“…the only thing we have to fear is…fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”

It’s unusual that I quote Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Overall, I’m not a fan, but the man knew how to make an emotional impact on his listeners. He spoke the words above during his first inauguration to the U.S. Presidency, March 4, 1933.

America was in the middle of the Great Depression, the worst economic downturn in our history as a nation. People were angry, tired, desperate… and scared. F.D.R.’s proposed, with his New Deal programs, to calm that fear and address the very real suffering of the population. Current wisdom says The New Deal did not end the Great Depression, (more here) but he did take positive steps to end suffering.

And he was right about fear. There’s no emotion more paralyzing, nor more counter-productive. Even avarice and blind lust drive us to do something. Fear stops us in our tracks, unless it becomes panic. Then it does make us do something, usually something very stupid.

A lot of people are afraid right now, and more than a few are panicking. That’s understandable, but it’s also very, very bad for us. Our systems are not designed to handle fear continuously. Fear is meant to address immediate threats, like a poisonous snake. Did you know that part of your brain registers the sight of the snake before your frontal cortex recognizes, “That’s a snake?” That’s because your firmware is set to recognize a deadly threat and start corrective action to deal with it at a level below conscious thought. I think that’s pretty cool.

Anyway, you recognize the threat, and fear kicks in. You need to control or escape the threat. You run, you jump, you incapacitate the snake… or you calm down and realize it’s a blacksnake and it won’t kill you.

If it is poisonous, though, you might get bitten, and there are a few snakes so deadly that you would then have no time to save yourself. Still, fear is a useful tool that motivates you to escape, to fight, to seek medical care.

Fear is for the now. Until it becomes anxiety. What’s the difference? According to Healthline, “Fear is an emotional response to a known or real danger, and anxiety is a longer-lasting stress response to an unknown, or unclear threat.” Anxiety is pre-emptive fear, fear of the not-in-front-of-us, but maybe around-the-corner. Fear is, “Shit, a snake!” Anxiety is, “I wonder if there are holes in the foundation of my house. I wonder if a snake could get in. I wonder if there’s on under my bedspread right now!

A therapist will tell you that anxiety is the “What if” disease. (Its cousin, depression, is the “if only” disease.) And anxiety is exactly that: a disease. It is not healthy. It is not useful. It is, however, an excellent tool for anyone who wants to manipulate you to take self-destructive action. Ever taken a class or watched a video about protecting yourself from cyber-threats? (If not, you should!) One of the prime indicators that an email or popup message is from a bad actor is that it tries to motivate you by creating a sense of urgency. “Your computer has 1,288,476 VIRUSES!” “You approved a payment to Joh Blau in the amount of $367,428,124 EU.” “I have video of you pleasuring yourself to PORN!”

All of these threats play to anxiety, to the “What if?” in our primitive brains. And, if we’re not careful, they may drive us to stupid actions–clicking the link, supplying a credit card number, sending the BitCoin, installing the recommended software. All because anxiety serves some of the most despicable people on the planet: Internet scammers, sleazy businesspeople, self-serving news anchors, elected officials…

Every one of them is trying to scare you so you’ll do something stupid and self-destructive… that might benefit them. It’s a perverse variation on the old Kipling poem: “If you can keep your head while all about you are losing theirs… you could use their hysteria to get the money and power you seek.”

If you’re afraid, I’m not making fun of you. I may think your fear is irrational, but it’s real to you.

Right now, a lot of you are afraid of what’s happening to our government.

I absolutely do not want you to apologize for your fears. I just want you to be aware that fear–and anxiety–hand our emotional control over to the amygdala, our “lizard brain.” We go into fight-or-flight mode, and our rational thinking processes, those which happen in the frontal cortex, shut down. We’re vulnerable.

We can’t afford to be vulnerable when so many evil actors out there know how to work our fear and our anxiety. We need to be able to accept our fear, and say, “Thanks, fear, for the warning. You can stand down now and I’ll figure out what to do.” We then need to engage our rational minds.

Change is dangerous. We should have some fear when it happens. Businesses use a change management process to (hopefully) stop them from breaking the whole infrastructure. But politics doesn’t have a change control board, it just has the fairly primitive system of two powerful parties beating the shit out of each other in order to maintain party power and maybe  prevent bad change. As they do this, they engage in a lot of hyperbole. They each solemnly assure is that the other side is bad, just bad. They tell you the other candidate is going to trigger Armageddon, put everyone in camps, take your home, take your freedom, take your guns, take your money. That’s scary!

But, remember, most of the people saying it are saying it to win an election, not to warn you. They don’t care that it makes you lose sleep, they don’t care that it makes you sometimes too angry to function, they don’t care if it makes you end friendships and abandon your family.

And those are some of the things I see people doing.

If I had to pick one factor that causes the most conflict in society I’d pick fear and the long-term anxiety it can trigger.

Our anxieties project outward from us like 1980s shoulder pads, bashing into others, causing resentment, insult and, well, more fear and anxiety. We’re afraid someone may hurt us, so we don’t let them come near. We run, we try to scare them, we just act like assholes. We’re afraid of losing our property, our rights, our freedom, and so we’re suspicious and even paranoid. We portray anyone we don’t trust–read: anyone who isn’t wearing our team colors–as evil. In a purely external effort to calm our fears, we may hurt, anger or frighten others. We try to control every situation by striking first, striking in fear, and keeping threats away. At their worst, fear and anxiety lead us to try to control others. But this entry is already way too long, so I’ll talk about control another time. Suffice to say, a lot of people become “Them” to our “Us.”

Like the song says, “I’ve been looking at people and how they change with the times; but lately all I’ve been seeing are people throwing love away and losing their minds.” Your family, your friends, your neighbors, your co-workers are not them. They are the people who do and might love you. News anchors, influencers, politicians and outspoken celebrities are not your us. They don’t know you. So don’t cut out those close on the fear-inducing word of those you don’t know.

There are threats out there. There’s evil out there. You can deal with them. But don’t live in dread of them. Don’t let them rob you of your happiness. Don’t let them turn you into a monster. Like Captain James T. Kirk once told us, if you see a gorgon, look at it… and don’t be afraid.