Fear and Aggression

Fear is one of the four letter words that we try to avoid. While other emotions are socially acceptable, fear is not. "Don't be frightened, be brave," sums up our approach to fear. We want to hide it, pretend it does not exist, drive it away, cover it with other emotions. But it does not work.

The blindness that is created by this approach to fear makes us insensitive to our own condition. It blocks our understanding of this very important emotion. As a result we do not connect fear to aggression. When we ask the question, "What causes aggression?" the answers we get seldom include the real reason, "aggression is caused by fear."

Psychologists tell us that there are two responses to fear. We either fight, or we run away. These are closely tied to our survival instincts and we can easily appreciate that our survival depends on making the correct choice. It is easy to run, but if we do this too often we get branded as a coward and others take advantage of us. Even in modern society we have to demonstrate that we are willing to fight if we want to earn the respect of our community.

Our social constructs encourage the fight response to fear, while blinding us to the fact that this is a fear response. We can appreciate why this is done. Put simply, we see the need to champion aggression as we think this is essential for our continued survival in a hostile world. In our zeal to champion aggression, we disconnect this from fear. Aggression then becomes something we can cultivate as a "good" social characteristic while fear is branded as "bad" and discouraged.

Yet we all recognize that we must find ways to avoid fighting, as fighting destroys the societies that we are trying to create. We would all like to live in more "friendly" societies as these provide a much higher quality of life, but we don't seem to know how to achieve this.

George Bush's response to 9/11 was to fight - this was/is a fear response. The 9/11 attack itself was driven by fear, yet nowhere in the analysis of these events will you find this connection.

What would happen if we re-established the connection between fear and aggression in our social consciousness? If people who are inclined to be aggressive understood that they were demonstrating fear by being aggressive, would this influence them to be less aggressive?

This is one of the many issues relating to fear that I plan to explore in this blog.