What is wrong with your brain? Why do you all act the way you do?
Our main difference is how we process fear. The culture of fear has socialized you to perceive fear as something negative and to be avoided at all costs.
The fundamentals behind your culture of fear is through re-imagined meaning of the word "risk".
Traditionally risk was a neutral term, and "good risks" and "bad risks" were based on probable outcome. Risk taking was seen as virtuous and the basis of courage.
The culture of fear turned risk into a bad word. Risks were something to be minimized. Uncertainty was to be avoided.
Through this lens perspective of fear; fear was transformed, no longer based on probability, but instead on possibility... and everything is possible.
Through culture of fear, security and safety became first class values due to the new morale authority of "possibility" based fear. Freedom, traditionally a first class value was demoted to secondary or lower for the sake of security and safety.
How you all perceive fear affects how you live and the society and culture that has grown around you.
Take courage for example. In your culture of fear, courage is "going to a new restaurant" or "trying something new".
Risking harm was no longer the basis of courage; that is to say taking into account probability of harm and then deciding on appropriate action. In this culture of fear courage becomes mundane, banal, everyday things. We call people in uniform courageous just for doing a job.
In 2017 community police officers in Manchester watched two children drown and didn't intervene because they had not received water training. This is safety and security as a number one value. The centralized authority agreed this was the right action for the officers to take, showing institutionalized toxic "Better safe than sorry" culture of fear, based on the new highest values of safety and security.
This fear perspective of possibility warps our views of our very personhood, believing humans to be vulnerable creatures that best avoid fear, maximizing security and safety by minimizing exposure to risks. This attitude promotes infantile adults by assuming they lack moral or emotional resources to cope with life. This culture of fear directly speaks to their existential insecurity (in a world which has never been more secure) by instilling that if something doesn't "feel" right, that "feeling" becomes a safety concern. This culture explicitly conveys the message that mistrusting people we encounter is a sensible approach.
This is a culture of "to be safe than to be sorry", but sorry, humans are living gods, infinite in nature; problem solvers by our very nature. We are not vulnerable, we are an adaptable strong resilient species.
The culture of fear has perverted your fear perspective. It creates a pessimistic fatalist mood where we assume the worst.
We cannot face an uncertain future with a culture of fear and instilled toxic safety and security values. The future demands courage. Risks are something not to be avoided. We need to look at risks as probability and not possibility. We need to see uncertainty as opportunity. We only need to seize courage to risk these opportunities, but that demands a radical rethink of how you perceive fear.
@BlockchainDevil
Irish Writer, Poet, & Lover
