Fear Psychology Read online

predator. But these things are minor. A seagull born with a slight flying deficiency would not be assisted by the flock and would fail in competition with the others. Likewise an individual that deferred to another in picking up pieces of food would not survive.

  In most higher animals group living has evolved as a very significant survival technique, and is necessarily more restrictive to the individuals. It might therefore be asked how an individual animal programmed for so long to selfishly look after itself, can adjust in almost no time on the evolutionary scale, to group living, to the suppression of innate survival drives that conflict with the needs of group stability. The quick answer is surely “with great difficulty”. Even in wolf packs, those lower in the biting order conform to the rules and allow the top dog first go at whatever it wants – as to some extent in human clans, and modern organizations. Human society is more demanding than a wolf pack. Even in minor matters we regularly restrict the expression of personal instinctual drives in order to comply with the requirements of group living.

  Yet the human group cannot guarantee moment to moment protection, and in the final analysis the individual still remains alone, anonymous and dependent on itself. The fear of not surviving, and living with a vague awareness of all this while navigating the intricacies of social living is a proposed summary of the “human condition”.

  It has been pointed out that competition was never quite total, that cooperation began when the various replicating molecules joined together with advantage and subsequently became genes and the genes cooperated to form chromosomes. Perhaps this represents a tendency in living entities towards cooperation, but if any of the individuals thus evolving did not remain basically competitive they would be replaced by those which did. Cooperation in a particular situation can be advantageous to two parties against a third, or against a sub group, but the members of the cooperation still remain competitors in other situations. In current living, a person with expertise in some field might cooperate with a person having money to invest. Together they create a business that is more profitable for both than the sum of their separate contributions would have been. Furthermore the wider group becomes stronger from the combined outputs of cooperating individuals. But the price of such joint effort is the personal constraint necessary to permit it. There are different ideas as to how things are best done and the need for compromise in the interests of final success is periodically necessary. The primal selfish survival drive urges us to get the best for ourselves, while experience teaches that this has to be done without losing the support of other individuals or the group as a whole. Some people are unable to resolve this dilemma sufficiently to achieve a happy life, and we might wonder at the dynamics of the competing instincts of those who can.

  We have assumed that pleasure and pain evolved in parallel with the increasing complexity of organisms. Worms surely feel less of both than we do. The survival value of pleasure and pain is undoubted, for example those few humans born without pain sensibility do not survive long, even with the care that may be supplied to them. Pleasure guides us to food or behaviour that benefits survival – bananas are tastier than their skins – and procreation which leads to the continuity of our genes reaches special heights of pleasure. Perhaps pleasure seeking and pain avoiding are so fundamental to the survival of ourselves and our genes that they determine our behaviour, our choice between the instincts that drive us.

  Cooperation has been a thread running through evolution, so its survival value and hence potential for pleasure must be high. Most of us will know the feelings ranging from satisfaction to joy at having completed a difficult important cooperative task or participated in scoring a cooperative goal that wins a game. Indeed it is in such cases that a unique, if brief, emotion called love may be felt. The spontaneous expression of love can be witnessed between people who previously may have had no particular affection for one another nor few obvious characteristics in common. The wildly affectionate embraces of professional footballers seen on television when a difficult and critical goal is scored is a familiar example. The successful cooperation alone would hardly be sufficient to produce such an emotion between players who in some cases would not particularly like another team mate or might actually dislike him off the field. Those who have lived the comradeship of battle recognize it as love, and mutual survivors of an air raid have reported similar feelings. The sight of people across the world particularly children, suffering violence or famine is painful. If the world were invaded by aliens there can be little doubt that most people would feel the same empathy with all of humanity as people in national conflicts feel about others of the same nation. They would thus become aware of its latent presence.

  We can postulate that there exists an empathy between all humans that is experienced as love when people cooperate in what is symbolically or actually a survival situation for them or their genes.

  Empathy is readily felt between friends and lovers, between individuals and small sub groups to which they may belong, and between humans and their pets. But where do we stop? We experience a oneness with inanimate objects also, with mountains and lakes and stars. Empathy between living things can be assumed to have begun back when genes were forming, and as evolution progressed the sensations of pleasure and love would have evolved. Perhaps the simultaneous experience of the pleasure and love arising from inter-human empathy has created neuronal connections that intertwine the sensations. If we feel pleasure we tend to feel empathy and love. When we say, “I love chocolate, I love surfing, I love beautiful scenery” we are saying “these things give me pleasure and solace just as love does, and I feel I love them”.

  Strangely there are people currently called psychopaths, who act as if they have a very low capacity for love or empathy. They might have a genetic dysfunction or might have found relief from the conflict between personal survival and survival within a group by mentally suppressing empathy and love at an early age. The surrounding society simply provides an environment in which they live, either successfully or not according to their skills. They have learnt to imitate the behaviour of empathic others and can often be charming, obtaining the benefit of the others’ friendship without the cost of returning it, and without any discomfort of conscience. They are eventually discovered, and for some, this has the effect of reducing their prosperity and acceptance in the society they inhabit. However the more successful ones can become socially powerful by virtue of wealth and position, and oblige others to treat them with propriety and acceptance. The fact that only passive-dependent personalities continue to feel affection for them is of no consequence since they feel no affection for others.

  In spontaneous love there is a sense of loss of identity, which assuages fear. The euphoria associated with the condition follows from the logic that if there is no identity there is nothing for the Cosmos to threaten. It is not surprising then that love is often fantasised for the pleasure and reassurance it gives. Extreme cases of this can be seen when adolescent girls welcome an entertainment celebrity as he arrives at an airport. Their hysterical expressions of love, their wailing and screaming leaves little to the imagination. Old news movies of Adolf Hitler haranguing his followers show close-ups of women in the crowd gasping in ecstatic adoration of their hero. Men are likewise susceptible to such fantasies, the knights of old with their chivalry and love of some unattainable lady, and the fantasy of protecting her from dragons, providing a classic example. Such protective behaviour, if it had happened, would be classified as altruism, a generous act that increased the recipient’s survival potential and decreased that of the altruist. Fear is reduced by love, and in more extreme cases replaced by ecstasy. Sources of pleasure are not readily abandoned; rather they are protected and guarded with vigour, even at risk of injury to the guard. When this guarding and protecting is directed towards people (or other living things that can be loved) it becomes altruism.

  As touched on above, could all behaviour be simply a matter of selecting one or other of our instinct
ual drives in a particular situation according to the pleasure or pain expected to follow. If one instinct prompts us to take care of ourselves, another instinct might promise such pleasurable behaviour that the first will be ignored – live dangerously we might be told. So called dare-devil behaviour probably illustrates that idea, but with some addition of Keats’s “half in love with easeful death”.

  The pleasure of love in particular can lead us towards behaviour that might reduce our survival potential seriously. There are of course many ways in which this can happen the one already discussed being the act of altruism, which seems to offer the joy of love ahead of the instinct for survival. It is worth noting though, that in the case of life or death situations the altruist’s survival expectation is reduced only at the beginning of the act. If an isolated act of altruism is successfully completed without injury it becomes an event of the past with no negative effect on future survival potential. In that case we might look upon altruism as a gamble where the stakes are the pleasure of love via