Stop being afraid

Imagine the bogeyman doesn’t exist

This is part of a series I intend to write on Fear. (I’ve already written about perfect love driving out fear). This post is on fear of other people. But there are many types of fear, and I want to explore them all.

Photo by M.T ElGassier on Unsplash

Have you noticed the FEAR?

It’s palpable. It’s rampant on the internet, and it’s bled into the rest of life too. People are afraid, and becoming more so. But this fear isn’t natural. It’s manipulated.

There are dark forces that want to keep us afraid. Afraid of the future. Afraid of each other. Afraid of things we don’t understand.

Resisting this fear might be one of the most important things we can do, those of us on the Christ-led path. Important because it’s hard, and urgent, and maybe one of the only ways we can move beyond the divisions striking hard lines through society.

If you can keep a population afraid, you can do with them what you want.

Fear is something that’s interesting me right now, and I intend to write more on other aspects at a later date. (Here’s a post I wrote earlier this year about perfect love driving out fear).

So yes, if a population is afraid, then you can point to the bogeyman and say It’s their fault things are like this.

This is nothing new. In medieval times, the devil was believed to have a hand in most things. Crops failed? Pox blighting your village? Your child dies? It’s devilry, sometimes manifesting - of course - in the form of a single middle-aged woman. The witch hunts of the sixteenth century were shocking and cruel, but they were born of fear, and a hatred of the Other.

The Enlightenment brought us to a new age of reason, but as humans we haven’t changed. We may not blame the literal devil any more for our woes, but that’s irrelevant, because we still have our witches and our evil ones. We still have people we fear.

This fear is being carefully stoked, just as it was back then. The powerful wanted to control the population. They wanted an elite that held the keys to faith, to health, to the land. Wise women (and some men) creating healing potions from ancient herbs they foraged from the surrounding countryside were a threat to all three. Propaganda spread quickly, utilising grief and the need for blame.

And it wasn’t only the wise women that suffered. Generations were born that believed only a doctor could cure your ailments, that only priests had the copyright to faith, that you might farm the land, but it could be taken from you at any time.

People want you to be afraid

People who crave power don’t like it when others get together and break bread. They hate it when we reach across the barricades and learn how powerful we are. Because when we’re as one, we can achieve a lot. When we talk, we might realise how much we have in common. And that we all have similar grievances and similar hopes.

We might realise what’s really important: shelter, food, family, community. We might understand how we’re being manipulated, and once we do that all the Othering will fall apart.

Currently, this Othering has many names, depending on whose social media feeds we follow, who our peers are, where we work, where we live.

It doesn’t matter where our politics supposedly fall, whether we see the enemy as ‘far right’ or ‘hard left’, we’re being manipulated to believe that a group of people not like us are behaving badly, and that they’re being supported by our ruling classes.

It doesn’t matter who the Others are. They’re a grown-up version of the baddies from our childhood games. What matters is that we fear them, and we fear they’re taking over.

But imagine if there isn’t anything to fear. Imagine they’re not taking over. Imagine that they’re not supported by the media or the government. Imagine that this bogeyman is a chimera, is a spectre conjured from the recesses of our minds, stoked by those who really do crave power, who want us to look to them for the answers, who want us to think only they hold the keys.

The monster in us

Photo by Neil Rosenstech on Unsplash

Jungian psychoanalysis talks of the shadow side. It’s the part of ourselves we’d rather not see. Debbie Ford’s brilliant book The Dark Side of the Light Chasers says that those of us who want to be good pretend that our dark side doesn’t exist. And it doing so, it lurks in the shadows, growing claws.

We need to recognise that the bogeyman we fear is our own dark side. It is the part of us that’s tempted to divide, to see the Other as evil, to be afraid of the monsters that hide under the bed.

Ultimately, we need to acknowledge, listen to, and learn to love our shadow sides. Until then, we’ll be trapped in fear.

‘Love your neighbour as yourself’ is so glib, isn’t it? It rolls off the tongue. And of course that should be true. Of course we say we believe in it. Even people who’d never call themselves Christian, who’d run a mile away from a church, think it should be true.

But we get in the way of that instruction. We fool ourselves into thinking ‘Yes, I love everyone, but not that lot.’

Or; ‘I would love my neighbour, but they hate me, so what can I do?’

But it feels so good not to fear other people. Not to be afraid or to hate those who think differently to me. Even the ones who crave power, even the ones who glorify death, not to fear them is a relief. Because fearing takes away my energy, and it stops me from doing the real work of following a Christ-led path.

Yes, people can do bad things. People can do awful things. I work with men who have committed very serious crimes. They come into my classroom and I work with them, late in the evening, on my own. This is the situation, but I choose not to be afraid. My limbic system jumps when someone shouts in my face, or bangs on the classroom door, or boots a football at the classroom window because they think it’s fun to see someone jump out of their skin. But that’s not the same as choosing to be afraid.

We can refuse to live in fear. We know the darkness that drags people down, but fear is a part of that darkness, and living in fear is a choice. We must resist it, and we must resist the temptation to create a devil of our fear.

Or we become the Other ourselves.

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