IN DEFENSE OF FEAR [1]

[ Fri. Apr. 25. 2014 ]

Not a perfect mechanism, but fear remains a useful sense: without such a system, our life would have been a complete disaster. Where does this mania to underestimate the fear, prudence or caution if they have their positive side?

Fear is no longer fashionable. Self-help books are populated with tips so that we finish with our fears and go out of the comfort zone. The feeling that is promoted in today's society is that of the omnipresence of the internal control: the location should not matter to us, the crucial point is the attitude. And therefore it is that nothing and no one believes us apprehension. It seems that trying to feel secure and avoiding events that we assume vulnerable was a bad psychological strategy. But is it true that the caution is a tactic that we cancel? . . .

. . .Amid this discrediting of prudence and caution, the question that the stimulating publication Edge recently launched the brightest minds on the planet is striking. Every year, this digital magazine poses the question that respond dozens of influential intellectuals. The 2013 question was: "What should we be worried about?" ("Why should we be concerned?"). Most striking was not the demand for scientists and communicators identified social concerns, but the fact that you asked for them with that resounding "must". Because none of the respondents answered "no worry about nothing", so we can assume that, for these brilliant minds, harboring fears it is not nonsense.

In fact, a review by answers shows us, updated, the entire spectrum of disappointments that have proven many humans Adaptive throughout history. It is, of course, the apprehension that makes us the loneliness: the psychologist David M. Buss, for example, causes the alarm that the shortage of desirable couples increased in the future human brutality. There is also who points out the fear by the loss of vital sense. Dave Winer, the pioneer in the world of blogs, worried that we no longer have desire to survive and the anthropologist Christine Finn that we finish to completely lose touch with the physical world.

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