Collective Fear and Fear-Induced Irrationality

Fear is the mind-killer. One of my favorite science fiction quotes ever. It comes from the book "Dune" by Frank Herbert. As far as the psychological impact of fear, fear is quite the uncomfortable experience. Any situation where you feel your life or the lives of others around you are at imminent risk is never going to be a super fun experience for anyone.

Fear puts you in a difficult position. It forces you to make a choice of either facing your fear and overcoming it, or fleeing from it and finding security elsewhere. Unfortunately, fear and fear inducing things will follow you, no matter where you try to run and hide. 

 Fear breaks the mind, and we are often put in a position where we make irrational decisions that often put our security at further risk. When our families are threatened, or our lives are threatened, we don't always think rationally or clearly about our circumstances and make choices occasionally that compound the problem. 

  Fear makes humans herdable, like cattle, and cripples our will and freedom. The choices we make under duress are often not in our own interest, but in the interest of the thing or person inducing the fear. Fear cripples liberty.

It is the great enemy of liberty.

    As far as the psychological effects and nature of fear, fear is both an abstract concept  with an abstract interaction with consciousness, as well as a biological response to a threatening stimuli, initiated in the brain by fear inducing information and spread throughout the nervous system as the natural defense mechanism of an organism takes hold.

  There are different degrees and intensities of fear, and fear is very related to other concepts like terror and horror. These other concepts just have different applications and functions within the minds of conscious entities.

    Fear is one of the most psychologically crippling emotions a person can feel. Along with extreme grief, fear is the emotion and abstract force that breaks the mind the most easily. Terror is also insanity inducing, and I look at at terror as just a more intense and dynamic form of fear. 

     Fear psychology is one of those fields that have an important application in today's age of terrorism and pandemics. Helping people handle their fear so they make more rational and functional choices is important for the security and stability of any nation.

         A population that cannot handle fear and loses reason and rationality because of fear is not free, but cognitively in bondage, and more like a herd animal than a sentient, autonomous person. No society can operate with a significant chunk of its population crippled by fear and the irrationality that comes from the inability to manage fear and terror.

       Their is little freedom in a terrorized society, and our enemies and the schemers, plotters, opportunists, and powergrabbers of the world know this. America has been under attack by abstract concepts and complex ideas and ideologies that induce fear and terror, and even by the concepts of fear and terror themselves, and we have been for sometime.

Have a good day friends!