Fear

“Boo.”

That’s three letters. Said with the proper inflexion and the right amount of menace, in the dark preferably, when you’re standing right behind the dork from Computer Science, it can produce a terrifying effect. Just three letters. Can command such fear.

At the very least they can offer you an opportunity for said dork to do something ridiculous enough to put on Youtube.

The novelist H.P. Lovecraft once called fear the strongest and oldest of human emotions. There is indeed something very primal, very basic about the feeling of dread – an almost inherent reaction to situations and phenomena that we may never have come across. Perhaps the history of fear is, in many ways, the most vital link we have to the past. It has remained constant and unaltered, uncontrolled and autonomous, since the very origin of humanity.

It is interesting to note that while all other emotions might have had protocol and custom to rein them in over time, fear alone has been that dark beast which refuses to be tamed by civilisation. It is so organic and so potent in its force that it can erupt within us unexpectedly and uninhibitedly and there is nothing we can do to stop it. It is a feral response to being attacked, to the sense of danger and to the need to escape, among innumerable other things. Our ancestors, sitting outside their caves at night, building fires and crowding around them at night to ward off predators and, later, evil spirits present a sort of universal metaphor for the whole idea of being afraid.

Across centuries and countries, our collective consciousness has been aware of the feeling of anxiety and horror at the perils of the human condition – be they physical, like death, or social, like poverty. Or reading the words “Some Assembly Required”. It can all be traced back to the anchor of Darwinism. Psychologists such as John B. Watson and Paul Ekman have argued that fear, along with a few other basic emotions such as joy and anger, is innate in all human beings, regardless of geography or history. However, just like our societies, our fears too have been reorganised, reinvented and repolarised over the course of millennia. Where once, being hunted to death by some gigantic animal may have been our primary source of fright, today, contracting avian flu might just top the list. But these are the broader, big picture manifestations of the emotion, relative to time and space, contingent on the environment in which we live in.

Fear can exist even in the vacuum of our existence – an isolated, atomic world unto itself, which resides within us as the only contact we have with all that is the deepest, the darkest and the most deadly, both within and without us. In that sense, fear can be utterly detached from the matrix of our being and instead, serve as an interface between our perceptions and our realities. Should all the feelings between happiness and sadness be outlawed, fear alone needn’t depend on our complete and undivided attention and is the most natural. For example, the fear of closed spaces or claustrophobia, some scientists claim, arises from the nine months spent inside the mother’s womb, when every instinct propels us towards getting out. At that stage of our lives we are nothing but blobs of carbon, and yet, in a very odd way, we fear being left inside, never being able to exit the cramped, small space, a fear that carries over to our adult lives even. Fear, thus, is the very first emotional experience we undergo perhaps and one which is so powerful that it remains with us till our last breath.

We’re all familiar with the sensation of terror that used to creep over us as children, lying in bed in the dark, clutching our teddy bears and straining to hear the sound of the television in the living room, the slightest noise making us jump or snuggle under the bedcovers, tightly shutting our eyes and moving closer to the centre of the bed, so that whatever monster lurked in the dark space beneath wouldn’t be able to reach out and grab us. Or the scene in Hitchcock’s seminal fright-flick, Psycho, when Janet Leigh turns around, screams and the next thing you know, there’s blood on the walls where she’d stood. Of course, that being a black and white film, the blood was actually chocolate sauce. The point is, like every element of the human mind, fear also is part nature and part nurture.

Claustrophobia may be a product of birth but something like, say, Arachibutyrophobia or, more specifically, fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of the mouth, doesn’t seem to have much to do with biology. Culture plays an extremely important role in determining fear, as the example of ecological naïveté proves.

If a group of animals are born and bred on an isolated island, they would respond indifferently to the arrival of predators, should the latter be suddenly introduced because they wouldn’t be aware of the threat they pose. Thus, unlike the rudimentary alarm that surges through all humans because of our common genetic heritage and evolutionary past, complex fears are mostly cultivated. I mentioned earlier the redefinition of fame and how it mutates from time to time, taking on new meanings. This was in reference to these intricate, multifaceted reasons for fear. The more we develop socially and psychologically, the more our fears too will compound until perhaps, there will come a time when only the kernel of our base horror shall remain within the convoluted architecture of our personal and public demons.

Soon after the attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001, the United States began what is considered a strategy of tension and actively instilled fear in its people through propaganda and paranoia – it manufactured terror. Popular culture and mass media now do wield this power, this authority over us to guide and direct our sentiments to the extent of channeling them for political clout.

The example of feeling that horrible trepidation at night in bed as kids stems not from any primordial spontaneity but from having been habituated to feel so, from having been told campfire stories about bogeys who carried away little children at night. Similarly, generations of moviegoers find it hard to step into a bathtub without thinking of the memorable chocolate sauce. Book lovers still get the chills at night when they imagine Dracula or Frankenstein skulking up to grab them from their comfy couches. Gruesome urban legends, right from the one about the college student who opened dorm room door only to find her roommate murdered to the one about people sitting down on cinema seats only to discover they’ve been pierced by intentionally placed HIV positive syringes, exemplify the groupthink mentality that has pervaded the whole concept of being scared. Fear, like everything else, can now be created and enforced and, though a lot less than other emotions, be manipulated by an omniscient, enfranchised quasi-government that organizes the global information system. It has become a marketing tool (just look at the box office receipts for horror movies in the past 2 years), a political pawn and a social conditioner.

Finally, I would like to sum up by saying that fear, in and of itself, is neither to be scorned nor to be embraced. It is part of who we are as a species and as a society. It limits us in many ways, sometimes reducing us to inert, perspiring half-wits with treacle for a brain. I mean, come on, you paid your 2.5 for the cinema seat so you can’t get out, the air conditioner isn’t working apparently so you’re building up that sweat and when are they going to stop with the Scream movies? But seriously, despite at times paralyzing us, fear often is the only thing that motivates us to act, spurring us into taking steps to crush its very source so that the struggle between our ghosts and our growth, as the most advanced animals on the planet, never stops. The fear of darkness was extinguished with the first fire; the fear of disease eradicated with the discovery of medicine and the fear of exams by the…oh wait, that’s still out here. Well you can’t beat ‘em all, can you? The conquest of fear is the ascent of the human race. As Franklin Roosevelt once said, “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.” Oh, and the exams.