Fear

Fear is vital, Fear is healthy. 

My biggest fear are spiders, always has been, my siblings would chase me with them and put spider legs on my bed.  Poor spiders find themselves in my Dyson V8, I have been known to have the Dyson on at all hours!

My fear now is actually more anxiety, anxiety about the future, fear of the unknown. Fear & anxiety about researchers finding new medications, fear about the plasma always helping me. 

Emotions, especially fear, whip humans up into a state of alarm, they become angry and almost evangelical about what they believe.

The UK is full of fear, It's not just threats of terrorism, economic collapse, cyberwarfare and government corruption – some even fear how they will afford to heat their homes or even eat. 

In the USA, leading up to the election, 56 percent of Americans said they'd be afraid if Trump won the election, while 43 percent said they'd be afraid if Clinton won – with 18 percent of respondents saying they're afraid of either  winning.

Trump's rhetoric has only served to fan the flames: They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists.  It's only getting worse. You walk down the street, you get shot.  Build a wall. Ban the Muslims. Obama founded ISIS. Hillary is the devil. Death, destruction, violence, poverty, weakness. And I alone can make America safe again.

Never have I been so glad to be British.

I believe we are living in the most fearmongering time in human history, the main reason for this is that there's a lot of power and money available to individuals and organizations who can perpetuate these fears.  Mass media, insurance companies, Big Pharma, advocacy groups, lawyers, politicians and so many more, fear is worth billions. And fortunately for them, fear is also very easy to manipulate.

The human brain is mostly a stress-reactive machine. Its primary job is to keep us alive, which is why it's so easy to flip us into fear all the time, I believe our biology and psychology are flawed and susceptible to corruption.  

The amygdala, a tiny, almond-shaped region deep in each hemisphere of the brain, is the home of emotional responses, specifically fear.

I have read countless articles about "amygdala hijacking"  which best describes what inflammatory rhetoric and imagery are designed to do, they trigger the emotional brain before the logical brain has a chance to stop it.

Emotions are not hard wired, I believe they are incredibly complicated, emotions morph and change, go back and forth, I think you can have as many emotions as you can conceptualize.

Fear is experienced in the conscious mind – the cerebral cortex – where we assemble the experience and label it as an emotion.  Fear is a response to a present threat, Anxiety is a worry about something that hasn't happened and may never happen. 

Big banks, ISIS, environmentalists, patriarchy, feminists, The right or the left, Illuminati. Choosing a single enemy won't make you any happier.