Montaigne has addressed various emotions in the early essays but here takes on one that can be particularly debilitating. It’s impossible to disagree with this take:
Doctors say that there is no emotion which more readily ravishes our judgement from its proper seat. I myself have seen many men truly driven out of their minds by fear, and it is certain that, while the fit lasts, fear engenders even in the most staid of men a terrifying confusion.
All strong emotions – and fear is often the strongest – can propel us into immediate reactions that might be contrary to what we need. Fear is also prone to overestimating the risk that we might be in at the moment. It is also difficult at times to separate fear, at least in its low lever forms, from anxiety. We often react to the feeling of discomfort that strong emotions can elicit instead of identifying which emotion we are feeling and listening to what message the emotion is trying to send us. A sense of unease might be interpreted as fear, and a reason to be cautious, but could actually be a feeling of anxiety and a spur to move forward.
Montaigne gives one particularly of fear’s dark power in a humorous example of Monsieur de Bourbon’s capture of Rome. A standard bearer on guard at Burgo San Pietro was so terrified at the first sight of approaching troops that he raced out of town still holding his banner. The approaching troops thought a counterassault was underway and readied for battle – leading the fleeing guard to turn tail and return up the same path he had just raced.
This reminds me of a story my old boss Douglas Wilder, former Governor of Virginia, once told me about his tour of duty in Korea. His troop leader asked him and two other soldiers to make a recon sortie on Hamburger Hill … and as they approached a ridge, they came across 21 North Korean soldiers. Those soldiers were struck with fear and somehow believed Wilder’s troop was much large than three. They immediately surrendered. For his good luck, Wilder was awarded a Bronze Star and, so far, seven additional decades of life.
It’s a common view of therapists that fear is an anticipation that something, a way of preparing you for something that could involve risk. The rational approach is to consider what steps would make you better prepared and keep taking preparatory action until the fear subsides.
But this can be easier said than done, especially in the heat of battle. Montaigne writes:
It is fear that I am most afraid of. In harshness it surpasses all other mischances.
He then makes an interesting point, that the people most prone to fear are those with the most to lose:
People with a pressing fear of losing their property or of being driven into exile or enslaved also lose all desire to eat, drink or sleep, whereas those who are actually impoverished, banished or enslaved often enjoy life as much as anyone else.
We see this play out in politics all the time, where people who live comfortable suburban lives often have a much greater fear of urban crime than the actual residents of those cities. While it’s true that cities often have more restrictive gun laws, even when they do not, city residents have significantly lower levels of gun ownership in the United States. In fact, the farther away an American lives from an urban center, the more likely he is to own a gun and to own multiple guns.
In general, I am not prone to react to fear, but I do have a bad habit of being frozen by it and instead of using the fear signal to take action to avoid harm, I ignore and it hope the risk goes away. Sometimes I get lucky and it does, but all too often I end up just digging a deeper hole for myself.
Sometimes the thing we should fear most in life is our default, unexamined state of mind.
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