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Killing Fear Before it Kills You (from Drinking From the Darkness: Living Completely in a Time of Estrangement)

Fear kills. There is no sugar-coating to be applied to this reality: fear kills. In Chapter 2, we saw how the fear that fuels the Cult of Hard Work invades bodily cells and gives rise to a vast spectrum of cardiovascular diseasescongestive heart failure, coronary artery disease, hypertension, and stroke among them. But even before it reaches that stage, fear is the fundamental emotional component of depressive and anxiety disorders: chronic worry is merely Fear as a lifestyle. Overall, a seemingly infinite array of personal tragedies and diseases can be traced to the presence of Fear: alcoholism and other substance dependence, domestic violence, suicide, hate crimes, immunological disorders, certain neurological conditions or symptoms, compulsive behaviors, phobic and panic disorders, and more that are probably related to fear but lack conclusive scientific evidence.

Fear is also, like competition, a prominent, if more insidious, prop to our cultureespecially since September 11, 2001. This is the moment at which the irrevocable pain and danger of life is presumed to have been forced into the life of every individual within our citizenrythe point where we became the grim victims of a hostile Naturehuman nature. There is, we are told, no turning back from this state of affairsyou now live in a world where you can be a commuter on his way to work one moment; a puddle of smoking goo the next.

Fear is trumpeted in our mass media with a pathological hysteria: just turn on the Fox News Channel and listen to the shrill voices of the talking heads, screaming out their Medusa hatred, and you will also feel the dark breath and the raging pulse of Fearyou are meant to feel it; that is their purpose. We are now living under an administration in Washington whose first principle of government is Fear: its every crime against humanitywhether it is the bombing of innocents or the torture of prisonersis moved by a societal Fear that takes the form of a mass psychosis. Fear drives us to slave away at jobs which we despise; fear pushes us into shopping malls to accumulate possessions that will be next year's or next week's garbage; fear prods us to stab our neighbors or our co-workers in the back; fear forces us into the realms of opposition and competition in every arena of our lives, in every relationship and every encounter. Fear consumes us, and thus we consumecompulsively,

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