The Fearful Attitude

In the beginning, fear was a basic, simple emotion for the human animal. We confronted

something overwhelming—the imminent threat of death in the form of wars, plagues, and

natural disasters—and we felt fear. As for any animal, this emotion had a protective function—it allowed us to take notice of a danger and retreat in time. For us humans, it served an additional, positive purpose—we could remember the source of the threat and protect ourselves better the next time. Civilization depended on this ability to foresee and forestall dangers from the environment. Out of fear, we also developed religion and various belief systems to comfort us. Fear is the oldest and strongest emotion known to man, something deeply inscribed in our nervous system and subconscious.

Over time, however, something strange began to happen. The actual terrors that we

faced began to lessen in intensity as we gained increasing control over our environment.

But instead of our fears lessening as well, they began to multiply in number. We started

to worry about our status in society—whether people liked us, or how we fit into the group. We became anxious for our livelihoods, our future, our personal health, and for woman? Instead of a simple, intense fear of something powerful and real, we developed a kind of generalized anxiety. It was as if the thousands of years of feeling fear in the face of nature could not go away—we had to find something at which to direct our anxiety, no matter how small or improbable.

In the evolution of fear, a decisive moment occurred in the nineteenth century when

people in advertising and journalism discovered that if they framed their stories and

appeals with fear, they could capture our attention. It is an emotion we find hard to

resist or control, and so they constantly shifted our focus to new possible sources of

anxiety: the latest health scare, the new crime wave, a social faux pas we might be

committing, and endless hazards in the environment of which we were not aware. With

the increasing sophistication of the media and the visceral quality of the imagery, they

have been able to give us the feeling that we are fragile creatures in an environment full

of danger—even though we live in a world infinitely safer and more predictable than

anything our ancestors knew. With their help, our anxieties have only increased.

Fear is not designed for such a purpose. Its function is to stimulate powerful physical responses,

allowing an animal to retreat in time. After the event, it is supposed to go away. An animal that

cannot not let go of its fears once the threat is gone will find it hard to eat and sleep. We are the animal that cannot get rid of its fears and when so many of them lay inside of us, these fears tend to color how we view the world. We shift from feeling fear because of some threat, to having a fearful attitude towards life itself. We come to see almost every event in terms of risk. We exaggerate the dangers and our vulnerability. We instantly focus on the adversity that is always possible. We are generally unaware of this phenomenon because we accept it as normal. In times of prosperity, we have the luxury of fretting over things. But in times of trouble, this fearful attitude becomes particularly pernicious. Such moments are when we need to solve problems, deal with reality, and move forward, but fear is a call to retreat and retrench.

This is precisely what Franklin Delano Roosevelt confronted when he took office in

1933. The Great Depression that had begun with the stock market crash of 1929 was

now at its worst. But what struck Roosevelt was not the actual economic factors but the

mood of the public. It seemed to him that people were not only more fearful than

necessary but that their fears were making it harder to surmount adversity. In his

inaugural address to the country, he said that he would not ignore such obvious realities

as the collapse of the economy and that he would not preach a naive optimism. But he

implored his listeners to remember that the country had faced worse things in its past,

periods such as the Civil War. Fear creates its own self-fulfilling dynamic—as people give in to it, they lose energy and momentum. Their lack of confidence translates into inaction that lowers confidence levels even further, on and on. ―”So, first of all, ” he told the audience, ―”let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning,

unjustified terror, which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”

What Roosevelt sketched out in his speech is the knife’s edge that separates failure from

success in life. That edge is your attitude, which has the power to help shape your

reality. If you view everything through the lens of fear, then you tend to stay in retreat

mode. You can just as easily see a crisis or problem as a challenge, an opportunity to

prove your mettle, the chance to strengthen and toughen yourself, or a call to collective

action. By seeing it as a challenge, you will have converted this negative into a positive

purely by a mental process that will result in positive action as well. And in fact, through

his inspiring leadership, FDR was able to help the country shift its mind-set and

confront the Depression with a more enterprising spirit.

We face certain challenges as well. The world has become more competitive; the

economy has undeniable vulnerabilities and is in need of reinvention. As in all

situations, the determining factor will be our attitude, how we choose to look at this

reality. If we give in to the fear, we will give disproportionate attention to the negative

and manufacture the very adverse circumstances that we dread. If we go the opposite

direction, cultivating a fearless approach to life, attacking everything with boldness and

energy, then we will create a much different dynamic.

Understand: we are all too afraid—of offending people, of stirring up conflict, of

standing out from the crowd, of taking bold action. For thousands of years our

relationship to this emotion has evolved—from a primitive fear of nature, to generalized

anxiety about the future, to the fearful attitude that now dominates us.