives somewhere else and can be blamed.
So when people behave with real cruelty towards each other, what is actually there is not cruelty first. It is frightened people doing what frightened creatures do, having been taught to be frightened by other frightened people who meant them nothing but good. That does not excuse any of it and is not proposed as an excuse. It simply changes what is being looked at.
What it costs quietly
The obvious cost is the things not done. The work not attempted, the question not asked, the life not moved towards, the conversation postponed for eleven years. Those are visible at least in hindsight, and most people can list a few of them without much difficulty if asked at the right moment.
There is a less visible cost. Fear and guilt are like termites in a house. They do not bring the roof down in an afternoon and there is never a dramatic moment. They work quietly, from the inside, for years, and the house looks entirely sound while almost nothing is left holding it up. What they eat is peace, and they eat it so slowly that there is never a single day on which anybody could say that today their peace was lost.
And there is a third cost, which is that a life organised around avoiding fear becomes very small. Not unhappy exactly, and often not unpleasant. Small. Everything gets arranged so that the frightening thing does not arise, and after enough years of that arranging, the arrangement is the life, and there is nothing left over that was not shaped by it.
Not the absence of fear
Nobody can be rid of fear, and people who say they have been should be treated carefully. Who does not have fears? Having them is not the question and never was. The question is who is doing the deciding, them or us, and that question has to be asked freshly every time because the answer changes.
Fear does not usually announce itself, which is why it is so effective. It never names itself as fear. It says, that is not practical. It says, now is not the right time. It says, this is not the sort of thing people like us do. It speaks in the voice of good judgement, and the entire difficulty is that good judgement also speaks in the voice of good judgement, and from inside they sound the same.
There is one test that helps. Ask what would be done if the fear were simply absent, and notice whether the answer arrives instantly. When it arrives instantly, the decision was made long before any reasoning began, and everything since has been decoration built on top of it. Most of what anybody has been afraid of in a lifetime did not happen. And several of the things people were most frightened of did happen, and turned out to be the doors they most needed to go through.
