Flashpost: Fear As a Motivator

Why do you all think fear is such a powerful motivator?

Lately, I have been thinking a lot about fear and why the fear of "other" has worked so splendidly in American (and likely human) history as a way to justify hurting, ostracizing, and even killing people.

In my class on Black education, my students recently moved on from Black literacy during the period of slavery to Black literacy in the North during the antebellum period. Unlike enslaved Black people in the South, free northern Blacks often faced hostility to education not in the form of legal or social prohibition, but in the form of segregation - maintained by legal and physical violence.

In our discussion about this topic, I asked my students why they thought white Northern parents were so insistent on keeping Black students out of their schools when most subscribed to an anti-slavery worldview. Over and over their answers boiled down to the power of fear, and specifically the fear of how contact with a societally constructed "other" would potentially lead to acceptance and undermine societal order as they knew it.

In this case, that societal order was maintaining racial hierarchies but we see this same story map out all the time in other aspects of life. Take for example all of the focus on transgender people. It is estimated that only about 1% of the American adult population identifies as transgender (we are talking about 2 million trans people against 256 million non-trans people), yet these days the topic of transgender people seems lately to make up a huge majority of the public sphere. Most people who have strong opinions of transgender people, have never actually met a trans person nor do they have any in their social group. So why are there so many bills, speeches, posts, etc. about Trans people?

The answer always boils down to fear.

What could our society be, if we evolved to not lead with fear?

This might surprise you all but I think the answer can be found in 1 John 4:18 - "There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love."

Perhaps we will never evolve as a society based on love so long as every action/worldview starts with fear. We might need some fear, but perhaps de-centering fear could bring us closer to perfection in love.

So again, I wonder what could our society be, if we could move beyond leading with fear?