Thirty Truths about Fear and Courage

Introduction

Fear is a central issue, exploited by politics and media, eroding clear thinking.
Preoccupation with safety is a reaction to vulnerability but can be absurd.
Religion promises immortality as a salve for the dread of extinction.
America is increasingly authoritarian due to fear of external threats, leading to continuous war.
The national anthem is a tribute to fighting off threatening foreigners.

Fear and Anxiety in Modern Life

Psychiatrists deal with fearful people, with anxiety disorders characterized by worry and dread.
Anxiety differs from fear as it lacks a specific object, except in phobias.
Physiological symptoms of acute anxiety mirror fear: sweating, rapid heartbeat, muscular tension.
The "fight-or-flight" response is triggered inappropriately by public speaking, tests, or rejection.
Fears of failure and humiliation are common, fueling therapeutic and pharmaceutical industries.
Courage and resilience are alternatives to victimization from medical diagnoses.
Ernest Shackleton's Endurance survival story teaches courage in adversity.
Common fears include death, change, intimacy, loss, failure, success, inadequacy, time, loneliness, and the unknown.
Anxiety, like depression, has an element of heritability.
Biological inclination leads to medication use like SSRIs for chronic anxiety.
Minor tranquilizers provide short-term relief but cause chemical dependency.
Psychotherapy helps, teaching hope and courage as antidotes to anxiety.
Living a courageous life isn't easy, and bravery isn't constant.
Accepting mortality is problematic in middle age, leading to attempts to recapture youth.
Fear of death motivates infidelity, as per Olympia Dukakis in Moonstruck.
Middle age involves confronting limitations and the demise of dreams.

Cultural Malaise and the Culture of Fear

A surprising number of Americans (9.5%) suffer from clinical depression.
The line between sadness and clinical depression is blurred, with 54 million on antidepressants.
We live in a culture of fear, with advertising promoting material possessions as compensation for inadequacy.
Wealthy cultural icons display selfishness, and income disparity is growing.
The poorest 20% earn 3.4% of national income, while the richest 20% earn 49.4% (a ratio of 14.5 to 1).
The "99 percent" protests reflect awareness of income inequality worldwide.
We prioritize freedom but neglect courage, hope, charity, and justice.
An unsparing look reveals a devout, militarized, defensive, xenophobic, and selfish society.
We need to see ourselves honestly to change and avoid manipulation by fears.

Courage and Valor

War reveals how young men struggle with fear, attachment, and meaning.
Nearly everyone is afraid in combat; overcoming fear for the unit defines valor.
Moral courage, as called by Robert Kennedy is rarer than bravery in battle.
Moral courage can require sacrificing reputation or career for an ideal.
Examples: government employee resigning, whistleblower exposing malfeasance, soldier revealing illegitimate war secrets.
The book explores personal traits and values and how they shape leadership choices in a democracy.
We face daily situations testing convictions and requiring choices between accepting limitations or acting congruently with values.
We are defined by our actions, not words, feelings, or thoughts.
Courage is manifest by action, a habit serving as a nonpharmacologic antidote to apprehension.
Humor is a valuable defense against fear, disproving post-9/11 declarations that laughter was over.
Eleanor Roosevelt: Strength, courage, and confidence come from facing fear, and doing what one thinks they cannot do.

The Importance of Dying

*Death is the fundamental fear which most fears derive.
*Creatures struggle against the threat of extinction, human contemplate their demise.
*Humans long for immortality, which leads to fondness for religions.
*Most believers are accidental victims of childhood indoctrination, whom feel threatened by others with different belief.
Religion is still prominent in our twenty-first-century world.
*When asked describe what their lives mean beyond a desire to get ahead, most American fall back on some religious formulation.
*96% of believe in God and believe in some form of life after death in which the good are rewarded and the wicked punished.

Anxiety and Risk

*People suffering from anxiety routinely become subject to panic attacks.
*The military has discovered that through training and unit cohesion that people can overcome fear and learn to function even when bullets are cracking nearby.
*Tolerance for risk is an individual characteristic.
*SWAT teams look four hours to enter and clear Columbine High School after the shooters were dead, and at least one wounded person inside bled to death while waiting for help.
*Routine police procedures have a major goal including the safety of the police, sometimes at the expense of the citizen they are there to protect.

Misplaced Fears and True Threats

*Each year about forty Americans are killed while driving, but we fear it less than flying because we remain earthbound.
*A big problem in dealing with our fears is our poor record when evaluating which one are grounded in reality and which are misplaced or exaggerated.
*We buy guns for protection, for example, while statistics demonstrate that a gun in the house is much more likely to kill someone who lives there than the intruder of our nightmares.
*Frightened people do not make good decision.
*Our media magnify threats, crime for example, to keep us watching the news.
*In fact, violent crime has been decreasing in most places over the last ten years.

Defining Courage

*We lose track of the true meaning of courage, a virtue that requires both choice and risk.
*The false stories about the heroism of Pvt. Jessica Lynch and Cpl. Part Tillman, even the initial reports of the desperate firefight in the Bin Laden compound, are example of the routine exaggerations of courage that are common in war.
*The capacity for commitment that is implied in such choices may be motivated by some expectation of divine reward , but turning one’s back on the pleasures of the world to improve the lives of other is the very definition of altruism.
*Doctors are routinely disciplined for taking financial or sexual advantage of their patients and for providing substandard care.
*Air traffic controllers, even pilots, have been discovered sleeping on the job.
*Soldiers have been convicted of war crimes, but a uniform at the airport elicits statements of appreciation and sometimes a first-class upgrade.
*Contrast the steadfastness displayed by these populations and the response to 9/11, which most resembled a national anxiety attack in which we imagined that our entire way of life was being threatened by relatively small and stateless group of radical islamist.
*Over six thousand American dead, twice as many as perished in 9/11.

The Wages of Fear and the Importance of the Moment

*I think of these irreplaceable lives and colossal sums as the wages of fear.
*What have we gained?
*Are we safer now from terrorist attack than we were ten years ago?
*Do the radical Islamists really threaten our way of life?
*We cannot cope with our fear to death except by seeing it as a realistic apprehension that can, if we let it ,provide a sense of urgency and a determination to extract pleasure and meaning from the present moment.

Fear and Reason

Living in the moment is recommended because the past is unchangeable and the future unpredictable.
Actions are often based on habits, underlying motivations, emotions, impulses, and biases.
Sophisticated marketing appeals to unfulfilled longings, causing chronic dissatisfaction.
Consumerism focuses on superficial aspects of being human, such as looks and possessions.

Decisions About Marriage

*Research shows that marriage, the building block and economic engine of society, has a failure rate, by mutual satisfaction, of at least 75%.
*Practically all of us want to be married.
*Other fears-death ,humiliation, rejection.
*There is no emptier sound than the door closing behind us in a place we inhabit by ourselves.

Fear of Intimacy

*Often that price takes the form of an agonizing choice between breaking up a family or continuing an unsatisfying marriage.
*We are inclined in our closest relationships to replay our childhood conflicts.
*If one or both of our parents was unduly intrusive and controlling, we learn to have littlie confidence in our own judgments.
*We also tend to experience love as something that must be earned and traded like a commodity.
*That We get what we want only by demanding it ,is one reason people find themselves in the same unsatisfying relationships over and over again.
*The distance between instinctive mistrust and alienation decreases with time until, like any form of paranoia, we e become what we most fear are truly alone.