Fear is a fascinating emotion, and one that no doubt many of us have come to know in new forms over the past few years. The words “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself” were spoken by Franklin D. Roosevelt in his inauguration speech of 1933, when the U.S. was in the depths of economic depression. He then qualified fear itself as the “nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance”.
Obviously, fear also has positive qualities like letting us know when we’re in danger and signalling our bodies to respond in the form of fight, flight or freeze. Interestingly, it is also one of the few universal emotions, meaning it’s hardwired into each and every one of us.
As history has shown and as we’ve now seen firsthand, fear is also a powerful tool used by the manipulators of the world to persuade people to react to situations in certain ways. For this reason, anybody who truly wants freedom needs to understand the truth about how fear works.
In modern psychological parlance, primal fears are broken down along the lines of:
Extinction
Mutilation
Loss of Autonomy
Separation
Ego-death
I’m not sure how modern psychologists arrived at this breakdown, but I find it lacking in depth. To my mind, anything that could be characterized as a primal fear would have to be so simple and basic that it could be recognized even by a child. A deeper explanation of primal fears, one that addresses the question of WHY we have them, can be found in the works of people who have extensive knowledge of mass manipulation techniques.
In podcast 19 of his extensive series What On Earth Is Happening, Mark Passio presents humanity’s primal fears as fourfold:
1. Darkness
2. Predators
3. Abandonment
4. Chaos
The fears of Darkness and Predators are easy to understand. Before the widespread availability of electricity, humans instantly became much more vulnerable when the sun went down. We needed to secure warmth, and also protection from predators with better night vision. Even today and even in cities, on the whole people tend to move around less at night.
Beyond its literal meaning, “Darkness” in the modern sense could encompass all that is unknown. In our current climate of censorship, I find this particularly chilling. If the fear of darkness is dissolved by the light of knowledge and information is being withheld, the psychological status-quo of the general population remains Fear.
The fear of “Predators” can likewise apply to more situations than running into beasts who would have us for lunch. Bullies in the schoolyard or workplace, Ponzi scheme purveyors, and the narcissists we’ve known and loved can certainly make life miserable. But even in absence of a literal predator, this primal fear remains a present and powerful tool for manipulators to exploit.
Two full decades past the traumatic events of 9/11 and the subsequent U.S. invasion of Iraq, fears of terrorism have slipped almost seamlessly closer to home in the form of “domestic terrorism”, “domestic extremism”, and now billed in Canada as “ideologically motivated violent extremism” (IMVE).
The Public Safety department of the Canadian government, currently headed by Marco Mendicino, concerns itself not only with people who have actually committed crimes but also with “prevention”, a.k.a. “pre-crime”. As they put it:
We … recognize that addressing violent extremism is not just an enforcement issue, but one of prevention as well. This is why Public Safety’s Canada Centre for Community Engagement and Prevention of Violence continues to provide national leadership on Canada’s effort to counter radicalization to violence
The opportunities for governments to exploit human primal fears are most profound in connection to the third and fourth on the list. “Abandonment” is a simple concept to grasp, especially in connection to the first two primal fears. When the sun went down in the old days, and when we were children in modern times, we naturally sought protection from predators and the elements in the form of bigger, stronger humans. Whether these came in the form of alpha-males, father figures, or (gasp!) government, the principle is the same.
The fear of Abandonment is probably the most profound of the pack of primal fears, and can be understood as a kind of bridge between the first two and the fourth: Chaos. Because what would happen if the sun went down, and suddenly our protector was nowhere to be found? To the mind of the child, or the immature adult, the world would be thrown into disorder. In order to avoid this, many people seem to be willing to go along with allowing our government to manage even things that could happen in a hypothetical future.
The bridge between the fears of Abandonment and Chaos touches on another deep-seated psychological trait that humans share: our near-universal desire to let somebody else solve our problems for us. Most people, given the choice, would prefer some form of control over any form of discomfort, whether real or perceived.
Given our hardwiring, the real question is: Is humanity forever doomed by its primal fears to be exploited by manipulators?
Looking around at the state of the world today, it might seem so. But that would be to ignore the fundamental mechanism of HOW manipulators use our primal fears against us. For anybody who actually wants freedom, this is crucial to understand.
While most people remain ignorant of their own psychological makeup, the manipulators of this world understand it very well. This gap in knowledge creates a power differential that enables them to greatly influence peoples’ responses to situations.
Case in point, the British Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) was called out by a group of 47 psychologists in 2020 for having used covert forms of messaging to instil fear of the coronavirus in the population via “ethically murky” techniques that influenced “an entire nation below the level of conscious thought and reason without informed consent”. The story was eventually picked up in the British mainstream media seven months later, but how many people remain to this day under the initial mental conditioning is anyone’s guess.
Understandably, if you can prey on the fears people carry with them on a deeply subconscious level, it becomes very easy to manipulate their minds, and by extension their behaviour. But when people come into awareness of how their own minds actually work, they cannot be controlled. In other words, the manipulators of the world have no power other than that which has been granted to them by people who don’t want to think for themselves.
Not everyone in positions of power or influence hold the desire to manipulate other people. That said, if freedom is what we truly aspire to, we’re going to need to adjust our default settings of looking to external sources for protection or “safety”. Whether these come in the form of a politician who today is saying things we like, or a charismatic leader of any movement, simply jumping on bandwagons is not going to bring us anywhere significantly different than where we are today.
To be free, we need to stop looking and waiting for somebody to save us and start thinking for ourselves. Maybe this is something close to what FDR meant when he qualified fear the way he did in his speech in 1933. Then again, he was a politician seeking the support of the people over which he would rule.
On a final and related point of consideration, I’d like to suggest that Chaos may be the thing we should fear the least. The reason being because this is what we are already living through. When you look around, do you currently see government “saving” us from the chaos we fear or actually creating the conditions of a lawless land, where rules can change from moment to moment and people are held in jail for months without being convicted of any crime?
The Chaos we feared as children, built on fears of Abandonment by our protectors, has no use in the grown-up mind. In the deepest sense, what we are really afraid of is taking responsibility for our own thoughts, emotions and actions.
Yet for true order to exist in the external world, we must first create it within our own selves. This is the true foundation of freedom from rulers; just as with any other form of property, if we’re not in full possession of our own minds, you can be sure that somebody else will be. By the same token, once we have truly faced our fears, they power they hold can never again be used against us.
The famous inscription at the Oracle of Delphi, I think, sums up nicely the task we have before us:
HONK!
Excellent article! Thanks!