There is a difficult
question, which hasn’t been asked enough. As you’d expect, the
answer isn’t any easier than the question. First, I need to look
some things behind this question, the context of the whole problem as
I see it.
We are humans, all
of us: no matter the color of your skin, size of your nose (a fact
which late Michael Jackson seemed to dismiss), the amount of fat
around your stomach, quantity of arms and legs, size of your shoes,
your nationality, your religion et cetera – humans, all of us.
Still, if there are these several rather massive differences between
us, what binds us together? Our collective DNA? Culture, perhaps?
No and yes.
Still carrying on
with this point I’m trying to make: if there’s something that
binds us together, it would have to be universal (by definition),
something to do with all humans across the Globe from infants to
elders. As mentioned, this thing wouldn’t be any physical
(ab)normality, nor would it be cultural standard (universal moral
values, ethics etc.) since I, as a relativist, don’t believe in
such things (f.e. Plato's Forms is just plain stupid theory). What is
there left, then?
Emotions, feelings,
my dear friend. Laughter is a universal sign of joy and happiness;
joy and happiness both occurring (in one way or the other, varying
from culture to culture and from individual to individual, but still
basically in similar ways) universally among human species. Sadness is
also universal; same as love/affection and hate/anger not to mention
all the other feelings that are more or less similar across the
space-time-continuum.
However, I see all
the feelings listed above to be “only” versions of something more
primal, some feeling that lurks deeper in us all: survival. “But
survival isn’t an emotion”, you are screaming, and you’re
right. Survival is an instinct constructed by several
different feelings, but without this construction the whole
species would die eventually. That’s some natural selection for
you.
I see survival as
an construction built on two basic (proto-)feelings: lust (not to be
confused with love) and fear. Without lust the race would die fairly
quickly; without fear for your or your loved-ones' well-being the
race would die. That’s more than you can say about sadness or anger
– and to me that makes them more primal, more important for the
species overall. Thus these feelings are more universal, occurring in
human interaction more similarly than some other universal feelings
listed above.
Out of these two,
which is more important? Before giving you my answer I’d like to
stress out that – as mentioned – they both are extremely
important and in my answer I’m not trying to dismiss either of
these factors, but rather underline the importance of the
“arch-feeling” of choice.
To me, a
horror-fiction writer, the answer seems clear. No matter what the
perspective is – sociological, historical, fictional,
anthropological or biological, scientific or religious – fear
unites us, every single one of us.
I would argue that
every single human being can be made scared under clinical (perhaps a
poor choice of word, but what I'm after is ”scientifically”
similar conditions) and similar factors – fear factors, if you
will. Self-preservation (in other words, primal fear for the
preservation of individual's race/family/life/etc.) can be triggered
by factors which are much more universal than factors triggering the
will for the expansion of genetic pool (in other words, lust).
Here is a
hypothetical situation: Someone is chasing you with a hammer (or
other weapon of choice), and if this anonymous bogey-man catches you,
he will kill you. I’d be scared shitless, pardon my French
madam. If we add also dark woods, full moon, starless sky, owls,
thrilling music and other horror-clichés, the chase-scene would have
more flesh over its bones, but the basic structure would still be
there: he’s after you and won’t rest until you are lifeless at
his feet. Fear, primal self-preservation, would grab you by the
throat and it wouldn’t matter who you are, where were you born,
what is the color of your skin etc. Fear unites us.
But this isn’t
the only possible fear-triggering situation. Consider this: someone
is holding your kids (a son and a daughter) at gunpoint, urging you
to do something, because in few seconds he’ll blow your sons'
brains on the floor and, after that, your daughters'. Would you be
scared motionless or determined to do something, anything? Again, I
added some elements to the story to give it touch of sophistication,
which is unnecessary for the point I’m trying to patch through:
this time you aren’t in immediate danger, but in fact your
offspring is. Still, the basic horror, that gut-grabbing terror, is
there.
Lust doesn’t work
the same way. Even though The Almighty Natural Selection has written
a piece of code into our DNA to feel lust at the first sight of
genitalia differing from your own (or, in some cases, same
genitalia), the relativity is much more clear when we talk about more
complex situations. Beauty is sort of a follow-up to lust: we lust
what we consider to be beautiful, and we also think beautiful things
are lustful. And there is nothing wrong with that, just stating a
fact.
With fear it's –
again – different: there is no similar ”follow-up” for fear as
there is for lust, no single emotion (more or less) directly derived
from the proto-feeling of fear. What we fear is what has a power to
harm us. But there is a twist in this: there are way more things that
could possibly harm us than we have a brain capacity to use for
fearing these things. Someone might fear (for a good reason, granted)
snakes; someone else might fear (for an equally good reason) spiders;
someone fears cars, someone airplanes etc. All objects of fear are
rational by any definition of the word, but no-one (at least I hope)
is afraid of everything that could possibly harm this individual –
even lying in bed will eventually be harmful and thus to be feared.
If you'd fear everything, you'd kill yourself for the sheer pain of
existence you'd be having from simply being alive.
Even if we don't
actively fear everything around us, with some good convincing and
reasonable arguments, these phophias could be triggered. Consider
this situation: You're on your routine check-up at the doctor's
office waiting for some vague results from a test you really don't
understand due to medical jargon the doctor was using. Through this
facade of non-understandable words you still catch ”heart failure”,
”cancer” and ”mortal illness”. Every now and then fear of
cancer or other serious illness has crossed your mind, but for the
first time in your life you are face to face with a possibility of
having cancer or heart problems, often as not fatal.
In this situation
you'd be (rightfully) afraid; your fear of cancer (or other illness)
has been triggered.
Lust is much more
simple: you see something which rocks your boat and your animalistic
lust is out of control. The trigger could be anything from an
attracting representative of an opposite sex to (and I'm not making
this up – there actually is a fetish for this) peeing in your
pants. Still, not everyones' lust can be triggered by peeing in your
pants, whereas everyone will be afraid of cancer in the situation
described above. If you wouldn't be afraid, you'd be a sociopath or
some other lunatic.
Is this fair –
comparing possible diagnosis of cancer with peeing in your pants? No,
but my point is there: even if you weren't afraid of snakes before,
after thrown into a pit full of 'em (in a same fashion as one famous
archaeologist with a hat and a whip) you'd be scared – again, I'm
sorry for the profanity – shitless. Same cannot be said about
peeing in your pants or (again, not making this stuff up) breaking
glass with a woman's shoe: even if I'd pee in my pants along with
everybody living in the same city for two weeks in a row, I would
have absolutely no sexual fantasies about it.
Of course I'm
exaggerating, but still you get my point. After all it boils down to
this ”simple” statement: from the perspective of natural
selection, it's more important to stay alive or keep your offspring
alive than make more offspring, because if you'd be dead, you'd be
unable to make more offspring, but if don't make more offspring this
very moment, you can make them later, but that requires that you stay
alive. Man, that's a long sentence – a lot of rambling.
A
very short conclusion for those who were too lazy to read the whole
rambling: Out of the two most primal human emotions (lust
and fear) I consider fear to be more profound to the survival of
human species, and therefore more universal among human individuals.
I also argue that by similar conditions everybody can – and should
– be scared.
