Perseus and the Gorgon of Today

Should Fear be added to the list?

I think so.

We have all heard the story of the Tower of Babel but many fail to take this and use it as an analogy for life.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_of_Babel

More and more self help books to help peaople deal with fear is not because the first book was not adequate it is because everyones personal dictionary keeps getting bigger and your words and my words don’t mean the same thing.

Until we tear down the tower of individual words and go back to a smaller and smaller dictionary we will just keep building Babel.

enjoy the read.

As we know, there are seven deadly sins: anger, pride, envy, avarice, gluttony, lust, and sloth. But since about the 1950s, an eighth sin has come to dominate the thinking of psychologists, philosophers, and personal development gurus. Indeed, thousands of books have been written on the topic, and we are wrestling with the issue even today as I write this. The pages of The Epoch Times are full of it as an underlying issue.

President F.D. Roosevelt presciently identified it and wrote about it in his first Inaugural Address in 1933. He said, “So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is … fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” There it is: fear.

Our Obsession With Fear
Perhaps the book that most expresses our obsession with the topic is Susan Jeffers’s famous “Feel the Fear, and Do It Anyway.” This 1987 book is one of the key manifestos of the personal development movement. In fact, we learn from her bio that the author “has helped millions of people all over the world to overcome their fears.” Job done, then. No more fear. Well, as David Brooks observed, “The existence of more and more self-help books is proof that they rarely work.”

The point of fear and why it is so toxic is that it is alleged to be the root cause of many other psychological problems, including indecision, procrastination, anxiety, anger, and more generally a profound form of irrationality. In a fear state we cannot, as it were, think straight, and so we make suboptimal, weak, poor, or bad choices.

This is why the personal development movement especially dislikes fear; fear prevents us from realizing our full potential as human beings—it holds us back. Hence the subtitle of the Jeffers book: “Do It Anyway,” and so realize who you really are despite the fear. (We note in passing how mainstream this advice has become, with Nike’s “Just Do It” slogan exactly striking the contemporary note that enables it to sell and shift millions of units!)

David Adams

Article URL : https://www.theepochtimes.com/perseus-and-the-gorgon-of-today_3385591.html