Fear is the mind (and soul) killer
Emotional Intelligence and the Pitfalls of a Fearful Life
The second part of Denis Villeneuve’s “Dune” arrived this weekend, and if it’s anything like the 2021 film, we’re in for a sci-fi spectacle. If you haven’t seen the film, think “Lawrence of Arabia” meets “2001: A Space Odyssey.” There are spaceships, knife fights, a rare and valuable resource extracted in a land occupied by bedouin warriors, intergalactic politics, religious zealots, and colonizers fighting over this resource at the expense of the natives. The book’s author, Frank Herbert, heavily drew from Muslim iconography to build this fictional world, and the result is a subversive film that offers westerners a story with surprises and hijacked expectations. I’m very much looking forward to seeing it.
Still, there is some overlap between the Islam-inspired universe of Dune and the modern western world. As protagonist, Paul Atradies is forced to endure an intensely painful test to see if he is the space messiah, his mother in the next room recites the franchise’s famous litany: “Fear is the mind killer,” she says, working through her own fear for her son’s life. “I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me… Where the fear has gone, there will be nothing. Only I will remain.” Analyzing our fear is a chief tenant of emotional intelligence. The negative consequences of fear have been observed by psychologists, mystics, clergy, therapists, rabbis, neuroscientists, ayahuasca retreat guides, imams and pastors alike. It’s not just the mind killer, but a relationship killer, an opportunity killer, a motivational killer, and a happiness killer too. The more that fear dictates our life, the worse our outcomes will be.
Fear is one of our most basic instincts alongside hunger, thirst, libido, habit and anger. Some call this part of our cognition our “lizard brain” because these are brain functions we also find in reptiles. Humans have them too, but we have other cognitive capacities beyond what lizards experience. We’ve all experienced fear, of course, but we’ve also all experienced misplaced fear. With more information and reflection, many fears can indeed “pass over us and through us,” and leave us with clarity of mind. Without those higher thoughts, we will remain afraid of many things that aren’t actually threats.
A parent friend of mine confessed recently that they left their tired toddler in the car when they needed to visit the Sheetz ATM. “I’m not afraid of anything happening to my kid,” they explained. “They’re secure, they can’t reach any choking hazards, the temperature is fine, and the doors are locked. In fact, my kids are statistically more in danger when I am driving than when I leave them for a moment to step inside a convenience store.” My friend isn’t wrong. A quick fact check reveals that, of the 72 million children in the U.S., around 115 children a year are victims of stranger-danger style kidnapping, and 711 children died in vehicle collisions. The odds of something bad happening to a kid in a parked car are roughly the same as the PA Lottery’s Cash 5 jackpot. Still, my friend confessed to one fear: fear that they’ll be confronted by a stranger’s misinformed anger over a statistically risk-free behavior.
In our new media landscape, where money is made from your attention, your fear is profitable. Your lizard brain responds to “Law and Order” and “Shark Week.” It produces anxiety when Instagram influencers tell you that you aren’t pretty enough, thin enough, or tall enough for love. It tells you that clowns are dangerous, that flying is perilous, and that everyone will laugh at you if you try to speak in public. It’s that hit you feel when political parties tell you that this next election is the most important election of our age, despite the fact that they’ve been saying that about every election since at least 2008.
The author Marilynne Robinson wrote about this pattern back in 2015 for the New York Review of Books. “No one seems to have an unkind word to say about fear these days,” she reflects, “unChristian as it surely is.” If the space messiah’s mother considers fear to be the mind killer, the Christian believes fear to be the soul killer, which is just a less churchy way of calling it a “sin.” Saving faith often means walking fear-free through the valley of the shadow of death. That’s more than a matter of mental health or survival or cool sci-fi liturgy.
Still, it does beg the question: how does one stop being afraid? Catholic writer and best-selling memoirist Mary Karr offers us a good start. In a 2015 interview, Karr recounts the advice given to her by her priest when she went to ask him about a career in writing. “What would you write if you weren’t afraid?” he asked her, a question she confesses she is still unpacking. It’s a question for all of us to consider: what would we do if we weren’t afraid? How would our lives be different? What have we lost because of our fear? Perhaps, by growing in our emotional intelligence and being unkind to our fears, we can uncover a new bravery, a new soul, and a life we didn’t think was possible.