The Fear
The world has become in many ways an incomprehensible place to be. It is even more incomprehensible to realize that if it is like it is it is due to us, to the way we have built it, shaped it and created it. The world is a construction of men –of the male, of that genre supremacy in its origins (and maybe it is partly the reason why is so fucked up)- and when I state “world” I make reference not to the natural environment or the planet that we found living in, but the systems and the practices that formed a way of thinking and therefore, living.
This world, our small worlds in which we socially interact and cooperate between each other had been built on certain human values or religious mandates or utilitarist dogmas or maybe all of them. If we look closer into our planet –and I’ll use this word to make a defined difference with the word “world”- we can see many ways –even opposite between each other- of social structures and of human thought. Everything is an extension of the mind, of ideas; what performs the world, what produces it as it is, is a prolongation of ideas that have been accepted and reinforced through time. And time in that matter plays for the elder: no matter which ideas, or what kind of ideas are they; they will have a better hand in the moment of discussing any new coming thought.
Human beings have this ridiculous sense of complexity, derived in part from science, of the unknown, and of chance. Ridiculous not in the sense that it doesn’t exist such complex network but as an imbedded thought that spreads to all our social relations, constructions, adventures. It is true that life is complex. It is true too, that life is simple. There is no contradiction by saying this. What presents a contradiction of thought is believing pre factum that complexity reigns.
What I am going to focus is in the social relations between people and the belief of complexity that we imbed to this process. Why do we accept human relationships as a complex matter? Why do we attend to a trial of ourselves against the stranger –or viceversa- every time we are face to a matter of understanding terms. But, on the other hand, if it is wrong to start with the concept of complexity stuck to any spark of social contact, then this means it is purely a simple process instead?
Examples are the easiest way of understanding. Lets place the EFC as an example of a social structure in which different people interact. Of course, it is not the best example since the age of the people in this structure are nearly the same and their interest alike. But, it doesn’t matter for our purpose of exposing complexity and simplicity. A complex process of social interaction is, for example, favors. Even though I am not exposing this is a wrong or bad way of interacting, it is implicitly imbedded on any thing you do for someone else in a closed social place as the one we are using now. If someone asks you to do something, socially, unconsciously maybe, he becomes in debt. It is an easy debt to ignore if you want to, put it exists in the moment you commit yourself to do a favor to someone else. We state this as a complex state of affairs since it produces a network of values between the social entities that is based not only on quantity but also on quality of the favor. It takes from you but it also provides you. Following the same example, exterminating the concept of favor, we would have a simple interaction. How? Just by doing something for someone else without expecting retribution. But then why should I do it? Certainly, you will have no gain of doing anything, but you will do it because you have the opportunity, the possibility and the conditions to do it.
It seems that “simplicity” in this way of conceiving it, becomes a complex process and this argument shoots itself in the foot. Well, not quite. This concept just needs something to stand on, to be based on.
Then we will put simplicity over a concept that by itself is sufficiently simple, a rational emotion –or an feeling based on rationality- that is common to everyone, and that everyone understands no matter their condition, social status or race, it is universal enough to be understood easily: trust.
Trust is the base needed to make things work as they are: as a simple process between people that are essentially equal. Trust that someone will be there for you as you would, trust that nobody would do you wrong just by doing it. But then, the world is not like that… that what they say. But again, the world is what we have made of it, not what “it is”; it is our construction, our building and therefore, it can be changed because we can change as human beings. Imagine: everything would be simple if we just be together, trust each other, share and try to do better. Is not idealism, is not utopia. It is just simple rational thought.
But what go against this way of living is also a common, universal but irrational emotion that we all know well: fear. Fear comes against trust and destroys it without any hesitations. It is like a huge heavy amour that comes in our aid. And well, then we live with the armor 24/7. Trust is the base of simplicity, of human social relationship as simple and as obvious as it should be; fear is the base of complexity, of human social structure as it is.
And this is why we come again to see why human relationships are understood as a complex process of interaction, of bonding. Because the base of trust is so thin than once it is broken, or seem to be broken, or believed to be too weak and “it will break” we come back to fear and simplicity is gone.
I believe I am not wrong to say that trust is the key to make this world, all of our diverse worlds in which we are surrounded by, better. We can do better. Things can be better. It just a matter of trust. A matter of never give up on trust, even if you are abused, deceived, broke into pieces because due to stand on the trust side. Because then you think that you are fucked up BECAUSE of trusting. But that is, again, a wrong mental process; you are fucked up because of someone else, because of a human being, who deliberately used your trust in him to act against you. It is that individual subject the source of the problem, not trust. So then, you think, that if I don’t trust I don’t get abused. WRONG. Again: it is due to the subject that perpetrated the action. Not trusting at all doesn’t disable another subject to submit you into the same game. Of course, you will be more secured by not trusting, the probabilities of being wronged will decrease. But remember this: once you put a fence, you never take it back. Yes, it is true. Once you feel fear, you put a fence in front of your house, of yourself, then you believe that you are more secure. And then when something similar happens, even with the fence on front, you put another one, and then you feel secure again. And again, and again. And suddenly, you find yourself living in a cage.
The problem is on us. It is on the fear we invite to control our lives. As a friend far away in Santiago once told me: “Confidence is built at the speed that a palm tree grows and it is destroyed at the speed a coconut falls”. And it is true. That is why we have to be responsible of what we say and what we do. You can’t stand at dinning hall and destroy trust on your society that is the EFC as you shouldn’t stand in a stage and break the confidence of your countrymen. Then you have no decency at all. You make people lock their doors, hide their things, look with suspicion anyone they don’t know well. Is at easy as that to make the world worst. To make your own world a rat nest where there are no rats but everyone look like at the first glance.
Fuck fear. I keep on leaving my stuff on the table, leaving my door unlock.
