To simply fear an external object or circumstance is very different from the all-encompassing spiritual dread and fear that Hunter S. Thompson liked to describe using the lens of a drug trip going bad.
The Fear, correctly capitalized and formalized, was something permeating and overpowering one's basic experience. It was no longer the temporary attack or avoidance of a given limited threat, but the imminent quality of the entire landscape, experienced as rising up within one's own self, inescapable, experienced itself as a sort of End - however drug-induced that end might be.
One can glimpse signs of such a thing in the political and cultural landscape of the United States, the failed and failing state, lurching with a great shadow cast downward and downslope like a great doomed tree, its back cracking against growing winds.
There are many totalizing experiences and perceptions here, whether you want to describe them with a capital Fear, Anger, Dread, Rage, Anguish, or what have you, and you see them in the daily discourse. And the mundane daily administrative cycles stop and start, stricken with existential questions of life and death, with the many classes and identities cracking and folding under each other as they seize up together under the failing machinery.
But it doesn't matter how huge the capital Distress may be, it must still be localized and navigable, at least if one cares to continue to persist in this world.
