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Why Dune’s Litany Against Fear Is Good Psychological Advice

5 points by _Microft 5y ago

austincheney 5y ago
I cannot help but disagree. Fear is great and essential. Fear raises our pulse and hones our mental focus with great precision. Fear is perhaps among the most developed reaction in animal neurophysiology. Fear is good. Panic is bad. The distinction is the difference in cause and response. It takes a mature mind to appreciate the difference. The human mind is not fully developed to account for this until the prefrontal cortex gains power over the limbic, which for most people is age 22-24. Even then it takes great practice and experience to properly transform a fear response into something supremely beneficial.
- WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
  > Fear is great and essential. I think fear is neutral - productive where it can be and crippling where it can't.
imbnwa 5y ago
This is such an abstract, storybook way of talking about fear. There's just no point to talking about processing fear without talking about causes and relations between things. The article attempted to legitimate itself by excluding "trauma" from the definition but it's still more porous than that. Things like White Flight don't happen because people failed to let fear "pass over and through them", they're social praxis. The celebration of FOMO in amorous relationships (at least in milieus I've been party to) is bordering on celebrated to disastrous societal effects, again, social praxis. Many of the fears people deal with aren't of the class of fears that "fear of skydiving" or "fear of bees" belongs to. This pseudo-existentialist take hand waives the complexity of the problem. Fear is often cultivated in our social milieus in ways which can avoid critical introspection. And saying the "hard stuff" is "trauma" makes the solution easier to describe when in reality everything classed as "trauma" is a gradient that overlaps with whatever it is this litany deems to address. Better than telling me how little risk-averse you are, how fearless you are (since our society has overcorrected and its popular to stamp yourself as 'fearless' in some way), I'd be more convinced if someone told me what the substance of their commitment to some value or goal was that carries them over and against fearful outcomes. These are the people that historically have truly been fearless. But abstract fearlessness as it abounds in society today is opaque and uncritical in its value. We have enough examples of subcultures that revolve around this abstract brand of fearlessness and yet you find these milieus bound by all sorts of unwritten social rules they dare not break.
- sdwr 5y ago
  You're missing the point by taking a societal/social stance. The angle of the original mantra is personal, stoic, and frames an internal locus of control. As an individual, I can't always control what you do or the situation I'm in, but I can influence my own reactions, and dig deep to change+grow.

5 points by _Microft 5y ago

I cannot help but disagree. Fear is great and essential. Fear raises our pulse and hones our mental focus with great precision. Fear is perhaps among the most developed reaction in animal neurophysiology. Fear is good. Panic is bad. The distinction is the difference in cause and response. It takes a mature mind to appreciate the difference. The human mind is not fully developed to account for this until the prefrontal cortex gains power over the limbic, which for most people is age 22-24. Even then it takes great practice and experience to properly transform a fear response into something supremely beneficial.

WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
> Fear is great and essential. I think fear is neutral - productive where it can be and crippling where it can't.

imbnwa 5y ago

This is such an abstract, storybook way of talking about fear. There's just no point to talking about processing fear without talking about causes and relations between things. The article attempted to legitimate itself by excluding "trauma" from the definition but it's still more porous than that. Things like White Flight don't happen because people failed to let fear "pass over and through them", they're social praxis. The celebration of FOMO in amorous relationships (at least in milieus I've been party to) is bordering on celebrated to disastrous societal effects, again, social praxis. Many of the fears people deal with aren't of the class of fears that "fear of skydiving" or "fear of bees" belongs to. This pseudo-existentialist take hand waives the complexity of the problem. Fear is often cultivated in our social milieus in ways which can avoid critical introspection. And saying the "hard stuff" is "trauma" makes the solution easier to describe when in reality everything classed as "trauma" is a gradient that overlaps with whatever it is this litany deems to address. Better than telling me how little risk-averse you are, how fearless you are (since our society has overcorrected and its popular to stamp yourself as 'fearless' in some way), I'd be more convinced if someone told me what the substance of their commitment to some value or goal was that carries them over and against fearful outcomes. These are the people that historically have truly been fearless. But abstract fearlessness as it abounds in society today is opaque and uncritical in its value. We have enough examples of subcultures that revolve around this abstract brand of fearlessness and yet you find these milieus bound by all sorts of unwritten social rules they dare not break.

sdwr 5y ago
You're missing the point by taking a societal/social stance. The angle of the original mantra is personal, stoic, and frames an internal locus of control. As an individual, I can't always control what you do or the situation I'm in, but I can influence my own reactions, and dig deep to change+grow.