CLAUDIA PARDUCCI

March, 2008

Musings on Fear

Motivations for The Survival Project

ASK THE FEAR EXPERT

I am an expert on fear. A sort of fear blackbelt. Anything you want to know about it, from the effects of fear on the body to a short list of things you should be afraid of, I’m the one to ask. Email your questions to claudia@claudiaparducci.com. Be patient if I am slow to respond. I run all correspondance through a virus scanner.

WHY YOU SHOULD BE AFRAID, TOO

I’m pretty sure that some kind of apocalyptic situation is just around the corner. Judging from the wars, famine, genocide, threats of genocide, global warming, looming pandemics, mercury in our fish, hormones in our milk, radiation in our phones, disasters natural and unnatural and the random madcap shooting sprees of unhinged humans, I think that is a very fair assumption.

IT IS NOT PARANOID TO BE PARANOID

I looked it up somewhere and found a sensible comparison of fear and paranoia:

Plain old fear is a reasonable response to scary things that are likely to happen. (You find yourself alone in the wrong neighborhood in an alley at night and you fear something bad could happen.)

Paranoia is an irrational fear, an overreaction to perceived danger that is unlikely to occur. I can’t give you a good example of paranoia because every one I come up with, on further consideration, seems quite possible, even probable to occur. 

YOU ARE PARANOID EVEN IF YOU THINK YOU AREN’T

Given those definitions and these times, is any sane person not paranoid? Between current threats to existence and the constant and irresistible reporting of such threats, no one, to my mind, is qualified to separate justifiable fear from paranoia. My suggestion: stop trying to separate the two. And if you think not reading the paper is the answer, you’re fooling yourself. There is such a thing called oral tradition. It happens around the water-cooler. You get the news alright, just like the rest of us.

WHY DWELL ON FEAR

Fear of the specific plays host to free-floating anxiety. It is a call to action, lending focus to amorphous threat. Besides, is there really a choice?

WHY FEAR CAN BE FUNNY

It is funny because it is mostly irrational, but unavoidable. It makes us do crazy things, like keeping a 3-year supply of power bars in the garage as though that will fend off global warming. It is funny and sad and unacceptable that we are on a sinking raft; we know no one gets off but we keep filling the raft with air, and we’ll do it if it’s the last breath we have.