Fear is the mind-killer

I’ve opened up registration for my April Utah trips! Just warm canyon vibes, no doomscrolling ha ha. Deets here. And there are just a few spots left in my February beginner trips- go from zero outdoors experience to being able to plan your own backpacking adventure! Deets are here. Like always, all my trips are for women, trans and non-binary people. And people love them- read the reviews here.

In 2017 there was a study that showed that the more afraid people are, the more conservative they become. The inverse was also shown to be true- when people perceive the world as safe, they adopt more liberal ideologies. In the last few days it’s been really hard to watch scores of people, including people in the highest positions of power in this country, sing the praises of one of the worst people imaginable as though he was an innocent saint while ignoring all other tragedies, including the school shooting in Colorado that happened the very same day and the murder of democratic lawmakers that happened months ago. This coocoo-bananas cognitive dissonance is extremely stressful to experience, and I’ve been trying to make sense of it.

It would be one thing if it was just people in positions of power who loved Kirk- he was rallying young people to the right, of course they loved him- but what boggles the mind is all the regular people who thought he was great too. The people he was rallying. All you have to do is listen to a few of his quotes to know how evil he was- he thought that black people had lesser intelligence, he thought trans people should be “dealt with like in the 50s and 60s” (when they were beaten to death), he said if his 10 year-old daughter was raped and became pregnant he wouldn’t let her get an abortion, he said that removing consent late at night when drinking was involved was a “grey area”, he wanted to bring back public executions etc etc (all these videos are online, you can watch them yourself). He targeted professors who disagreed with him with hate mobs until they were harassed out of their jobs. And yet regular degular people are talking about him with reverence and heartbreak, about how wonderful and kind and non-judgmental he was, how he was a shining light in a dark world. I was so puzzled about this that I thought my brain would break, and then I remembered the study about fear.

There is so much to be afraid of right now. At the most basic level, there’s the future of this planet’s ability to support our species (and how we live)- climate change, water, fossil fuels, resource extraction, food production, etc- all of that is uncertain. I think that all humans can feel this on a deep, cellular level, even people who don’t believe in climate change and think that earth is some inexhaustible resource that couldn’t possibly be run into the ground. Then there’s fears around another pandemic, natural disasters, nuclear war, the healthcare industry, the housing crisis, evil techlords, the poison in our food, water, air etc, and the total lack of a social safety net in this country (so if something happens you’re fucked). The right, because they’ve been knowing that when people are afraid they crave authoritarian power, pile more made-up boogeymen on top of that- immigrants, trans people, “DEI hires”, leftists, literally whatever scapegoat they think of in the moment.

In the best of times, humans can be calm and rational but many humans are fucking scared right now and so, I think, they’re losing their marbles.

You can’t reason with someone who’s lost their marbles in this way. You can’t change their mind. It doesn’t work to show them things that are real. They don’t want real, because real is too scary. They want authoritarians. They want black and white thinking and boogeymen who can actually bleed and die (trans people, immigrants) instead of the real boogeyman they feel powerless against (climate change). They want the promise of the afterlife (escape). They want gods that provide simple rules to follow to reach this afterlife. They can’t be reached when they’re in this headspace because it is the fear place.

Understanding this is helpful for me, knowing why things are the way they are. It doesn’t give me any answers as to what to do, though. I don’t think any of us have those answers. It does help me preserve my energy- trying to reason with these these people is about as productive as banging my head against the wall- and it does give me compassion for them, even if that compassion is mixed with abject horror. And tempered with extremely firm boundaries. And a willingness to defend myself and others.

Speaking of, if you’re comfortable with it, it’s good to have a gun and know how to use it. If the right wasn’t so well armed I wouldn’t feel that this is as important as it is, but they are, so.

As far as my own fear about the future, to keep it from turning into weird toxic sludge in my brain that poisons me, I continue to work on my relationship with death and loss. Because this is the deep well from which all our other fears are born. Even in the best of times, with no other bullshit like climate change etc, we will lose everything we love, and then we will die. The more I work on letting go and accepting this, the less everything else in the world scares me and the more at peace I can be. These times, although remixed in an interesting way, are not unprecedented, and we are vain to think that they are. Embodiment is wonder and horror both. That has always been the deal. I continue the thought experiment of pretending that I chose to come here- that I knew exactly what this life would be like and I still chose it. And the more I practice thinking this way, the less I have to pretend. Because you know what, I would choose to come here.

I’ve been listening to the new Hunger Games novel, Sunrise on the Reaping. If you haven’t read these books, they’re about young people who are being prepped to slaughter each other in a public spectacle. These young people are from poor areas where most people are hungry and just barely scraping by. Suzanne Collins is brilliant at putting the reader in the protagonists’ shoes, and as the tributes are groomed and fed in the days before the slaughter, I find myself relating strongly to their choices- yes I would devour that sandwich and pie, yes I would luxuriate in that bubble bath. Yes I would learn how to make fire, and form an alliance with the other tributes, and try and devise a clever plan. These young people know that all but one of them are going to die, and still they do these things, even against their better judgement- they know they should just give up, or throw themselves off a bridge for a quick, painless death, and yet they keep going. Maybe this is dark, but I think they keep going out of curiosity. (And I keep reading out of curiosity.) What if they are able to break the machine that runs the arena, and escape. What if they are able to keep from turning on each other. What if things are different this time. And anyway, there’s pie…

That’s all for now,

Carrot