Nothing to Fear but Fear Itself
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Written by Bear
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I was standing in the middle of the busy street of a big, big city with all these people running past me, busy busy busy. I was standing there in the middle of the street staring at the poster-heads baring teeth, pointing guns, knives, fists in my face. All these advertisements of death and violence. Death, both fictional and real, men clad in tights with the face of a bat, other ones asking me to remember MIAs, to be proud, be an army of one, on and on…
And then a line from an old rock-opera came to mind: "...Why are you obsessed with fighting?"
Really. Why are we obsessed with fighting? We have been breaking our heads to figure out this propensity for aggression—genes, testosterone, bad parenting, society, repressions—and if we can tame it…
Then I looked again at the twisted faces surrounding me. What I saw was fear and uncertainty… That sort of made it all plain and clear. There is one fundamental strand of human nature that makes us seek power and find death: weakness. We are weak, ignorant, and blind. Our tools to adapt to the world are unreliable. We have no idea what the next hour will bring us and that ignorance makes us feel weak. We react with logic and grasping for power.
On one hand we need to handle the unpredictability of Life, trying to impose on it a knowledge-grid of logical rules, speak to it in the language of science and mathematics, and see it all as knowable. On the other, to compensate for our physical weakness we strive for more and more power. The more of it we have and the more powerful we think we become, the more it betrays our weakness and fear—which we then feel, getting us even more mad, intensifying the need for more money, more swords, guns, territories, women, degrees, children, houses… It is never enough for us.
I think that despite our pathetic boasting we mistrust and fear the universe. We do not really believe that God is watching over us. If we even believe that he is really there, we are certainly not sure that he likes us.
Our blind race for power that is fueled by fear, but fear also makes us incapable of trust (this should not be confused with being a complacent idiot!) and faith. And so fear prevails every day, every hour. In a way it is fear that makes all humans want to be super-human. We dream of superpowers and invincibility. In our infantile fantasies, we never want to be simply human—because we still have no idea what that means. We have never tried to be human. Animals, gods, angels… anything but human.
We never manage to embrace our humanity, our weakness and what it brings. We invent millions of tools, we augment our senses, our strength, and our brains with gadgets, fantasizing of some Borg-like society so that we never have to be alone and scared. Thus we fail to look inside and see our true strength: infinite, demiurgical powers that are dormant in us…
We have founded our whole civilization on the fear of our weakness… a civilization that is running out of steam, whose paradigm has to change…
Perhaps that is why we did not accept Christ when he came weak and not with a host of sword-bearing angels… How could it be? God has become weak? To our supposedly sapiens minds this is still a mystery. No matter how much we mouth prayers, we still hope that he will come with vengeful plague-sowing super-beings. We want our God to be strong… If he comes to us again in linen robes instead of armor, we will not accept him now either!
I say that our weakness is our strength. It is our chance to understand something…
We could remember what the Daoists teach, that weakness and suppleness are signs of life and strength and rigidity are signs of death. The true warrior is soft. Being weak when you have to be weak will allow you to stay and fight and, most importantly, survive for the next fight. Do not fear somebody who is clenching his fists, every fiber waiting to pounce. Instead, fear the one with calm gaze, relaxed posture, soft movement…
So stay soft and do not be afraid of your weakness. It will open your eyes to your true strength… |
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