On Being Unafraid.

Fear is not a useless emotion. Fear can keep you alive. It is often rational to be afraid. But fear is not itself rational. It is a wild, unreasoning emotion, the enemy of reason. Fear wants to move your feet for you, wants to speak for you and act for you and deprive you of your will – in the moment fear can keep you alive, move you faster and further than wolves behind you, give you the strength to go on, to overcome, to survive the crisis. This a healthy fear.

But Americans (especially older Americans) seem to me a fearful people, though whether they are more or less fearful than any other I cannot say, and their fears seem much more the unhealthy sort. They are more afraid of terrorists than dogs, of strangers than intimates, of crime than of crossing the street. I my head understands this, that to most it is somehow much worse for a bad thing to be done to you than for a bad thing to simply happen, that malice terrifies while incompetence frustrates. My heart does not understand this though. When I think of the things that could ruin my life, that could harm me, that menagerie of misfortune is populated principally with the spawn of incompetence. Those creatures of malevolence are a sideshow compared to them.

And then there are the natural disasters that people fear, but to fear them is useless. After taking the precautions you think best, terror will not help you survive a tornado. If you let it though. it will gnaw at your guts before the storm and torment you – useless suffering which offends my sensibilities. The fear of incompetence may drive us to scrutinize the work of others, the fear of indifference may cause us to speak for ourselves, the fear of malice may push us to look to our protection, and live cautiously.

But the fear of the storm? We build our shelters, and weather what we must. All further concern is masochistic.

Now I am not a fearful sort, as a rule. I see the harm fear does, the madness and misrule it inspires, and whenever and know that courage is the first virtue – without it all the rest fall silent. So, I strive to overcome fear to master it, lest it master me.

But all of this is preamble, aside from my main point. Consider the phenomena of a gamma-ray burst. When a star dies and goes nova, a burst of high energy gamma rays shoots out from the star as a ray traveling at the speed of light. Such events are uncommon, even on an astronomical scale, and if it were to happen in our galaxy there is only a minute chance it would hit us.

But if did hit us, we would not see it coming, since the radiation travels at the speed of light, and it would be as if we microwaved the whole earth on high for half an hour. The atmosphere would burn off, the seas would boil, and on the whole surface of the earth and in the deepest depths there would not remain a single living thing or trace of our civilization. The entirety of the human race, all our works, the whole humanity’s history and our homeworld could vanish in instant, without and forewarning or chance of survival. What do you when there is no shelter from the storm? Take a moment to think on this.

When I first learned this , I was afraid. But I overcame that fear – it was the most useless of fears. I got on with my life, in doing so I learned a subtle truth: That safety is an illusion - there are only different levels of risk. The risk of a gamma-ray burst is small, and not my efforts or the efforts of the whole human race could reduce that risk one way or the other. It is simply there. Something to be endured.

And this comes back to the madness and misrule of fear – fear drives us to seek safety, but there is no safety. The politics of fear is that of promising safety (impossible!) or more accurately of promising to make people feel safe. And I don’t know what to do about that. I would like for voters to wise up, to overcome their fear, to accept that to live is to be at risk, to understand that safety is an illusion, and that the reduction of risk is never done without cost. But it is easier and more profitable to terrify than to reassure, so I expect nothing will change in this regard. We will frighten each other, and cook in our own fear until its softened our brains to the point where we’ll support anyone who promises to make us feel safe.