Yes, fear often tends to be a response to threatening stimuli, or stimuli perceived to be threatening. But beyond that is a spectrum into terror and panic, where there is much more going on. For example, underlying terror and panic is a breakdown in organization and a failure of discipline amidst the coping milieu. Terror arises in an environment in which one's trusted means of mitigation and perpetuation completely break down: "nowhere to run, nowhere to hide," as the horror movie trope goes. It is not just the external threat that is the problem, but one's living framework which is affected by a given threat.
Yes, an overwhelming external force can bring this breakdown about all on its own; indeed, that is the nature of calamities like natural and man made disasters. But important to the analysis here are the internal conditions for breakdown and ensuing panic. Because overwhelming force can build up, and build up in relation to internal frameworks, and it often does build up in response to over-zealous responses to perceived external threat.
The traditional law and order approach deceptively recognized the internal portion of the dynamic by focusing intensively and obsessively on external threats real and imagined, and so a process of internal and social sterilization occurs, in which substantial resources are put into reinforced concrete and steel: stronger prisons, more powerful and spread out militaries, and the like, and so internal discipline and organization is concentrated and intensified in an undisciplined and unorganized way, to the impoverishment of everything else.
And then gradually over time, the tremors and convulsions grow. And blockades and shieldings appear in the capitol, and metal detectors and security and bulletproof shields appear in offices and schools and convenience stores, and the police begins to resemble the military, and the convulsions only continue to grow. The fear and terror spreads.
And in a similar way, the fields and medical patients are bombed and gassed, and are sterilized, and require ever greater doses and concentrations of herbicide and antibiotic to fight off the strengthening hordes. And the war on drugs and the war on poverty, like splashing about an oil fire, spread the drugs and poverty. Need I go on?
On the flip side of that coin, you have something like the hippie movement, which in its mainstream strains, renounces external threat along with all of the discipline and organization that goes with addressing those things.
And so without traditionally disciplined and cultivated means of maintenance, and stewarding systems that sustain the ecstasies and illuminations of intoxication and ecstatic ritual, free love, communal living, and the like, those phenomena are burnt up and dissolve into bad trips, fair weather friends, and failed communes, and the fear and terror spreads.
So, where and how do we get our food, our shelter, our relations, our securities, our delights? How to put it all together so that it works together?
