Fear and Loathing in Coronavirus

“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.”
Frank Herbert, Dune

Coronavirus shocked us.

The next moment: overwhelming uncertainty

Uncertainty creates fear. Fear puts us humans into a fight-or-flight mindset. We humans, think poorly when alarmed. Understanding dispels fear. This essay explores the onset of fear, the experience of uncertainty, and a way out.

Fear

Fear is an emotion. Fear disrupts thought. Fear is difficult to control. What is the utility of fear?

“I was so scared I couldn’t think.”

When you see a snake, your fear circuit takes over. Your thought process is immediately stopped. Fight-or-flight! Blood rushes to your legs; survival mode.

In this moment, there is a singular focus: surviving. Avoid harm from the present threat ( snake ) by fighting or fleeing. Our body changes as fear overtakes, here’s how:

Threat: an attach, harmful event, or threat to survival [ VIRUS ]
Brain: the brain processes the signals – beginning in the amygdala, and then the hypothalamus
ACTH: pituitary gland secretes adrenocorticotropic hormone
Cortisol & Adrenaline: released
- Heart rate increase
- Tunnel Vision
- Dilated Pupils
- Shaking
- Flushed Face
- Bladder Relaxation
- Dry Mouth
- Slowed Digestion
- Hearing Loss

The list above are the responses that our body in order to ensure our physical survival. However, this comes at the expense of our thinking mind.

“The amygdala, a small almond-shaped organ in the brain, fires up and shuts down. People who are afraid temporarily shut down their higher cognitive functions… …When we say “I was so scared I couldn’t think” that actually turns out to be true.

Fear shuts down attention.”
Hunter Maats, Fear & Learning

Back to our current situation…

Coronavirus is scary.

We all agree this virus is unknown and terrifying. A new disease emerged into the world. Unknown territory. There is so much we don’t know: Will I get it? How will it affect me? What about those nearest and dearest in my life? Will the virus go away soon? and so on…

Fear and uncertainty are never too far from one another. In many ways, uncertainty drives fear. But they are bi-directional, fear can drive uncertainty. And that process can feed back on itself.

Back to the evolutionary setting, the sight of a snake frightens you. You respond quickly:

a] you run away to safety or b] you smash the snake with a rock

( Alternatively, you don’t survive, but let’s stay positive )

At that point there is nothing to trigger you back into fear. The threat that emerged is no longer present.

For us, it’s not very likely that the sight of snake catapults us into the fight-or-flight response. We are mostly sent into a flight-or-flight response by technology. Namely, our media [ legacy media & social media ] consistently uses fear to garner attention.

Uncertainty

The virus introduces extreme uncertainty.

If we can make sense of what’s uncertain, then we can step out of our alarmed state, think clearly, and act sensibly.

If we cannot make sense of what’s uncertain, we are playing without a full deck. We are blind; senseless. Without our senses, we aren’t able to discern what heals from what harms.

We Modern Folk® enjoy extreme predictability in our daily lives. When we are certain, we are able to make sense of the world. Because of this, we imagine things are under our control.

Are they?

Nope.

Most things are not under your control. And that’s okay. It hurts to give up this comforting illusion. However, the benefits of re-centering your locus of control greatly outweigh the momentary pain. For now, we focus on what ~~serves~~ served as our collective sense-making tool:

The Media

I will refer to publishing entities as Legacy Media. Some examples are: CNN, Fox, MSNBC, Mother Jones, Huffington Post, Breitbart, etc.. Legacy Media comes from an earlier age. In that era, information was expensive to access. Individuals did not have the resources to access information, but institutions did. People would look to things like the New York Times to deliver reliable and relevant information. This guided our sense-making. Legacy Media used to hold the keys to information. Today, that is not the case.

Social Media refers to platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, etc. These emerged in a world where access to information is dirt cheap: an internet connection. Social Media is populated in a bottom-up fashion; users submit content, there are no editors limiting what gets “published.”

Why is the Media no longer effective as our collective sense-making engine?

Because the Media wants your attention at any cost.

The lifeblood of Social Media and Legacy Media is your attention. Media hijacks your emotions to gain your attention. Your harnessed attention is readily-converted into revenue via advertising.

Attention = Revenue

Media exploits your limbic system. ( they are incentivized to do so )

Our attention is caught in the cross-fire between all forms of Media.

In the arms-race for attention, hyperbole leads to hyper-hyperbole in order to garner more clicks and more traffic. As the Media compete for your attention they ratchet-up their tricks that hack your emotions amplifies. This torments your sense-making apparatus.

We are shown what is exciting, not what is accurate.

Attention Warfare™ instantaneously bombards your brain with the most eye-grabbing threats from all corners of the global, all the time — thank you internet technology! This wrecks our perception.

Our focus is drawn out of the Small World we live in and into the Big World that we do not and cannot live in.

You’ll notice that this is at odd with our biology: we evolved to detect a threat, react to it, and move on. The 24/7 News Cycle stands in direct opposition to that; all tension, no resolution; all wretch and no vomit.

Excessive exposure to the onslaught of Fear Porn from your “News Feed” & Primetime News ruins your mind. A diet of only pop-tarts rots your health. Similarly, an information diet consisting solely of Junk Information rots your mind. And, boy do we get hooked.

Junk Food → Diabetes | Junk Info → Mental Obesity

This is another way the Media exploit your psychology is the availability heuristic. It’s a mental shortcut: “If it comes to mind easily, it must be true.”

A poor information diet does to the mind what a bad diet does to the body.

Clickbait, outrage & ‘engagement’ are empty calories. Sugar of the mind that addicts & consumes.

Fixable—with effort—by individuals.

But collectively—hard to see how the vast majority will change diets
— Bobby Goodlatte (@rsg) December 2, 2019

If you continually see danger ( on all those shiny screens! ), you will continually feel that you are in danger.

Put this all together and you see:

We fear the perceived world.
Are uncertain about our future.
And live in the cloud of doubt!

Doubt

The third piece of the emotional-hijacking trifecta is doubt.

Fear, Uncertainty, & Doubt

Doubt is not unlike fear and uncertainty, but has a couple distinct qualities. I’ll express them with a few questions: Will this ever change? or get better? Am I to blame? Who do I trust?

Why are the Media merchants of doubt?

Because once doubt sets in, your mind begs for fear and uncertainty to be resolved. This is the hook that keeps you coming back. The FUD Trifecta positions you to want to resolve your state of tension.

How many times a day do we all return to Doom-scrolling Facebook, Twitter, and the like? There is no dignity in this.

Brain Parable: Rider & the Elephant

It’s helpful to think of your emotions as an elephant. And your brain as the rider atop that elephant. The elephant is of course big. It is cumbersome to direct. Your brain does its best, but this is a daunting task to manage. Plus, we are humans, we make mistakes.

When you feel helpless and fear that nothing is safe, you want clear direction away from danger and toward safety. Which is to say, you are primed for direction and easily manipulated.

To recap:

First they give you the poison [ fear, uncertainty, & doubt ]
Then they can sell you the cure [ the message their advertisers want ]

As if this wasn’t fun enough, there is more darkness to explore. Don’t worry though, there is a way out.

Loathing

“All I maintain is that on this earth there are pestilences and there are victims, and it’s up to us, so far as possible, not to join forces with the pestilences.”
Albert Camus, The Plague

Where does this catastrophic failure of communal sense-making lead?

The loss of any semblance of a concrete, shared reality, makes us feel as though we are free-falling. In our free-fall we reach-out to grab onto anything solid. It is easy to choose poorly when we’re in such a panic. How do we make sense of such a confusing reality?!

Escaping our catatonic Media-induced Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt requires a coherent story about what is Good and what is Evil. You desire and orienting force; traveling away from differentiated chaos, moving towards ( seemingly ) rational order.

What is tragic, is that lowest-hanging fruit is ideology. An ideology is a set of ideas that shapes a worldview. More importantly, it is created by someone else.

With an ideology comes allegiances to a Team. We are social creatures; a sense of belonging is one of our fundamental needs. Who can blame us? We resolve our tension by finding a coherent world-view that is shared by others.

Congratulations, you are now on a team and your fear is gone — what a relief! Additionally, you now conform to entire lines of thinking without having to spend your own energy.

Unfortunately, teams & ideologies divide us. Each Team forms their own view of reality. In the United States of America, this is why Democrats and Republicans can see the same event, but have diametrically opposed opinions of what occurred.

There is only one screen, but we are watching two different movies.

Conservatives look at the past and see what was good, and must remain.
— 🛖➡️🏛 GIMME SHELTER (@buckthundaz) May 30, 2018

What’s wrong with these teams?

Well, the distance between all sorts of opposed teams is growing. But in many cases, the teams are meant to operate in tandem.

When there is no common ground, there is no co-operation. This is tragic. Co-operation is humanity’s killer app.

Your right hand would be foolish to cut off your left hand out of spite.

Right now, you are thinking:

“Okay, you may be right in some ways. But this is depressing, is there any hope?”

YES!! There is hope. That’s the good news.

There is hope. And you are the reason for it. The simple solution is to build common-ground. We must repair our collective sense-making.

A Way Out

A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention
Herbert A. Simon

How can we parse through all of the data we generate today? I’m not sure we know the best way to do this. To me, it seems that we are the blind men, trying to understand the elephant.

We get fragments of the full picture, but cannot intelligently piece them together.

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Perspective & Patience

Careful reflection is the way out. Lame, I know…

In order to think intelligently, you must look at a given issue from multiple sides and in multiple ways. This let’s us see the big picture.

Building perspective takes time. That is why it’s important to be patient. Gather information agnostically; don’t prematurely decide.

It’s important to reflect carefully:

Think through all sides of an issue
Continue to seek out the bigger picture
Leave room for gray area, the world is composed of mountains of nuance — all-or-nothing thinking is not sophisticated.
We all have blind spots. Be sure to listen!
Enter dialogue with people you know:
- challenge your beliefs
- challenge their beliefs

Gratitude & Compassion

Mindfulness and stuff! ( lame again, I know )

Orient yourself towards Love and away from Fear:

Be present
Be watchful
Be observant
Be aware
- of where you are
- of what you are doing
- of what you are feeling

Gratitude is what keeps us thankful rather than resentful. One saying that helps guide gratitude is:

“Trade your expectation for appreciation.”
Tony Robbins

When we are compassionate about what others are going through, we are acting as our Highest Self. It is important to give folks the benefit of the doubt. You never know what someone else is going through.

When we rush to judging other, we often throw the baby out with the bathwater. Disagreement is okay.

How to Change Your Mind

We are all right at times, and wrong at other times. We must reserve the right to be wrong. Humility is a virtue.

Give yourself space to think, give yourself time to reflect, don’t be afraid to “sleep on it”.

Allow yourself to change your mind.

Wrapping Up

We must guard our attention from those that profit off it. Our sense-making is what defines our models of reality. Our models of reality are what guide our behavior. Do not allow others to poison your perception. Your attention is sacred. It is the guiding force in your life.

Some things are under our control, but the list is short. The media distorts our locus of control. It makes you worry about far away things that have nothing to do with you. Return your energy to who you are and the people you love.

Bring your attention back to yourself.

Addendum

I began writing this on May 8th, 2020. ( slow writing, I know )

Since then, Coronavirus has been dethroned from the prized position of our attention:

Protests, Riots, Looting, Police Brutality, State-sanctioned Violence, Looming Civil War.

A few parting thoughts:

Much of what we take as Political Issues are Linguistic Issues.
Actions speak louder than words.
Direct Experience is primary.

M_Buckley Design