"what I feel when I am told that my neighborhood is dangerous is not fear but anger at the extent to which so many of us have agreed to live with a delusion - namely, that we will be spared the dangers that others suffer only if we move within the certain very restricted spheres, and that insularity is a fair price to pay for safety.
Fear is isolating for those that fear. And I have come to believe that fear is a cruelty to those who are feared."
-Eula Biss, from Notes from No Man's Land
The trouble is: fear is not invented but inherited. And the fears we are socialized into are fears we cannot empirically disprove, because there is never enough evidence, and what there is is biased by selection, and therefore self-fulfilling. And there is always, underneath that social fear, a second more private anxiety - of looking foolish, of being ashamed.
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4 comments:
Very thought-provoking quote. Thanks for posting!
very good quote.
And great point. We are educated to fear (or even better, worry about) certain attitudes, a certain skin color or ethnic group and there are places or religions we assume to be dangerous. And we tend to fear what is different. So the more we isolate each other into these imaginary cocoons of safety, the more we grow as different from each other and the more we fear…
And the more we fear the more we embrace aggression which we justify as defense…
And for a fact, we imagine New York city to be more dangerous than provincial Pittsburgh. I haven’t felt safer than in Manhattan, as I was surrounded by people who learned living with their difference.
Good one.
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