HALLOWEEN — Celebrating Fear

Fear has its own housing in the brain: a highly interconnected little almond-shaped nest of neurons called the amygdala. From its central location the amygdala asserts a huge, out-sized influence. It is the key element in all fear-related responses. It is the home of the flight-or-fight response, the keystone of anxiety, the neural host of post-traumatic stress.Taming fear has been a universal human pursuit down through all our ages. Amulets, prayers, sacred objects, rituals, horror stories, terror tactics: all have been employed in the effort to control or ward off or suppress fear.We have always been afraid of predators. Being part of the great chain of being we hunt, kill and devour our prey but we exist as prey for other, usually bigger animals. So fear functions to keep us alert to the possibility of predation.We are also afraid of other humans. We have always been territorial, always guarding our food source. Hunting and gathering were for eons the two tasks that consumed all our attention, recruited all our efforts. Anyone —other humans—seeking access to, if not wholesale acquisition of, our territory were deadly threats to our survival.That fear boiled our blood. Our little amygdala, in its very long evolution, cleverly hooked fear to anger, the other half of the flight-or-fight response. As humans evolved away from hunting-gathering and became sedentary, turning to farming and building cities, we became fierce warriors..

Men in warrior cultures did not suffer post-traumatic stress disorder.

.War for thousands of years was a human constant. Populations never stopped expanding and the greed for more arable land—lebensraum the Nazis called it—led to war upon war.War became glorified. You only have to look at statues and monuments around the globe to see battle emblazoned onto adulatory art. Grim, bloody battles scenes emerge in full glory out of the Elgin marbles from the ancient Athenian Parthenon. Fear of death was transformed into the most honorable form of dying—in battle. And the belief in an after-life provided the nostrum that made death survivable.But to make strong, implacable warriors-- men able to kill a neighbor with his own hands or a hand-held instrument—that required a special means to tame fear. To avoid combat trauma.Warrior cultures began recruiting children, young boys, into schools to harden them by systematically terrorizing them. The ancient Spartans (great heroes to the Nazis) sequestered boys and subjected them to trials facing terror. Other cultures sent boys into the forest under the order that they kill some beast, the fiercer the better, or not come back. Rites of passage were often brutal, such as circumcision far beyond infancy, as a test of pain endurance.Childhood trauma re-shapes the brain, entrains responses focused in the amygdala to bestill fear of combat, of its terrors both inflicted and endured.Men in warrior cultures did not suffer post-traumatic stress disorder; they were well hardened against fear.But the culture paid a price. Women were devalued. Romantic intimacy was bound under the fierce pride of duty. Collegial friendship was more prized. Enemies were demonized. Genocide became ready solutions, and every religion and many nations have practiced it.Fear is the fun motif behind our enjoyment of Halloween. It has become a celebration of death as a masque.  Halloween harnesses fear to joking guises. The “trick” of trick-or-treating is the gentle application of fear as an inducement to play hostage to it, to reward the trickster and thus avoid a fake punishment. Fear — all in good fun.Meanwhile, our TV news channels daily throw us images, coverages of horror and terror around the world, even nearby. Does that harvest a kind of hardening effect? Similarly, do video games with truly gory content provide the early training our ancestors might have relished? Hardening us against the experience of fear—fear of assault and from the trauma of inflicting it?Enjoy the fun of fear. Happy Halloween!