Complex Numbers

Phobos

Write about a fear you experienced as a child that you have since overcome.

Before I do that, there's something that's been bugging me for a while.

Now, I admit I'm not the most emotionally aware person in the world, so maybe someone can explain this to me.

We conflate hate and fear, and I don't understand why.

I know that some schools of thought (mostly very New-Age-y) hold that all human emotion can be categorized as, at base, either love or fear. Under "love" in this philosophy we have, I suppose, things like affection, camaraderie, comfort, whatever - those emotions we consider "positive." Under "fear," by contrast, would be things like greed, jealousy and hatred, the "negative" ones.

I once had an epiphany that since fear is an emotional response to a real or perceived threat to something that we love (including our lives), that would mean love is the basic emotion. I suppose you could turn that on its head and declare that fear is the only real emotion. More likely, you can dismiss the whole philosophy as the bullshit that most New Age stuff is.

But that's irrelevant; I'm talking about hate and fear here. Like I said, we conflate it: hatred of something usually gets the -phobia suffix added on, indicating fear. However, the Venn diagram of "hate" and "fear" seems to me to have overlap, but it's not a perfect circle. For example, just to use a common fear, maybe you're one of those weird people who goes outside and you're afraid of bears. This is logical; a bear can fuck up your day. Still, this doesn't mean you hate bears; it just means you don't want to be eaten by one. Bears are, apart from the whole "outweigh me by a thousand pounds and possess sharp teeth and claws" thing, pretty damn cool. Of course, it's possible you both hate and fear them, but it's not required.

Likewise, maybe you hate, I dunno, PETA. This, too, is understandable; they're a bunch of extremist hypocrites (personally, I think they're being funded by the soybean industry as a way to increase demand for their product, but I have no proof of this). But there's certainly nothing to fear about them. What are they going to do, bleed on you?

Hate and fear are not the same thing. So why the "-phobia?"

The best I can come up with is that it entered the public consciousness as a kind of social engineering. A lot of people (okay, men) find it socially acceptable to hold hatred in their hearts, but if you suggest that they're actually cowards, they feel shame about that. If this is true, it needs to stop; the goal should be to get people more in touch with and understanding of their own emotions, not leverage atavistic impulses to further your own aims.

But I don't know if that's true. I'd really like to hear others' take on it.

When I was a kid, like all kids, I was afraid of a lot of things, mostly because I didn't understand them. This, I think, is the sort of thing that fosters fear: ignorance. I don't see ignorance in itself as a bad thing; it's correctable. It's the people who refuse to learn who deserve scorn, not the generally ignorant. Everyone is ignorant about some things and enlightened about others.

To address the prompt, then, I guess I'll have to admit that when I was a kid, thanks to movies, TV, and the science fiction books I loved to read, I was sure that space aliens existed and wanted to abduct me. This, naturally, freaked me out, as if the constant threat of nuclear annihilation wasn't enough. Other kids maybe feared the monster under the bed, but not me. It's not that I didn't think there was a monster under my bed; it's that the monster would have been abducted by aliens, too, so we had common ground to bond over.

Why more people don't buy kids beds without space underneath them, I simply don't understand. Maybe it's so the monster stays there and doesn't interrupt the parents while they're boning.

Anyway, point is, I got over it. For a while there, as a kid, I had certain rituals I did to ward off the aliens. As an example, I just knew that as long as I had my back against something, they couldn't beam me up (fears have never been known for making a lot of logical sense). I could never sleep on my back, though, so instead of hugging a pillow or a bear like other kids, I kept my back against one.

It must have worked, because I was never abducted or replaced by aliens.

Or, at least, I wouldn't admit it if I had been, fellow humans.