The Importance of Fear

[Ben Iscatus]

Watching the three part BBC4 series, "Restoring the Earth", which stressed the importance of restoring healthy ecosystems to fight climate change and maintain a habitable Earth, I was struck by the statement of an ecologist about the importance of apex predators. I had previously understood this, in part, when reading about the ecology of Yellowstone Park, where wolves were reintroduced to keep down the elk which were killing the willows along the riverbanks by eating the bark; this, in turn, affected the ability of beavers to dam the rivers; and the lack of dams badly impacted on populations of amphibians, fish, water birds and otters.

In Part 3 of the series, it was revealed how huge areas of seagrass near the Great Barrier Reef (capable of storing a lot of carbon) were being severely depleted by turtles. This was because too many sharks, the apex predators there, had been killed (by people). The ecologist pointed out that it was not that the sharks ate a huge number of turtles; the important thing was that it changed the behaviour of the turtles. Instead of eating the seagrass to the roots, they had to graze briefly and move on. Moreover, their whole breeding and social behaviour, he said, was changed by fear.

Thinking back to Yellowstone, I realized that exactly the same thing applied there. It was not that the wolves ate a great number of elk; it was that the overall behaviour of the elk was changed by their presence. Fear meant they could not stay long in favoured areas or risk breeding to excess, thus destroying the vegetation. It was found that rangers occasionally culling the elk had no real effect on the ongoing degradation of the ecosystem because the elk were not obliged, day by day, to be constantly wary. The upshot is that healthy ecosystems not only need apex predators, they actually need the fear which these predators continuously generate in their prey.

Humans evolved on the savannah to fear big cats. Notice how the efforts of our civilisation to remove so much fear from our lives (yes, including killing other predators like wolves and sharks), has led to the gradual build up of the same problems as occurred in Yellowstone: overpopulation, ecosystem degradation, resource depletion, but now adding in systemic climate change because human civilisation is planet-wide. As with the elk and the turtles, our lives would appear to have become too comfortable.

So more fear, not less, may well be the most useful driver of remedial human behaviour. What about the so-called converse of fear: love. Could that be a useful driver of collective action? I'm old enough to remember the Summer of Love. Lots of dope smoked, lots of sex, lots of sitting around listening to loud music. Actually, a perfect breeding ground for COVID-19, had it been around at the time. Useless.

Unfair? Probably. So let's consider the COVID-19 pandemic. Were we driven to try to solve this planet-wide problem by love or by fear?
a) Face masks and hand-washing
b) Lockdown isolation
c) Vaccinations (both research and implementation).

A little honest self reflection would be useful here. Most people, most of the time did not have the disease when they were wearing facemasks. So they were primarily wearing them because they were afraid of catching the disease (only secondarily to prevent themselves catching the disease and passing it on to loved ones). Lockdowns, likewise. Vaccinations were mostly for self-protection, since they do not necessarily prevent you contracting the disease in mild form, and still passing it on. Rather as World War 2 galvanised research into radar, Governments poured huge sums of funny money into furlough schemes and vaccination research. Did they do this for a suddenly discovered love of their people or because they were afraid their health services would be overwhelmed and they'd be howled out of office?

I think fear was the primary motivation in all this. Fear can be a great force for good, if balanced by hope (obviously if there's no hope, the dead weight of despair results in listlessness and inactivity. A future Artificial Intelligence might calculate the likely optimal balance of hope against fear to ensure that we are energetically motivated to solve global problems).

What are the implications of this lesson from Nature for new forms of Metaphysical Idealism? For someone like the virtual-reality advocate, the physicist Thomas Campbell, it casts doubt on his model. He says that we humans need to drop fear and express love to evolve the quality of our consciousness. But if, as he also insists, we must "pay attention to the feedback", then here the feedback from Nature (whether you regard our lived environment as real or virtual) is that fear is very important. Fear cannot be "dropped". What's more, he asserts that consciousness must permanently and perpetually work to progress its quality, or it will find itself degraded by a kind of information entropy. It looks for all the world like his model embodies a physicist's backdoor fear of the ever-present, ineluctable power of entropy. But he is in denial of that. For that reason, his psychology seems dangerously naive.

For Analytical Idealism (AI), on the other hand, all this is confirmatory. AI is naturalistic.

It says that although the Transpersonal Mind is transformed, stepped down, diminished, from noumenal to phenomenal status in the minds of its dissociated alters by localising itself in a planetary ecosystem, it nevertheless reveals much of its own essential nature in the unfolding of evolution, and in the behaviours and psychology of its life-forms: thus, fear, as much as love, must be a natural expression of the Transpersonal Mind. It may be that the constricting act of dissociation or localisation brings on fear not obviously present in the infinite transpersonal state. Nevertheless, for it to be realised in the dissociated state, the potential for it must exist in archetypal form.

Analytic Idealism accepts that to repress or ignore fear now is to strengthen it in the future. Think of the film "Forbidden Planet". When Earth's problems assume the immediate existential threat of "the monster from the Id", we will be forced to act. At our current level of response, it seems we will be too late, like the proverbial frog in the pot of warming water. On the other hand, we only addressed the Covid-19 problem when it was already stalking us and on our doorstep. Perhaps this will apply to the big bad predators we call "environmental collapse" and "climate change".

When the whole of humanity is galvanised by collective fear, astonishing achievements are possible in a very short time. But if it really is too late (if collapse is already "baked in"), Analytic Idealism permits an alternative possibility: it speculates that on death (the end of our dissociated state), self-reflective alters, particularly humans, feed back their considered feelings, thoughts and moral understanding into the Transpersonal Mind, Mind-at-Large (MAL). When MAL, through us, absorbs the consequences of its natural preferences, it adjusts its archetypal patterns of behaviour. So Life on another planet somewhere else in the universe might evolve differently, with more enlightened rules of engagement - that is, where fear is not such an important part of the fabric of existence. If this is so, then even if we are too late to save the Earth, we will not have lived in vain.

[Eugene I]

Good points, Ben. IMO, love is a driving force of a higher spiritual quality compared to fear and should be held as a goal for our spiritual development, but we as humanity is far-far away from reaching it yet. So, in the meantime, until at least some sufficient amount of collective love is attained, we can not abandon fear, we need it as a safeguard for collective survival.

[Soul_of_Shu]

I think you just need a booster dose of Oracle Girl ...

[Ben Iscatus]

Good points, Ben. IMO, love is a driving force of a higher spiritual quality compared to fear and should be held as a goal for our spiritual development, but we as humanity is far-far away from reaching it yet. So, in the meantime, until at least some sufficient amount of collective love is attained, we can not abandon fear, we need it as a safeguard for collective survival.

Thanks, Eugene. I agree with your "far-far away", unfortunately.

I think you just need a booster dose of Oracle Girl ...

Ahem, I'd rather have a booster dose of Anna Brown.

[Ben Iscatus]

What's your take on Oracle Girl, after watching this? My BS meter got so excited, it's now orbiting Neptune.

[Soul_of_Shu]

What's your take on Oracle Girl, after watching this? My BS meter got so excited, it's now orbiting Neptune.

I can resonate with it in a metaphorical metamorphosis context, in sensing that there is a new 'program' of ideation for the human embodiment within the corporeal construct that, however incipient, is now functionally up and running, which will eventually become fully operational, and that our focus needs to be on getting into alignment with it. And lately, insofar as I focus much on the outmoded program/paradigm, it is only serving to shift the focus back to the alignment with the one that is going to supplant it, because staying in the old 'vibe' is just too bio-energetically unbearable. However, the phase transition is not going to be without its fits and starts, and ongoing resistance and disruption from anyone still deeply invested and identified with the dysfunctional program, now facing its demise with all the expected attendant suffering. But I have no doubt whatsoever that this shift is happening, and resistance is futile.

[Lou Gold]

Just a couple of perspectives...

There's a real difference between intelligent fear (look both ways when crossing the street) and phobic fear (don't step off the curb). I don't believe there's a contradiction between intelligent fear and love, which I believe requires a full acceptance of reality. For example, I love rattlesnakes, which means that I do not wave my hand in front of one's face. I do not expect the rattlesnake not to be a rattlesnake. This would not be love.

Yes, we are in a phase shift. Yes, resisting reality causes pain, which is why we live in a painful world. Finding right balance in a dynamic reality of movement and repose is the moment-to-moment challenge of love. Thus, there is dynamic truth and finding a way to deal with it. It's a process.

About the role of apex predators in a healthy ecosystem, nature limits them. Yellowstone wolves in Wyoming do not kill elk to ship them to Denver
markets in Colorado (and beyond). Humans are top predators in the planetary ecosystem. When predators become separated from grounded nature, via intellectual abstraction and/or profit-seeking (or more), there's trouble brewing. Can Homo Sapiens, the so-called "wise ones", self-limit? Can humans take care of their places if they are not intimately connected to them? Does the system require adjustments via the catastrophic punctuations of "nature batting last?" Are apocalypse/revelation part of the process? Finding the way is not simply a matter of knowing some fundamental truth other than (perhaps) it is change. It's dangerous to break relationships that have evolved systemically like wolves in Yellowstone.

[Ben Iscatus]

there is a new 'program' of ideation for the human embodiment within the corporeal construct that, however incipient, is now functionally up and running, which will eventually become fully operational, and that our focus needs to be on getting into alignment with it.

I strongly suspect you stopped before the Q&A, which took her off her guard. There we learned we "sort of" have crystalline DNA, our light bodies are denser than our slave bodies and that we no longer have souls.

[Soul_of_Shu]

there is a new 'program' of ideation for the human embodiment within the corporeal construct that, however incipient, is now functionally up and running, which will eventually become fully operational, and that our focus needs to be on getting into alignment with it.

I strongly suspect you stopped before the Q&A, which took her off her guard. There we learned we "sort of" have crystalline DNA, our light bodies are denser than our slave bodies and that we no longer have souls.

Yeah, I'm just riffing on some other interview with her. Definitely I don't resonate so much when the metaphor is taken too far beyond a certain point.

[Lou Gold]

Just a couple of perspectives...

There's a real difference between intelligent fear (look both ways when crossing the street) and phobic fear (don't step off the curb). I don't believe there's a contradiction between intelligent fear and love, which I believe requires a full acceptance of reality. For example, I love rattlesnakes, which means that I do not wave my hand in front of one's face. I do not expect the rattlesnake not to be a rattlesnake. This would not be love.

Yes, we are in a phase shift. Yes, resisting reality causes pain, which is why we live in a painful world. Finding right balance in a dynamic reality of movement and repose is the moment-to-moment challenge of love. Thus, there is dynamic truth and finding a way to deal with it. It's a process.

About the role of apex predators in a healthy ecosystem, nature limits them. Yellowstone wolves in Wyoming do not kill elk to ship them to Denver
markets in Colorado (and beyond). Humans are top predators in the planetary ecosystem. When predators become separated from grounded nature, via intellectual abstraction and/or profit-seeking (or more), there's trouble brewing. Can Homo Sapiens, the so-called "wise ones", self-limit? Can humans take care of their places if they are not intimately connected to them? Does the system require adjustments via the catastrophic punctuations of "nature batting last?" Are apocalypse/revelation part of the process? Finding the way is not simply a matter of knowing some fundamental truth other than (perhaps) it is change. It's dangerous to break relationships that have evolved systemically like wolves in Yellowstone.

A bit more...

When the role of top predator (wolves in Yellowstone) is restored, biodiversity and balanced resilience return. Nature is the Glory of God. Nature pushes toward checks-and-balances and a Divine Integral Diversity. Mitakuye Oyasin. All our Relations. We, as particles of God (M@L, Glorious Whatever), do the work. May we work well.