FEAR and Happystance

Both in everyday encounters and during workshops, I frequently come across the power of FEAR (False Expectations Appearing Real) and how it can blight our current experience of our life. I described a visit to a pre-school group that had prompted me to consider the topic of chaos theory and happiness. It does seem as if some people’s current unhappiness is grounded in apprehensions about the future and a sense of helplessness about influencing those wider concerns and future events.

So, I recognised the phenomenon when I read Dr. Sanity’s tongue-in-cheek account of command hallucinations and the creation of FEAR. We need a Happystance to resist these strong command hallucinations and to provide us with personal and social resilience in the face of all the dire news that confronts us on a regular basis.

In The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, Friedman argues that the financial and social anxieties created by living in a stagnant economy lead people to look for explanations and answers in intolerance and fear. Furedi provides his own explanation for this behaviour. He claims that the phenomenon is responsible for the widespread internalisation of conspiracy theories: "[t]oday, acts of misfortune are frequently associated with intentional malevolent behavior".

Michael Crichton recently gave a lecture on Fear, Complexity, Environmental Management in the 21st Century. He gives a remarkable account of the mis-information surrounding the impact of Chernobyl. He summarises some of the statistics of estimated deaths and health-related problems and goes on to discuss how wrong they have proved to be. Crichton quotes a UN report from 2005 that says the largest public health problem created by the incident at Chernobyl is the: