The Fear of Our Fathers

I’m noticing a rising trend of people willing to publicly broadcast their struggles with anxiety. This was once a hush-hush condition, but today a Google search of TED talks on anxiety produces 340,000 results. Teenagers talk openly about their anxiety as if it were akin to acne – unwanted, but basically unavoidable. “Pop a Xanax” is becoming a common and often lighthearted prescription for just about any level of emotional discomfort. This uptick is actually not too surprising, given the kind of society in which we live. An entire population of deeply anxious individuals is just one of the logical conclusions of a capitalistic society.

Let me explain: in our free market, the work of the advertiser is to actually create a tension in the consumer that only the purchasing of their product can relieve. The wildly successful AMC series Mad Men was based on this idea and its consequences. Fear mongering is at work underneath not only toothpaste and auto sales, but also cable news channels and educational choices. When I was young, I used to be afraid of monsters; now I’m afraid of rising interest rates. We then pick up on that pattern and begin peddling anxiety to those around us, even when we have nothing to sell but our approval. Because we’re social creatures, the last thing any human wants to be is on the outside looking in. Everyone is trying to sell us something, and it’s easy to become either brutally cynical or perpetually gullible in our endless search for reprieve from those pressures. 

I’m not making an argument against capitalism - there is no problem-free social model, and this is simply the other side of a pretty shiny coin. I’m just pointing out the phenomenon is not likely to go away. But aren’t you tired of being manipulated? As I’m writing this, I even have to check my own fear that I’m trying to manipulate you into “buying” into St. Patrick’s worship service this Sunday. Yet I don’t have to manufacture your anxiety for you. Right now, there are probably a dozen potential dangers you have your eye on, and you just want a solution. Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s famous attribution, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” is widely accepted as a true proverb but it’s almost entirely unhelpful, and I’d like to even challenge its truthfulness. What if fear isn’t actually a burden, but a gift? What if even manufactured fear can be a conduit to something we were actually made for – something that can’t be manipulated? What if fear itself is not a curse, but a blessing? I’ll tell you I think the Psalmist has the responses to those questions you need, and they can be yours, at the low, low, price of…