“Yes, well, I imagine if it were fear, my eyes would be wider.” – Serenity
Sadly, I’m a Sagittarius and my name’s not Morris or this could have been comedy gold.
I had a Ford® Taurus©. Yes, that’s an admission of guilt. Even worse? It was a pale-lime green. I imagine someone in marketing called the color “seafoam”, but if the sea has foam that color, it’s probably in a congealed blob off the coast of China and consists of anti-freeze, extra kidneys, and despair. After 150,000 miles the Taurus© died on impact with a pickup whose driver decided stop signs were optional on Tuesdays. But the other driver made up for wrecking my car by not having insurance, so there was that benefit.
As I recall, there were three buttons on the dash of the Taurus® to program the display. Since I am a man, reading the manual was out of the question. The display had the option to show various things – it had a compass mode, a thermometer, and a countdown timer to show the number of days until Obama left office. I only knew it had a compass mode because when I bought it (used) it had the compass on. After I changed the battery, it reverted back to the “Only this many days until Obama is gone” mode.
I wanted it to show the thermometer.
Clearly it never gets hot in summer, so it must be global warming.
I had no idea how to change modes – since the manual was only two feet away in the glove compartment, it might as well have been in Mongolia, and not the easy to reach parts of Mongolia. I reached my hand out to start mashing the buttons with all of the skill of a baboon wearing a pink tutu attempting to clear a paper jam while making double-sided color copies at Kinkos®. I hesitated. What if I ended up turning the car’s language into French? Would I have to wear a beret and learn to smoke cigarettes while being nihilistic?
Then I started to panic. Being French was awful, but what would happen if I accidently turned the car’s units into metric? I don’t even know how to drink in metric. Is sixteen a lot of kilometers of beer to drink? How many metric days until Christmas? How many milliliters of cheeseburger do I order at Sonic®? Perish the thought of being French and metric. That’s how we got Canada, after all. Sure, the Canadians look like us, but that’s how they infiltrate.
Sure, they look polite. But just try to dissect one to see if it’s an alien from outer space and they get darn grumpy.
The thought then hit me – I’ve spent literally my entire life tearing stuff apart to see what was inside, and then trying to put it back together. That’s been my mode since, much to Pa Wilder’s dismay, I discovered screwdrivers. If I wasn’t tearing stuff apart, I was experimenting in other ways. Sometimes the result wasn’t that great, like the time in fifth grade when I took a letter opener and put it across both prongs of an electrical plug.
An electrical plug that was plugged into the wall.
Oops.
Immediately there was a big spark, smoke, the smell of ozone, splattering molten metal, and then complete darkness in my room. I knew where the breakers were, and went to flip mine back on. I’m pretty sure Ma Wilder smelled the ozone, but didn’t say anything since my bedroom wasn’t actively on fire.
I’ve done stupider things. Some of them even when I was sober.
So, there I was sitting in my car. Once I was brave enough to slam a letter opener between into an active electrical circuit, and now I was hesitant to push some buttons.
What? I came to my senses. It’s just a car.
I pushed buttons, didn’t turn French, and even better, just like the Apollo program, I avoided having to use the metric system entirely. And I got rid of the hesitation.
What led to the hesitation?
Fear. It’ll creep up on you, first in small ways, and then in large if you don’t fight it every time it shows up.
General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson said, “Never take counsel of your fears.” And Jackson didn’t – he even got his nickname by being famously fearless at Bull Run when he rushed his troops to fill a gap in the line. “Look, men, there is Jackson standing like a stone wall!” Not a bad way to get a nickname.
Stonewall understood that fear was his most potent enemy. Well, fear and that musket ball his own troops accidently shot him with.
For the record, he didn’t ever have a microbrew or a nonfat anything.
So, why is fear so bad? What’s wrong with a little fear?
That’s simple: fear is at the root of every significant problem in the world. Period. I understand that’s a pretty bold statement. Can I back it up? Sure.
Let’s take envy. It’s at the root of lots of bad things, like Leftism which is almost entirely based on envy. What causes envy?
Insecurity. Think Elon Musk feels envy? Probably not, and I could name a dozens of people who don’t feel envy. They’re not envious because they’re not insecure. They don’t feel uncertainty, anxiety, or self-doubt. All of these emotions are based in fear and lead to envy.
That’s the same with every other negative emotion – anger, shame, et cetera. It’s just another face of fear. And evil things come from evil emotion (and Disney®), not from rational calculation.
Frank Herbert got it right, writing about a rite in his novel Dune:
“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”
If Dune® had sandcatworms, would the spice be in the hairballs?
Okay, Herbert is a bit flowery. But the concept is right. Fear robs you, decision by decision, of your entire life. And fear is used to manipulate you. Today I was reading Google® News™ and counted 38 major stories on the main page. Here’s my analysis:
- 3 of the stories were mildly amusing or interesting.
- 2 of them were potentially useful to me – they were stories I could use to make myself better, depending upon my situation.
- 8 were useful only to manipulate and titillate readers through fear.
- 25 were utterly useless.
I read the amusing stories. I read one of the useful stories – the other didn’t apply right at the moment. I’ll admit, I got caught and read one or two of the useless stories. I skipped the fear manipulation stories. Fear is a tool that can be used against you, but only if it makes you forget your values. There should be no news, no story that can make you waiver from your values.
What’s the cure for fear?
Action. Press the button. Ask the girl out. Lift the weight. Press the button in your car. Successful or not, you will have overcome your fear. You will be stronger. You will have less fear the next time – the only way to escape your fear, is to go through your fear. And fighting fears when they’re small (like resetting a car dashboard) is easier than waiting until they grow to the size where they eat away your life like vintage Elvis© on a peanut butter and bacon cheeseburger.
Is fear useless? No. Fear can be used. Fear should be used.
General George S. Patton, riffing off of Stonewall, said:
“The time to take counsel of your fears is before you make an important battle decision. That’s the time to listen to every fear you can imagine. When you have collected all the facts and fears and made your decision, turn off all your fears and go ahead.”
Fun fact: General Patton is tired of your whiney crap.
So, maybe Patton is saying I shouldn’t fear the metric French, but maybe I should stop the whole “turning a letter opener into a bedroom arc welder” because, in the words of Robert A. Heinlein:
“Stupidity cannot be cured. Stupidity is the only universal capital crime; the sentence is death. There is no appeal, and execution is carried out automatically and without pity.”
Funny, I saw one of the “original style” Ford Taurus just the other day.
There aren’t many left out in the wild.
My boy (10) delights in pointing out vehicles such as them.
“Daddy! That’s an old car! What is that?”
“That’s not…(mental math…) okay, that’s an old Taurus, hasn’t been made in probably 30 years. Based on this being Ohio, with Brine, Salt, and general Road Repair issues…I’m shocked it’s in such good shape.”
Mine took impact with a Dodge pickup to take it down, or I’d be driving it still. Because I’m cheap.
Fear is awfully useful for controlling people (see: Religion, Organized). We allow weirdos at the airport to make us take off our shoes, take images of our bodies and grope us because we are afraid that terrorists will replicate 9/11. Even more insidious, we are so afraid of losing our stuff: reputation, jobs, health insurance, etc., that we are cowed into silence. Many of us think we have too much to lose and so our cherished stuff becomes the bars of our own personal prison. Sure the Left is running roughshod over us and we are on the precipice of losing our very civilization but at least we won’t get into trouble.
Yes. Silence is easy, though I must say that saying outrageous things as I gets older . . . is fun.
John – – Another good life lesson in this missive. Oh, and thanks for including Elvis….he is so overlooked these daze.
When GEN Westmoreland, a veteran paratrooper, became Chief of Staff of the Army (the ‘top dog”, so to speak), he inquired about sending EVERY officer entering the Army to Jump School making them parachutists. He believed, from experience, that those who are successful leaders, both in combat and otherwise, are able to control their fears, make decisions under severe stress, and get others to follow them in to the risks of the unknown. (these are my words, not his).
Jump School teaches you how to control your fears and act. The stress is high and the unknown in every jump is present, even for those who have hundreds of jumps to their credit. Acting under such stress also makes you “situationally aware” of what is going on so you are less likely to submit to NORMALCY BIAS or COGNATIVE DISSONANCE.
(John – – These are both subjects you previously wrote about and dove-tail nicely with this missive).
Unfortunately, Westmoreland was told about the expenses and the fact that trying to get Congreessswines to approve the funds would be impossible, especially with the USAF wanting to buy lots of expensive shiny objects….
Thanks for another excellent life lesson full of humor.
Cognitive Dissonance – the state of having inconsistent thoughts, beliefs, or attitudes, esp. as relating to behavioral decisions, preventing decision making. Being unable to act because the event as seen is so unexpected or un-contemplated, the viewer cannot believe what he/she sees and thus is “frozen” and unable to make clear decisions.
Normalcy Bias – the state of expecting that the unfolding events will be those seen previously, as tomorrow will be like today. This results in failure to plan ahead or planning for events and failing to adjust them when presented with changing circumstances.
I think that when you have to face fear on an individual basis it makes you stronger (assuming you don’t fold). It’s good for the soul.
I get what you’re saying, but what about fear of failure? Being afraid to fail can A) freeze you into inaction, or B) give you a strong motivation to succeed. I’ve experienced both versions.
It’s possible (indeed, extremely likely) that I’m a weirdo (okay, it’s a long established fact), but a lot of my success in the past has stemmed from creative insecurity, a deep seated fear that I’m not all that good at what I do so I need to work extra hard to maintain a facade of competence. In the long run such an approach is probably unhealthy, but in the short term, when one is just starting out such an attitude can be the difference between success and career failure.
I think I’ve largely outgrown that fear and now approach life and career challenges differently, but at the start of my career, fear of failure was a big motivating factor.
So I guess I’m in the middle on this one. Fear in many ways is a bad emotion, but it can at times be very useful.
Agreed. I know one friend who waited to do work (at work) until he thought he couldn’t make the deadline. That kept him interested – he was a fear junkie.
“this could have been comedy gold”
We can all agree that too much of a good thing is not a Good Thing, but it occurred to me that you could have phrased this “this could have been uproarious”.
I like it.
I love ya, man. Your blog is WAY better than mine (and pretty much all the others, too). But …
What’s wrong with the metric system???
Ask John how many inches there are in a mile, and out comes the calculator. Ask me how many centimeters in a kilometer, and the instant answer is 100,000. Notice how many significant figures there are in that conversion factor. One, and it’s a trivial one: 1. You do your conversions by moving the decimal point.
But you know what’s really the best thing about the metric system? Mentioning it instantly annoys my wife. Almost as much as answering the question “what time is it?” In the 24-hour system. And since my entire purpose in life is to exasperate that poor woman, I find the SI measurement system to be an essential tool.
Try it — you’ll like it!
Thanks! I appreciate the kind words.
Okay, the metric system. I can calculate in it, and it is easy to do conversions, especially if you remember that water is 1 g/cm^3.
However, except for calculations involving true mass, I like Imperial. I have all of the relevant conversions memorized, (32.2, 14.696, 12, 144, 1728, 62.4, 7.48, 5280, 43,560, etc.). I can think in metric if I try, but I naturally default to Imperial.
And Imperial wasn’t developed by French communists during the Revolution because they wanted to break entirely with the past – that comes from when they re-did the names of the months as well. See, French Communist units. Says it all.
I did the same thing as you with the outlet. Only I used my finger. DOH!
The AC went out when I was traveling once, and the tech wanted $600 for a new control board. So I called my buddy that runs an AC supply business.
“You want the original, OEM, or the chinese copy?”
I’ll take the OEM, Split the difference.
“$80. I’ll fedex it to ya.”
Then I started equivocating about how to install it. Me, working on multi-million dollar networks. Then he said a line I use until this day.
“Dude! It’s an air conditioner. It ain’t the f-ing space shuttle!”
To this day, I’ll dive right in.
(Screwed me on my iPhone though. Forgot to unplug the battery when I changed the screen and hosed it good.)
Yup – mistakes can be painful. And after that hesitation? I use it remind myself to, as you correctly note: DIVE RIGHT IN!