The Importance of Fear
Posted: Fri Nov 19, 2021 6:10 pm
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.
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.