Who's afraid of the big bad wolf?
Fear is paralyzing, doubt destructive. Despite many years of training oneself to accept uncertainty, it's almost refreshing to find out, in one humid evening, that I can still panic in the face of change.
I blame it on our evolutionary ancestors, somewhere on the ancient craton of Africa. When we were a younger race, tenuous and predated upon, it was our capacity for imagining the worst that allowed us to escape the worst. Even as our brains were upgraded in each generation for superior processing, so they involuted and curled in upon themselves in wonderful whorls of self-deception and paranoia.
And survival instincts in a world of multilayered peril have gifted us with the sensitivity of comparison. Just like the human ear doesn't measure loudness in absolutes, but is sensitive to jumps in the order of magnitude; just like pattern recognition is all about juxtaposition of textures and contrasts. We see faces and strange beasts in clouds. We imagine crises and revolutions sometimes where there is only a fleeting alignment of events.
Naturally, we have also evolved ways, culturally, to deal with disillusionment and societal implosion. Ordered systems, whether secular or religious, seem to help ensure stability. But only for a time; the environment supporting such systems changes and when the body swells or shrinks, the clothing must either stretch, collapse or be changed. Some cultures preach universal law; other cultures preach that there is nothing certain except transcience. And in between we have those twilight civilizations of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Meso-America, with their creation myths and doomsday foreshadowings: oft-bloody ritual kept the sun rising each morning and the crops verdant... that is until the next cataclysm arrived in either godly or human form.
I cannot be a full pessimist or a full optimist, because both require ignoring large pools of evidence for the good and bad in my existence. I cannot be a fatalist since I acknowledge change. It's at times like these that one must fall back on the slightly unsatisfying compromise of becoming a livejournalist. "I see, I comment, I sit on the fence and lean from side to side." Commentary of this sort, one must admit, is the safe sort, because most of us currently entertain the pleasant illusion that free speech is the same thing as a mature, peaceful society. Actually, if anyone has ever been an even half-sensitive friend, one would know that free speech can be a terrible idea. How much of free speech and forward thinking is the result of internal angsting and second guessing; how much the balance between exuding power and appearing non-threatening, only the individual speakers know. But I digress.
I remember an interesting conversation I once had in a pub. I told a secondhand account of a man who never flew because he was afraid of air stewardesses (yes, I know the politically correct term is 'flight attendant', but that divests them of the trolley-dolly, promiscuous, gritted-teeth-smile stereotype). And this girl I was with (psychology student, but of course), said that the the term for this (though outdated) was called 'displacement', i.e. the man was actually afraid of flying but had shifted his excuses onto something more exotic - and thus more personally justifiable.
Which takes me full circle - am I seeing the clear and present dangers of the wide world, or am I looking to the wide world to provide the monsters for some childish night terror?
I blame it on our evolutionary ancestors, somewhere on the ancient craton of Africa. When we were a younger race, tenuous and predated upon, it was our capacity for imagining the worst that allowed us to escape the worst. Even as our brains were upgraded in each generation for superior processing, so they involuted and curled in upon themselves in wonderful whorls of self-deception and paranoia.
And survival instincts in a world of multilayered peril have gifted us with the sensitivity of comparison. Just like the human ear doesn't measure loudness in absolutes, but is sensitive to jumps in the order of magnitude; just like pattern recognition is all about juxtaposition of textures and contrasts. We see faces and strange beasts in clouds. We imagine crises and revolutions sometimes where there is only a fleeting alignment of events.
Naturally, we have also evolved ways, culturally, to deal with disillusionment and societal implosion. Ordered systems, whether secular or religious, seem to help ensure stability. But only for a time; the environment supporting such systems changes and when the body swells or shrinks, the clothing must either stretch, collapse or be changed. Some cultures preach universal law; other cultures preach that there is nothing certain except transcience. And in between we have those twilight civilizations of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Meso-America, with their creation myths and doomsday foreshadowings: oft-bloody ritual kept the sun rising each morning and the crops verdant... that is until the next cataclysm arrived in either godly or human form.
I cannot be a full pessimist or a full optimist, because both require ignoring large pools of evidence for the good and bad in my existence. I cannot be a fatalist since I acknowledge change. It's at times like these that one must fall back on the slightly unsatisfying compromise of becoming a livejournalist. "I see, I comment, I sit on the fence and lean from side to side." Commentary of this sort, one must admit, is the safe sort, because most of us currently entertain the pleasant illusion that free speech is the same thing as a mature, peaceful society. Actually, if anyone has ever been an even half-sensitive friend, one would know that free speech can be a terrible idea. How much of free speech and forward thinking is the result of internal angsting and second guessing; how much the balance between exuding power and appearing non-threatening, only the individual speakers know. But I digress.
I remember an interesting conversation I once had in a pub. I told a secondhand account of a man who never flew because he was afraid of air stewardesses (yes, I know the politically correct term is 'flight attendant', but that divests them of the trolley-dolly, promiscuous, gritted-teeth-smile stereotype). And this girl I was with (psychology student, but of course), said that the the term for this (though outdated) was called 'displacement', i.e. the man was actually afraid of flying but had shifted his excuses onto something more exotic - and thus more personally justifiable.
Which takes me full circle - am I seeing the clear and present dangers of the wide world, or am I looking to the wide world to provide the monsters for some childish night terror?