For a vivid illustration of the dangers of ill-considered thought and its relation to the real, a brief survey of the operations of political fear could be quite useful.
Let's start with a more basic conception of fear. You have these fear responses that are evolutionarily hardwired for certain old antagonisms, like for dangerous insects and snakes, apex predators, predatory and/or aggressive human emotions and behaviors, and then scaling up, explosive forces, loud unidentified rumbles and/or noises, earthquakes, approaching fires and floods, and so on.
These fear responses can differ per individual, but for the most part, there is a universal collection of elemental threats that by exist simply by virtue of the way in which we are all built.
As social organization becomes progressively more materially and politically complex however, the ques start to change. When you're living among a greater population, there is always going to be some portion of that population that is subjected to certain elemental threats (when they come) first, and so you are also taking cues from others and their reported experiences and information to judge whether you are going to be coming into danger next. That person yelling from the bush over yonder about getting bit by a poisonous snake is a good cue not to go by that bush, which is simplifying things a bit too much I know, but you get the point. And to a certain extent we are also hardwired to pick up on those compounded social cues too, which adds additional considerations, such as the nature and intensity of another's emotions and register, and how convincing it all is, and what it means for us.
Not only that, but with growing material and political complexity comes an increasing complexity in society's powers of production and destruction, and so the intelligible sequences of motion that result in the more elemental destructive forces become more complex as well, so it takes more thinking and deciphering to make sense of those cues of increasing complexity. As we are gradually socialized into a modern society from a young age, part of that socialization involves modulating and shaping those innate fear responses to encourage appropriate social behavior on the one hand, and then training the executive controls through teaching to properly ascertain and navigate the complex dangers of the modern world on the other hand.
To be redundant for a minute, this socialization process is quite social though, and at greater scales, it becomes quite political too. The process in which power concentrates is in itself a complex, multifaceted process, but part of that concentration takes place to better manage material complexity - as a side note, I'll have to interrogate our notions of complexity and simplicity at another time. In the same way, we collectivity concentrate particular symbols, narratives, and ideologies to think about that complexity as well, which forged through collective intellectual and cultural labor and repeated usage, are then regularly circulated whole to help guide us in our daily lives.
These collective symbols and ideologies prescribe certain daily perceptions and actions, and so order large masses of organized labor and institutions to move and function in a certain way and in a certain direction, together. It becomes clear why such concentrated systems of thought would become such hotly contested political sites, which results in all kinds of additional complications in navigating daily modern life. Collective fears can become further entrenched through tribal signaling and alliance, and through the forging of personal and national identity through this process. And to be clear, there can be real advantages and benefits to participate in certain factions and share their preferred fearful fixations, given you are the right demographic to be plugged in with a given faction.
One good example would be the US' political culture at the height of the War on Terror. The political class - and capital standing behind it - was very interested in directing the popular fear, that Eye of Sauron, towards the Middle East and its peoples, and to a lesser extent, towards other hot spots around the world where military action was desired, which would cultivate a public sensibility that would facilitate that action. Which created some very interesting distortions.
You had people on the lookout for the much rarer terror attack - and forget the white people with guns; we really had to watch out for the brown people - or anthrax powder in the mail, while industrial agriculture and the fossil fuel industry and mass automobile transportation and financial crisis and abandonment hummed away in the background, chewing through the body politic with regular ambient heart disease and cancer and literal car crashes, or the economically exploited and abandoned committed suicide by firearm or overdosed via opioid, or died via homelessness and exposure, and so on down the list of real modern threats to life.
All of that directed stress and anxiety and anger is energy intensive in itself. It beats your body up; it exhausts your mind. Arthritis, gut issues, hypertension, depression, etc. It can drive you to drink, which can accelerate all of that other stuff too.
What's more, the collective contestations of the objects of danger can themselves be sites of danger. Disagreements arise over what to fear, and what to do about those fears with social resources, disagreements that become welded through conflict to one's identity, increasing the propensity and explosiveness of potential conflict.
And all of these issues remain chronic today, and indeed are growing worse. To listen to the discourse out of Washington, it is China and foreign invasion which is the great threat today. Nevermind that the domestic oligarchs and the domestic political class become ever more bold about exacting blood from the stone, wringing what life is left from the body politic. And forget climate change altogether. That's someone else's problem.
So, pretty much everyone has the capacity to fear something, and as you can see, in the modern world that something can have its genesis in a dizzying array of sources, which could be sources of real danger or phantoms of the imagination. It bears thinking about and training that capacity to fear, at least to the extent that one can reduce what risks one can in one's own life, as bad thinking and bad consideration can actually be quite dangerous.
To point to a simpler metaphor, a survival manual will tell you that ankle deep water may not look very frightening, as compared to a swollen river or a mudslide, but if that water is moving swiftly enough, it can trip up and sweep away a grown adult. And what is in that water and where that water is going matters too.
In regard to risk though, we all die eventually, and one can't anticipate little thing besides. As hopefully I've shown here, there is a lot to take stock of and consider when working through one's thoughts and fears, and the path forward is not always clear. And then part of longevity is finding it in oneself to chill out altogether, when appropriate. Working through the dangers of thought and its relation to action then figures a lifetime of work. More later.
