Fear
Fear fascinates me. It is a force which governs
almost everything we do, a positive force if you may. Why so? Look around you,
the reason that you live in a place that is safe is because of laws that are
enforced in a country, laws that protect, laws that were made with fear in
mind. If not for law and order, we all probably be killed by now, just because
we can kill. However , in the real world, it is because of the fear of going to
jail or the fears of execution or perhaps the fear of going to hell, that
prohibits us to act on a whim. I’ve heard somewhere that hating someone is as
good as murder, it’s just without the opportunity to do so. How true…
Fear governs us. Why? It’s instincts. From
birth, humans or any other organism on earth have only one true goal, that is
to survive. Yes, survival is what makes us respond to fear. We fear death, to
be lonely, to be hated, to feel pain. Physical survival is more evident in
harsh laws which brings death penalty. It is also evident in how doctors and
scientist are hard pressed to find a way to extend our lifespan or the simple
fact that doctors earn a lot. The rest of the fears we face today involves our
emotional survival. As the body has needs to survive, so does the soul. Perhaps
the most important thing for the soul is companionship. Even the most hardened
criminals fear the isolation chamber, the lack of human contact will eventually
break anyone.
We are creatures of habit, we fear change. We
fear losing our jobs, even though that may be a blessing in disguise. We
believe that by a certain degree that we can predict how things will turn out.
So losing your job is predicted as a bad thing, and such we fear it. Getting a
promotion is considered a good thing and we welcome that. We predict that it
aids our survival, making more money and thus being able to fulfill Maslow’s
Hierarchy Of Needs better. In the corporate world, promotion is distributing
skills inefficiently. Promoting a person that is a skillful engineer to a
senior engineer means that his skills as an engineer won’t be used, but instead
he needs to manage people, which is what he is unskilled at. So he sucks at his
job and eventually gets laid off. The higher the corporate level, the more
mismatch of the skills we have, I’ll get to it next time. In fact predicting
every factor in your life is useless unless you can predict your own death
accurately.
We fear something less if we have some sort of
control over it. (Peter Sandman’s
"control" principle). From the book "Freakonomics", death
by terrorist attack is considered dreadful but death by heart disease isn’t. As
such, we fear thing that we think we can control, like driving a car over
taking a flight by plane. Our predicting mind which is primed for survival has
just failed us. Even though speeding will exponentially increase your chance of
dying, we still do it because we think were in control. Sometimes, people skimp
on the safety of their car just to safe the money. A flimsy Proton is around
RM30K while a safer Toyota Vios is around RM65K. Is the lives of you family and
yourself only worth RM35K? We still make such decisions because it is in our
control, so we fear less of the outcome. But alas, little do they realize that
there’s a reason the call it "accident".
Fear is an excellent incentive, it is highly
evident in how the world is govern by it. Dangling a carrot in front of a
donkey is never as effective as whipping it. "Do your job or you’re
fired!" or "do your job and get promoted!", which will make you
work as hard as a horse? Perhaps fear works that well because it has been
strongly ingrained in our childhood. If we did something wrong, we get spanked.
When we did something right, we get nothing. Thus, fear makes a better
motivator than incentives.
Fear is something we deemed negative, we consider
it stopping us from pursuing our dreams and such. But then again even the judgment of the mind is flawed so how can we be sure of what are the
irrational fears create by ourselves? Fear is a natural mechanism for survival,
it isn’t something to be despised but rather to be understood. If the world was
without fear, imagine the number of suicides we’d have because no one is afraid
to die? Not all fears are meant to be conquered, only those that we manifest
ourselves, for if we were to stare at fear straight in the eyes, all we would
find is our own reflections…
