Within his first inauguration speech,
Franklin D. Roosevelt, 32nd President of the United States, said: “So, first of all, 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.”
We have all heard the seemingly
discriminating remarks that fear is normal and abnormal, and that normal fear
is to be regarded as a friend, while abnormal fear should be destroyed as an
enemy.
The fact is that no so-called normal fear
can be named which has not been clearly absent in some people who have had
every cause for fear. If you will run
over human history in your mind, or look about within the present life, you
will find here and there persons who, in situations or before circumstances
which should, as any fearful soul will insist, to inspire the feeling of at
least normal self-protecting fear, are nevertheless wholly without the feeling.
They possess every feeling and thought
demanded except fear. The concept
of self-preservation is as strongly present as with the most abjectly timid or
terrified, but fear they do not know. This fearless awareness of fear
suggesting conditions may be due to several causes. It may result from constitutional make-up, or
from long continued training or habituation, or from religious ecstasy, or from
a perfectly calm sense of spiritual selfhood which is unhurtable, or from the
action of very exalted reason. Whatever
the explanation, the fact remains: the very causes which excite fear in most of
us, merely appeal, with such people, if at all. to the instinct of
self-preservation and to reason, the thought-element of the soul which makes
for personal peace and wholeness.
It is on such considerations that I have
come to hold that all real fear-feeling should and may be banished or removed
from our life, and that what we call "normal fear" should be
substituted in our language by "instinct" or by "reason,"
the element of fear being dropped altogether, knowing that whatever the situation,
we are able to deal with it or, at least, successfully endure it until
conditions change.
"Everyone can testify that the psychical state called fear consists of mental representations of certain painful results" (William James). The mental representations may be very faint as such, but the idea of hurt to self is surely present. If, then, it can be profoundly believed that the real self cannot be hurt; if the reason can be brought to consider vividly and believingly all quieting considerations; and is surely within that self will suffer "no evil " while all the instincts of self-preservation may be perfectly active, fear itself must be removed "as far as the east is from the west."
How is it that we are to view fear? There are several ways that can be
considered:
As a warning and as a maker of panic. But let me say that the warning should be
understood as given to reason, that fear need not appear at all, and that the
panic is perfectly useless pain. With these discriminations in mind, we may now
go on to a preliminary study of fear.
Fear is (a) an impulse, (b) a habit, (c) a
disease.
Fear, as it exists in man, is a
make-believe of sanity, a creature of the imagination, a state of insanity as
considered by many.
Furthermore,
fear is, now of the nerves, now of the mind, now of the moral consciousness.
The division depends upon your point of
view. What is commonly called normal
fear should give place to reason, using the word to cover instinct as well as
thought. From the correct point of view
all fear is an evil so long as it is entertained.
Whatever its manifestations, wherever its
apparent location, fear is a psychic state, of course, reacting upon the
individual in several ways: as, in the nerves, in mental moods, in a single
impulse, in a chronic habit, in a totally unbalanced condition. The reaction has always a good intention,
meaning, in each case, "Take care! Danger!" You will see that this is so if you will look
for a moment at a couple of comprehensive kinds of fear: fear of self and fear for others. Fear of self is indirectly fear for self-danger.
Fear for others signifies fore-sensed or
fore-pictured distress to self because of the anticipated misfortune to others.
I often wonder whether, when we fear for
others, it is distress to self or hurt to them that is most emphatically in our
thoughts?
Fear, then, is usually regarded as the
soul's danger signal. But the true
signal is instinctive and thoughtful reason.
Even instinct and reason, acting as a warning,
may perform their duty abnormally, or assume abnormal proportions. And then we have the feeling of fear. The normal warning is induced by actual danger
apprehended by the mind in a state of balance and self-control. A normal mind is always capable of such
warnings.
Let it be understood, now, that by normal
fear it is here meant normal reason, real fear being denied place and function
altogether. Then we may say that such an
action of reason is a benefactor to man and thereby to ourselves. It is, with pain and weariness, the
philanthropy of the nature of things within us.
One person may say: "Tired? There is
no such word in my house!" Now this
cannot be a sound and healthy attitude. Weariness, at a certain stage of effort, is a
signal to stop work. When one becomes so absorbed in his labor as to lose
consciousness of the feeling of weariness, he has issued a "hurry up call"
on death. I do not deny that a person
may cultivate a sublime sense of buoyancy and power; rather do I urge you to
seek that beautiful condition; but I hold that when a belief or a hallucination
refuses to permit you to hear the warning of nerves and muscles, nature will
work disaster inevitably. Let us stand
for the larger liberty which is joyously free to take advantage of everything nature
may offer for true well-being. There is
a partial liberty which tries to realize itself by denying various realities as
real; there is a higher liberty which really realizes itself by conceding such
realities as real and by using or not using them as occasion may require in the
interest of the self at its best. I hold
this to be true wisdom: to take advantage of everything which evidently
promises good to the self, without regard to this or that theory, and freely to
use all things, material or immaterial, reasonable or spiritual. I embrace your science or your method; but I
beg to ignore your bondage to philosophy or to consistency. So I say that to normal health the weary-sense
is a rational command to replenish exhausted nerves and muscles. A situation that should not go on ignored.
It is not liberty, it is not healthful, it
is not even rational, to declare, "There is no pain!" Pain does exist, whatever you affirm, and your
affirmation that it does not is proof that it does exist, for why (and how)
declare the non-existence of something which actually is non-existent? But if you say, "As a matter of fact I
have pain, but I am earnestly striving to ignore it, and to cultivate
thought-health so that the cause of pain may be removed," that is sane and
beautiful. This is the commendable attitude of the Bible character who cried:
"Lord, I have faith; help me where I need more faith.” To undertake swamping pain with a cloud of
psychological fog merely thinking that it does not exist, is lunacy! By pain, nature, in fact, our whole body,
informs an individual that he is somehow out of order and needs to give
attention to this matter. This warning
is normal. The feeling becomes abnormal
in the mind when ones imagination pricks the nerves with reiterated irritation,
and ones “will”, confused by the discord and the psychic chaos, cowers and
shivers with fear.
I do not say there is no such thing as
fear. Fear does exist. But it exists in your life by your permission
only, not because it is needful as a warning against "evil."
Fear is induced by unduly magnifying actual danger, or by conjuring up fictitious dangers through excessive and misdirected psychical reactions. This also may be taken as a signal of danger, but it is a falsely-intentioned witness, for it is not needed, is hostile to the individual because it threatens self-control, and it absorbs life's forces in useless and destructive work when they ought to be engaged in creating values. However, this is the nature of our make-up because we’re only human!
QUOTE TO CONSIDER
"On the other side of fear,
can be great happiness!"
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