Fear itself

Fear isn't the object from which we recoil, nor is it the discomfort to which an encounter with the object might lead, nor a motivation to achieve the tranquility of its erasure. These are all rationalizations to an essentially irrational response. Fear, fundamentally, is a reaction which focuses our attention, briefly, on an object or some characteristic of a situation which might do us harm: a snake on the path; the edge of a cliff; a blackening sky and a flash of lightening. But with imagination came the possibility of chronic fear, the manifestation of its triggers in the mind and the pathological holding of them there. These became the seeds of ideology; the containment of a chronic fear became, in time, essential to tribal cohesion; the common fear, popularly nourished, reinforced tribal identity by defining what was inclusive to and what would be excluded from society.

Our understanding of “other” began in empathy. The first step to comprehending individuality, self and other, I and thou, was the recognition of a shared imagination, whether that imagination was identified as god or a secular self makes little difference. But once social groupings began to identify the common elements of their imaginations and to formalize them into ritual and constructive civilization, the empathy detached itself and became a concept in itself, the membrane in which the ideology of the civilization was held. Empathy applied only to the tribe, and what began in sympathetic resonance quickly split the world into us and them.

Our understanding of “other” ended in fear, and fear is the truth and the consequence of all that we've created and destroyed as a civilization. So where do we go from here? Can civilizations themselves become conscious? Can something analogous to empathy allow us to comprehend our shared humanity within the isolated bubbles of religion, race, national identities and all the other ideological walls that have comforted us for so long?

This is the key question I think John Ralston Saul is trying to answer. What Roosevelt meant by "fear itself" was our resistance to novelty, our exclusion of ideas not already instituted, of questions our methods couldn't answer, of solutions inspired by theories outside the canon of approved argument. Roosevelt was talking about the membrane we've worshiped, the fear we've maintained, that metaphorical womb that had become our prison.