Fear, and how much your primal brain hates you.

Inspired by a conversation this weekend, psycholi-jay bring you the lowdown on how effective fear as a tool can be. But first? Like any good university-trained drone I will define fear for you, at least in the context of this little keyboard-hammering exercise.

Fear is the primal emotional response that warns you of danger, it can also be defined as insecurity, dread, or apprehension.

The thing about fear is it is one of our oldest physiological responses evolutionarily speaking. It could be argued almost every other species on earth shows evidence of a fear response, rabbits hammer their foot on the floor and bolt, cats arch their back and try and look big, and conservatives blame the poor and try to exploit as much cash as they can out the system before they are booted out again.

As humans our fear responses are fairly sloppily integrated into our conscious and unconscious thought, after all it’s been with us ever since we were lizards or fish or whatever, it’s going to be pretty tough to override or even ignore. We actually have very little defences against it because it’s a response designed to cut through all of our other thoughts feeling and responses in order to ensure we survive long enough to pass our genes on. There are actually parasites in nature who block the fear responses in their hosts to ensure they die young, and have a greater chance to spread the parasite to carrion feeders (The natural equivalent of “Come on! All the cool kids are doing it!”).

Interestingly the only other emotion that cuts through our cognitive processes so effectively is love, and modern psychologists weren’t the first to notice this. As Machiavelli said, a Prince must be either feared or loved, in order to rule. But if one must be chosen above the other, let it be fear.

So what does this mean? Well next time you turn on your TV and check your newsfeed, see how many people are trying to sell you fear. Fear of dying, fear of loneliness, fear of poverty, fear of immigrants, fear of joblessness, fear of religion, fear of sexual predators, fear of crime in general. These things are used so often because it’s known that you have very little protection from the fear response, and therefore their message will be taken in (especially around election time!). Why do you think those hideous chain-letter things that people continue to clog up newsfeeds with that promise “Sally McSceptic did not forward this and was found a day later eaten to death by Mongolian bugger-ants!” still get forwarded. It’s a clumsy attempt to poke your hypothalamus into giving you that fear, and getting the architect of the original post what they want, your compliance.

The fact that fear is pushed upon us so casually has led to some serious social problems. Each moth we are looking for a new hysteria, something new to be our boogieman, to sell our papers, win our votes, and market disposable good that you don’t really need but are suddenly insecure about not owning. Like the lifelong junkies of adrenaline abuse we need a bigger and bigger hit to get us motivated and compliant, so they threaten our children, our religion, our homes, and so on in order to win your support.

So next time somebody tells you that you should be scared. Be sure to look at what they have to gain by telling you that, reign in your knee-jerk response, and look out the window, and to your family, and to your friends.

And maybe the world won’t be so scary after all.