Defining Fear
A few weeks ago, my dad decided to buy a new TV. I thought it was a waste, and paid it very little attention, until last week, when I discovered that you could plug a PC into it and pipe the display there.

So, today, I unplugged my laptop, took it out to the family room, and played, because I had decided I wanted to watch a movie. So I watched Batman Begins. Afterwards, only my mom was left, so I showed her "Sunday, Bloody Sunday", and then Colbert's Correspondence Dinner thingy. And then I showed her Crichton's talk.

That's where this is leading, because Crichton was talking about fear.

I wanted to make it clear now, in advance, because I anticipate that I will rewrite my own memories in the future to make myself think it was different. The reason I embarked on the journey to understand love was because, as mentioned in the Valentine Day Discourse, I wanted to know whether or not what I felt, what my self-assessment had produced, was love. That long, winding journey I have been on for the past 7 years feels to be culminating. Within the next few years, I expect that I will be able to confidently say that no major changes will be enacted to that basic, fundamental theory.

Yet I also anticipate that I will believe that my revelations stemmed from a desire, not to merely better myself, but instead from a desire to "right a wrong": to negate fear.

That is, however, what I want to do now. And for this reason, I deliberately and admittedly intend to counteract fear. But this begs a most necessary question, one that Jenn asked me, back in the summer of 2004. One that must be answered before I can honestly act against fear.

What is fear?

My answer comes primarily from two sources, and secondarily from a larger host of experiential sources. The first primary source is my definition of love; the second, and complementary, source, is the unremarkable and generally unknown 1 John 4:18: "There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love."

From this verse, which I consider to be true without regard to any context it might have (which I do not consider to have a significant influence on its truth value), I derive the simplistic notion that love is the opposite of fear.

Thus, we define fear to be the inverse of love. Another connective term is a "diametric opposite", implying the idea of a circle on which both love and fear exist, and they exist in opposition to one another. (Incidentally, I intend to develop such a cycle. I am merely not confident enough in that idea to put it down yet.)

The larger host of experiential sources is a series of talks, presentations, books, both fiction and non-fiction, essays, notions, conversations, etc. In other words, my walk through life has exposed me to numerous accounts to the nature of fear, and this has served to undergird the primary notion that fear and love, as I understand love, are opposite and that fear, by itself, is what I think it is.

Fear, n.: 1. the process of alienation due to ignorance; 2. the condition of feeling something to be absolutely alien, unnatural, or irreconcilable with oneself, as an end-state to fear (def. 1).

Just as love is a force of togetherness, fear is a process of separateness. Love unites, but fear divides. Like love, fear by itself is not actually anything. The key, again like love, is what it causes, what it acts as motivation for. These are typically things we consider to be evil: unnecessary violence, betrayal, injustice, destruction. Love, on the other hand, typically generates things we consider to be good: intimacy, altruism, creation, peace, harmony.

Neither of these stereotypes are true. And more importantly, neither fear nor love exist independently. In the academic framework of theories and thoughts, it is a simple thing to divorce abstract concepts into such pure states, as I am doing. But in reality, it is extraordinarily difficult to actually pinpoint quantities of love and fear in an event. The world is simply too complex. Both love and fear serve to polarize our ability to think and to reason. But there is one key difference.

Love is naturally more difficult, because it involves gaining rather than losing. It is easy to shed things, but difficult to acquire and maintain. And more importantly, love demands knowledge. Any knowledge, and the more the better. It is possible, having decided love and fear to be diametric opposites, to place them on ends of a spectrum in an issue, and say that the percentage not loved is feared. This concept of a spectrum, while a useful analogy in many cases, is in fact wrong, if only because the world is not linear, and cannot be reliably reduced to such.

So, I have one last definition for you. This takes a common word and turns it from a very acceptable practice into an esoteric and possibly religious context. The word is education, synonymous with indoctrination and brainwashing and indeed, civilization.

To become educated is not to love. They are different. Instead, to become educated means to temper the resulting effects of both love and fear with caution and prudence, giving oneself time to think and operate from an accurate proportion of love and fear rather than a rash one.

Knowledge (provided by love) is useless without discipline (provided by education). This is also why fear, ultimately, must be erased: ignorance is always useless, except as an impetus to rash action.

An accurate proportion generates an understanding of what one does and does not know about a situation. Discipline is what the entirety of the schooling system, from preschool to your doctorate, is meant to teach. And discipline is what gives us the ability to reach that self-knowledge of the limits of our knowledge.

There is more to discipline than just that simple little tidbit, but this was an entry about fear, and I've gone off course far enough.

One last thing: the next essay will not coincide with a holiday. Let's hope I actually write it.

[edit]P.S. I looked back at the Bible verse and decided to elaborate.

First, my dismissal of context signifies two things. One: it doesn't matter what the paragraph, chapter, book, testament was talking about. The verse, by itself, standing on its own, feels true to me. Two: it doesn't matter what the Greek version was, the original intent, God's version... all of that. My evaluation of its truth value was based on MY reading of MY Bible (which happens to be NIV; the KJV version substitutes "punishment" with "torment", which I don't think is a significant change).

Second, the idea of punishment also rings true, and it is already built into my definition. The human instinct is always to classify things by, if absolutely nothing else, their linear relationship to they themselves. God is higher, animals are lower. This is a false worldview, but a worldview nonetheless. Fear, while an alienating force, already means they feel some kinship (we both exist!) yadda yadda. In this sense, the absolute alienation is impossible, because it is not possible to be absolutely different. (Likewise, it is impossible to be absolutely united, as love would say.)

But this linear scale speaks to something interesting: the unification of love demands equality. That means they occupy the same level on that great scale. Fear says they occupy a different level. It is exile, banishment, expulsion from our spot. Now you may be thinking, what about fearing those who are greater than us? Not a problem. While in the case of fearing the lesser, we punish them, in fearing the greater, we punish ourselves with the belief that they are punishing us. Or they really are punishing us, which shouldn't be dismissed as a possibility TOO quickly. =D

There are, after all, two meanings to dehumanization. One is the well-known one: to make them lesser, so that it would not be wrong for us to be unjust. (Because it would be just; yes, this argument is valid. It is only wrong because they, whoever "they" is, are not lesser.) The other is veneration. Superhuman. Godly. Larger than life. Legend.

Vous comprendrez? Or: "Savvy?"