Originally posted on the What a Nascence blog.
Sometimes I am slightly synesthetic. I think of it as I do my dyslexia. Dyslexia makes it harder to read, and sometimes, when I am tired or stressed, words make no sense at all; but the upside is that I can solve jumble puzzles, seek and finds, and even cryptographs, faster than most people who are way smarter than I am. The answers just seem to 'show' themselves.
My slightly synesthetic side gives me shape and form to forces, elements in this world, revealing them to me, their symbols and their behaviors, in ways that makes them easier for me to understand.
Under stresses and events of intimidation in my own life, I began to see, recognize fear as something with a shape, form, beginning, and end. An animal complete with gnashing teeth and a fatal flaw. That flaw is the hunger that fear creates that gives it strength and impetus, but which also MUST eat. And when it cannot consume its target, it will consume itself.
I watched as I was growing up, how people were controlled by others. Fear was key to getting people to act against their own best or better interests. Fear was key to keeping people divided by false issues or untruths, to where they would not act, collectively, in their own best interests.
The rules of fear that I have observed, work on an individual one-to-one basis, exactly the same as they work on the collective, the masses.
For the sake of making this simple to understand and to relate to, we will deal with the personal, one-to-one tactics that make fear work, and at the same time, reveals to us exactly what it is and how to defeat it.
Fear is used to control people. It is used by people who themselves, fear us. If they did not fear us, they would not need to make us fear them, for them to feel safe. They would have no need to control us.
Essentially, one has to know and understand fear and how it affects others. Fear is such an emotional core sense, that to understand it, one has to have it. Like a gun: You can't shoot it if you don't know how. You have to first know it to then use it. Then you can 'aim it'.
Unlike a gun, Fear cannot affect someone who has none of it in them to begin with. It cannot be used by someone that is not afflicted with it and it cannot afflict someone that does not recognize it. Fear has to be owned, sold and bought or it has no effect.
Essentially, they have to take their fear, and sell it to us. For this to work, we have to buy their fear. For this to continue working, we have to ignore where it came from: Their fear of us and what we can do with what we know about them.
Fear has to be reinforced in order to stay in control. That reinforcement has to come at closer and closer intervals, increasing, essentially, the frequency in the cycles, in order for it to continue to have the desired effect.
We can, if we let ourselves, begin to predict the next installment of 'fear reinforcement'. The pattern becomes predictable. Only the extremes that are required are relative unknowns. However, that each cycle will increase in intensity, is predictable.
This leaves the person who is employing fear as a weapon or tool, in a quandary. It becomes a chore. It takes more and more energy to do the wrong thing. It is exhausting. Fear is a limited resource because it has to increase how much it draws from the well each visit. Fear requires more fear.
It also requires timing. One cannot go directly to the worst case and most extreme, because they would have to top it at the next interval. How do you top your best? How do you top that? And then top it again?
Fear is limited. As a tool, it is also limiting.
Fear is utilized by those who have no other skills. It is the worst choice of anyone seeking to lead or control. Fear has no allies. It has servants, but they are never trusted completely.
Every time fear loses its desired effect or performs at less than the optimal level, it backfires. The victim of fear might get an insight or feel empowered and put up more resistance. Or lose their fear of the person bullying them, regardless of what they do.
They might even see the flaws in the Fear Plan. They might see that the person employing fear is doing so 'because they are wrong and they know it.' If they were Right, they would not need fear. It would be obvious.
When fear stops working for the ones who employ it, it does not go away. It goes home. Home is where it came from. Home is where it lives. Home is where it eats. And fear, once it is used, becomes hungry. The person who uses it can't control it. Fear begins to consume them.
This is why bullies and despots become unhinged, paranoid, sleepless. The fear they cannot sell to others, consumes them. Even if they have a majority of people cowed, they still need more. They need it all. All is not enough. Fear either grows or dies. Resources are finite. There is never enough.
Had they opted to deal with their fears in the first place, learned more about themselves and rid themselves of their insecurities, they would be immune from ravenous beast. But they chose, instead, to bully others to bend them to their will, all for the one goal of getting their way, when in fact, their way, and getting it, is what ultimately destroys them.
Fear's Worst Fear
Comedians are Fear's worst Fear. To be a comedian of any worth, any success, one has to be really smart. One has to have a true perception of times, places and events that rings true with their audience. Otherwise, no one would laugh.
People who laugh, rethink, relive that which made them laugh. Laughter is shared amongst all Human Beings. We share jokes, tell funny stories, and repeat those that are told to us.
Comedians defeat fear by showing us how stupid it is. Showing us, comically, how ludicrous the tools of it are. Essentially, we laugh at those who try to use fear on us. We begin to think.
People who are laughing are not, in those moments, in fear. Fear and laughter are mutually exclusive and both cannot reside in the same place at the same time. Laughter can come and go, and remain strong. Fear, as we have seen, must be sustained. Any break in the continuity of fear means it has to be, essentially, rebuilt again.
One laugh leads to another. People lose their fear of tyrants. Tyrants and their minions sense their own failure. They turn on one another. They begin to consume one another. Once they start feeding on one another, to survive, to consolidate their power; they become smaller. Smaller becomes weaker. The bellows and roars that used to instill quakes and shudders in their victims, become squeaks and shrieks... and fade from weapon, to ineffective implements, to vague curiosities, as victims stand up, and walk away.
Using the tools, training and skills of non-violence, we overcome those who bully us. We overcome them by not becoming them. By not employing fear or violence, both of which need to be sustained, we build a more lasting ever increasing unity.
But first we have to remember who we are: Especially in those dark moments when we are being beaten down, bullied and intimidated: We are, in ways we may not know or realize, something that they fear. Knowing that, we are already armed with several facts:
They fear us so much they are now engaging in what will be their downfall.
Whatever it is, it must be powerful in us. So powerful that they want us to be afraid of who we are and what we can do.
One laugh can undo all their efforts and they have to start over.
They will have to spend every waking moment, and many a sleepless night, worried that we will see through them. Afraid of us.
It is nothing we have done wrong that causes them this fear and panic. It is what is in them that causes this fear and panic.
All we have to do is survive or die. If we die, they have to start over on someone else. And they have to fear that they will be found out on this. If we live, we live to tell the story, and their weaknesses, fears, all that they were afraid would be found out-- is revealed.
Fear is High Maintenance
The one thing I have seen that bullies fear the most is Truth. Truth is their undoing. It reveals them to us. It reveals them to their minions. It reveals them to themselves. Whatever that is, or means to them, it is something they cannot face. It is the demon they flee while tethered to it.
Fear relies on lies. Lies that create a general mindset that is other than the truth. An alternate reality of sorts. Alternate realities require constant construction and maintenance as the gaps, contradictions and flaws, all bring it down.
Like hoards of plasterers, minions carry the mortar and try to cover the flaws. More and more are created. Mortar is whipped up faster and with less thought, becoming thinner and less supportive, some of it, towards the end, won't even stick, much less dry.
It gets louder, but it fails. The more it fails, the weaker it becomes, the more the minions and their masters become afraid. The more they become afraid, and with fewer people to impose that on, and FEAR being the only skill or tool they have, they begin to turn against one another.
Blame is all they know, so they blame one another. They then cannot reglue those alliances as they see each other as the reason for their failures.
Truth is Low Maintenance
Truth is unchanging. More and more Truth can be revealed, but Truth itself, exists whole. Lies have to be manufactured and the recipes are flawed.
Speaking Truth to Lies, even the really loud lies, even the really bad-tempered lies, is all it takes to keep the lies from sticking, drying, becoming part of the scene as anything except a work of fiction, and of little enduring relevance.
One Truth, spoken over and over again, can undo the lies of history. One Truth, unchanging, more and more revealed, can crumble the lies that have fundamentally created a false history.
In this day and time, we can, by speaking Truth to Lies, prevent a false history from ever solidifying.
We have no enemies. We are all brothers and sisters in this Human Race. We have opposition, and that can be dealt with by laughing at fear merchants, speaking Truth to Lies. They can continue to divide us, and we can continue to appeal to that we all have in common: The Truth. They have it too. They just choose to ignore it.
It is more powerful than all their lies, and it reveals the core of their fears, from which they have chosen to deal, for far too long.
Once we realize we have Truth, we have already won. It just will take time to get there. Meanwhile, they and their minions, their plaster and their noise, are running from the beasts they created and are tethered to, until they let it go.
As long as they are feeding the fear, it will consume them. Fear must feed or starve. That is the way of Fear.
As long as we stand in Truth, we are sustained by Truth.
This is why the opposition is failing. They want us to believe we are failing, but we are winning. We are gaining. Their voices are everywhere, carrying their lies... but the Truth is unchanged, unmoved, unharmed. It is there for us to see, to know and to take sustenance from.
We have done good work. We have told the truth. We have not sold fear to anyone. Those who have it chose to feed it, and it is not our fault they can't let go as it is devouring them.
Their lies starve in our presence.
Posts
