Fear is a fundamental and positive emotion, so much so that it is part of our survival toolkit, although feeling it is unpleasant, its appearance is a sign of mental health, of course, every time you respond to a real danger. on the other hand, when it arises from an imaginary threat, it corresponds to a neurotic symptom and mainly takes the form of anxiety.
Like other emotions, fear can also reach different levels of intensity, ranging from simple fear to total panic. In less intense fears, the situation resolves relatively easily, while when that emotion has a high intensity, it can even nullify the autonomy of the human being; in fact, there are cases of total paralysis out of fear, these are cases in which emotion leaves the individual literally paralyzed.
- Neurotic fears are sometimes quite complex.
- And persist even after the stimulus that awakens them has disappeared.
- In addition.
- There are ways of being and life projects built entirely around fear.
- We always act or fail for fear of something or someone.
- Social fears of breaking people’s freedom and making them more manipulable are also conveyed.
One of the fundamental fears, present in every human being, is the fear of the unknown, if an object or situation is too alien to us, we fear him, even if it is not a threat, if at this point you meet a person who has four arms, and even more suddenly sure that you will take a leap back. If you don’t have knowledge of biology, fear can be much greater. In the end, more than ignorance, what fuels fear is the inability to understand.
The familiar gives us tranquility and exoticism frightens us to varying degrees, what we understand brings us closer to the feeling of familiarity, while the weird, the strange, but above all what we consider incomprehensible, frightens us.
If we are facing a new situation, but there are elements that we can recognize, we feel more relaxed, for example, when we visit a city we do not know, but it also has houses, buildings and streets like the city in which we are. On the other hand, if we move towards a completely different and unknown landscape, the situation may be different, imagine being in Antarctica and finding an animal that we have never seen before, one of the natural reactions will be fear.
Just as knowing and understanding reassures us, ignores us and ignores us puts us on alert, we don’t have to go to Antarctica to feel that feeling, in today’s world we live surrounded by anonymous and rather serious dangers, like so-called public insecurity. In some cities and countries you take to the streets and you don’t know what can happen. If they tell you that a particular street is dangerous, even if it seems quiet, you’ll be afraid to cross it.
The same goes for terrorism. This causes fear precisely because we do not know when, where and how it will appear, because we cannot place it in a specific space, it is everywhere, this becomes a ubiquitous threat that arouses constant fear, both in this case and in the previous one. In this case, there is a lack of knowledge. The inability to predict or locate a threat that we believe exists or from which we have evidence sets in motion our alert mechanisms.
The behavior of these phenomena is unpredictable because we do not have the information or knowledge to organize a coherent response, all these global threats are more or less worrying and contribute to us finally seeing authoritarian leaders with good eyes, representing the control we have We do not have one way or another, they save us from these uncertainties in the face of dangers.
Just as primitive men feared lightning because they did not know what it was or how to defend themselves from them, modern humans are also afraid of danger, precisely because they can cause us so much harm before we have time to move away from their reach. . .
Just as in the past we invent the gods to protect ourselves, today extraordinary qualities are bestowed on some leaders who promise to fight danger, in this way, just as knowledge frees us and makes us more capable, ignorance condemns us to the slavery of fear.