Fear…? What have we to fear? This world is ours is it not? We have crushed all threats, all resistance. What of our fellow humanoids, we drove them to extinction first, then things that still presented a threat. We built walls, towering monuments to safety. Have we not yet killed the wolf at the door? I think we have. What now could challenge us but ourselves? It is no longer a wolf at the door, but a wolfish grin. What demons now lie in the shadows we can see? Afraid, yes we should be afraid. Fear, we feel it for a reason. We are not save you and I, we never have been. How can we be safe while the hunter hunts the hunter? Our own species turns against us. How then do you think we are safe? Worse yet behind smiles we are manipulated and do nothing, what we see: hear, learn, can decide, is all censored, moderated and controlled. But we made this cage and do not want to be safe.

If we did we wouldn’t create demons to fear, if we did we wouldn’t turn brother against brother, homelands against homelands. We would unite. But as ever the wheels of conflict drive us like slavers with raised whips. Destruction is our construction. What have we left to destroy, our habitat is dying. Suspicion turns friend to foe and we find ourselves alone in the unknown. Waiting for the knife to take us in the back, fearing the blow will come from a friend.

Reflections:

This was a piece of free writing that has been very sparsely edited before posting on the theme of fear. (cue mass surprise and death of shock) Why fear, well because that was one of the options and it was the first thing that came to mind I could write on for ten minutes which was the time I self-allocated. For ten minutes it doesn’t look like a huge amount on a computer but this was originally hand written. When approaching this concept of fear the first think I wanted was a human voice, it may be my own or that of a character but to explore fear, particularly in free writing I think that it would have taken much longer and been much harder to have written an impartial analysis of fear. Regardless part of this reflection will try to do just that. Fear in horror movies comes from an unnatural source, but thinking about it the setting of some of the best horror movies tries to lull you away from fear only to scare you more when the time comes.

To give a few examples, in Alien, the ship that eventually becomes an aliens playground and results in deep moments of tension was supposed to be flying home routinely. Nothing out of the ordinary. The crew seem completely unperturbed by the disturbance at least as far as fear goes and then just as everything seems okay and the afflicted crew member recovers, out bursts the alien and the terror begins. In films like The Cabin in the Woods that were made almost to parody the horror genre we have a supposedly safe lake house setting, group of friends go to a relatives place to stay, seems harmless enough. Again everything seems to be going just fine and then things start going wrong for the teenagers. In short there is nothing that humans find quite as terrifying as an everyday location or place that is deemed safe, suddenly not being.

This is not the only thing that worries people however a more real human fear that many people engage with every day is doing something they are not comfortable with. For me it is meeting new people, dealing with crowds. For others it could be anything. But elements of the unknown make a species so used to being in control scared. For instance we can’t control Hurricanes and they are something that is rightly feared in areas of the world in which they are prevalent. In other areas it may be an unexpected volcano eruption. It could be much more human and people could be scared of getting mugged as they walk home alone, we could fear flying for the first time. This is key I think looking back at the flow writing (free writing) that I did, after all we have killed almost all major threats that we could do. We fought the Neanderthals out of their lands until they died out. Creatures, bigger, stronger and more adapted to the climate of Europe than we were. Then we built walls to keep the things we feared at bay. Understandable on one level but I think that you could take that as a historical example of humanity right from its conception needing control, fearing fear if you like.

I think the thing that made me most want to use the human voice to portray views on fear here was that it felt to me so much more alive than looking at it this way. To have a human being questioning things, in the manner of a monologue or soliloquy, to be thought provoking in the same way that these are. It is interesting just how much more fear the human race seems to live with now we control the planet and fear each other. Look at the aftermath of 9/11. Islamaphobia has become prominent and people associate them with terrorism, and have treated them badly without cause. The novel Zeitoun is a perfect example of this, based on real events after hurricane Katrina the Syrian main character is degraded, imprisoned without voice because of his ethnicity. It even mentions in the novel the after effects of the 9/11 disaster on their lives. Another thing that was hinted at in the free writing was that we are fed information, what we see is controlled and that is another thing we can use when talking about the 9/11 disaster.

The media covered it in great detail, the administration jumped on the war with terror. Passed laws, created homeland security and yet terrorism has existed for years beyond count. It is not new to humanity, poisoned wells in medieval times could be seen as equivalents. The actions of the IRA, what about the numerous stories of school shootings or killings by white Americans. The gun crime in America was at one point higher by three times that of Europe combined and yet these people are not called terrorists in news-papers. Laws are not passed against them like they were to deal with terrorists. As such how in control are we of our own lives? Not very much when you think about the government deciding how much we pay, businesses as well. Corporate giants passing laws that benefit them and not the people. Look at the bonuses that people still get when the country is suffering in economic recession and the numbers of homeless and unemployed have been rising. It is late as I write this and I am being lazy and generalising or surmising things that were in my head when I wrote this more so than presenting a well prepared argument, however I do not think you really need to look up what I am saying or research it in depth to get an idea that what I am saying and trying to portray in this piece has some merit.

The final comment that I will address that I put into the flow writing is the comment ‘Destruction is our construction.’ This as you may have guessed is a comment on how the capitalist system works. In a word Competition. The sad thing is that the system is effective, competition drives progress. Companies sinking money into research to outperform/produce other companies has given rise to a technological golden age in many respects with leaps in technology that people would barely have dreamed of less than half a century ago. To think that almost a hundred years ago phones where a rarity, something for the upper class and now everyone has them, some of them as powerful as small computers. However the problem is that it is wasteful, resources are wasted on things which works because we are constantly replacing them, in the drive of demand we are burning through these resources at unprecedented speeds as well. Fossil fuel reserves are running low and new energy must be found because in order to power computers, lights and things which require more electricity we need more power. That is basic capitalism, demand makes supply and then profit so that the cycle can continue. But also forgetting capitalism for a moment and looking at our growth as a species in other respects the world is running out of room. We are having to cut swathes of forest for houses and as more people are born we need more things and so we make them but eventually the day is going to come, quicker than we think that we reach for things and they are not there.

In short this post was inspired by a lot of modern day issues, climate change is something we should be afraid of. We fear the unknown, we fear other cultures because of incidents and yet are prepared to overlook problems in our own rather than admit how close the beast is to home. The very final point that inspired this is the disintegration of community that is leaving us more and more isolated in a world that demands much of us. We are no longer a species that values community as highly as we once did. Preferring instead material concerns.

This is an explanation of what I was thinking of when writing this piece of free writing, I shared my thoughts partially as reflection; but also because what is useful for me in flow writing is the ability to put a great deal on paper quickly and then unpack it all. Consideration of why I wrote what I did helps me to think about writing in the future but also to think about what I could expand this into for my portfolio.

To those of you that stuck with me this far, you have my gratitude, I hope you have and will continue to have a good day.

Hugh