Chapter 162: Fear Itself

“Only Thing We Have to Fear Is Fear Itself”: FDR's First Inaugural Address. 

Fear, along with anger, are a dominant factor in human aggression and violence. Fear causes emotional and psychological reactions with an emphasis on "the freeze." Anger, is about losing your emotional maturity and allowing the emotions, often of a illogical and irrational nature, to dominate in lieu of a logical, emotionally restricted and rational response of word or action. 

Fear often leads to anger, anger leads to the above state of mind and that leaves one vulnerable to the actions of aggression and violence. Aggression and violence are the base emotionally driven actions that are used to get either a resource necessary for one's survival or to get a process necessary for one's survival - generally speaking. Processes of a predator often deal with some feeling, need or drive that people find offensive and socially unacceptable - Rape, torture, etc.

If people consider most aggressive and violent actions humans take they may find that learning to control fear and anger are chief to the necessity of "social skills" for handing all social situations be they violent or non-violent, etc.

Fear as an irrational emotional response almost always makes things worse. It paralyzes efforts toward things like avoidance, deescalation, or escape and evasion into actions that exacerbate the fear and the situation that causes fear. It can be said the same results also are triggered by one's anger. 

Controlling our anger and fear is how we achieve a calmness, a open-minded logical and rational thinking process and the ability to trigger planned conditioned social coping skills. Dangers in life are real, the reality of life itself, but fear is that non-physical emotional entity that is only in our minds. In short, often danger is something we can touch and perceive outside ourselves while emotional reactions are strictly emotionally driven within our minds. 

Fear and anger also limit our human potential and does both individual and social harm, harm to others due to our human pension to be infected by emotional output of others in close proximity even when total strangers.