I Ain't Scared of no Goats.

“’The thing that is in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world…The worst thing in the world,’

said O’Brien, ‘varies from individual to individual. It may be burial alive, or death by fire, or by

drowning, or by impalement, or fifty other deaths. There are cases where it is some quite trivial thing, not even fatal.’” (1984, p.283)

 

Fear has this creepy way of taking hold of us. There is no feeling like it, and no feeling that trumps it. For Winston, his greatest fear was rats, that they may crawl on his and gnaw off his face. For me, you could basically name anything and chances are I’d be afraid of it or something related to it. Some things on my phobia list: Whales, snake bites, getting things in my eyes, being paralyzed… so the list goes on. If you were faced with the scariest thing you know, what would you do to avoid it? Apparently anything, such as betray the only person you’ve ever loved, as was the case in 1984. (Which, by the way, Winston lost any pity I had for him by doing that. Jerk.)

 

But we usually think of fear as an individual affair, a feeling that only we feel internally. But oftentimes we see a collective fear, such as the fear of a group or of a nation. In 1984, there was an unspoken fear by the people not in the inner party that the party would assassinate them at any moment. In the Middle East, there is a collective fear and resulting anger of the masses against their oppressive governments. As the article details, Japanese activists acted in the way they did out of fear of China.

Actually when you think about it, we see fear in a lot of governments’ actions. Japan’s not the only nation acting out of fear of their opponents. We do it too. A lot of our government’s actions are based upon the need to be a superpower, to be the best in something like energy, education, or economic stability. This need, in turn, is fueled by fear. We fear falling behind excelling nations like China, we fear instability like the Arab Spring, we fear a gosh darn lot of things. Clearly fear is an excellent motivator though, to influence our decisions and our actions to avoid that which we fear— which in some cases is good, and other cases not so much.

 

This whole government issue doesn’t really feel like it’s relevant to our teenage lives, so I’ll use a more suitable example for the grand finale of this post. Next time you’re walking down the street and you are faced with something you fear, (let’s say for this hypothetical, that you fear goats) approach it like you’re not afraid. I want you to walk up to that goat and yell “You don’t scare me goat!” and get reasonably up in its face. Let it know that fear doesn’t rule your life, that unlike all those governments and people like Winston that act out of fear, by golly, you don’t. Then walk off with your head held high, because guess what? You sure showed that goat who’s boss.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wow. Sorry, that last part got kind of random and weirdly dramatic… I guess that’s what fear does to you sometimes.