THE MOTHER OF ALL FEARS

Solomon’s wisdom says: “All shall pass, this shall pass too.” It is so easy to infer from this that the “past” is some kind of safe haven, the peaceful grave of our present troubles and fears. But is that really so? Isn’t it more accurate to say that this allegedly peaceable grave is the actual source of all our worries and our fears? This entry addresses just this subject. Mind you, it concerns itself mainly with the philosophical dimension of fear.

On the question of fear, very few people ever experience the dread of the present moment. We must admit that finding ourselves in a situation of acute and horrific crisis, when people uncontrollably break into sweat and wet their pants, is an extremely rare situation, which is, of course, a category in itself. On the other hand, there is nothing more common among ordinary people than a state of fearfulness about something that has little or nothing to do with the present moment. (In other words, the present moment can never be a source of fear, as, finding ourselves within it, we usually act, and only very seldom contemplate or pass judgment on our situation, the latter valid only in retrospect.)

Also in a different category is the abstract fear of death. “Seeing that death--- a necessary end--- will come when it will come,” as Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar puts it, the fear of death is a pathology, a mental disease, which, plain and simple, ought to be treated as such. Indeed, the fear of the unknown, of the unexperienced, just because it is an “unknown” and an “unexperienced,” is the most irrational of all fears as we do not even know whether this great unknown is a state of perpetual horror, perpetual bliss, or perpetual… nothing.

It is the fear of some future event, however, that constitutes the most common type of fear. Hence, the wise advice to the perpetually fearful is not to trouble trouble, until trouble troubles you…

Only nobody heeds this advice, for which reason it is easy to assume that the future is the real source of our fears. This is of course ridiculous, because the future is totally non-existent and unexperienced, and, having not taken place yet, it can indeed be a subject of a contemplation, but it cannot really be a source of anything at all.

In other words, the fear of the future is a fear of ghosts, a fake fear. In most cases (the exceptions are few), it has very little to do with practical reality, even though it surely feels the opposite.

Thus, the mother of all fears, literally speaking, can only be the past. That is, all fear is rooted in our past experience. The grave of all our worries and fears turns out to be not so peaceable, after all…

While all other fears get resolved this way or another, there is no resolution, no cure, no closure for the fear of the past. It is to stay with us for the rest of our lives.