To Fear Fear Itself

“Your emotions are the  slaves to your thoughts, and you are the slave to your emotions.” Elizabeth Gilbert once said. In this world that we live in, our emotions impact what we do. Whether we get married because of our love or kill because of our anger, our emotions control what we do. But there is one emotion that even controls other emotions and that emotions is fear.  We could actually be scared of losing the person so we fall in love and get married in order to not lose them. We could be scared that someone might hurt our family so we get angry in order to kill someone else. Fear is a powerful emotion. Because of how powerful fear we fear fear itself. There are many real life examples of this and they will be pointed out today. Another really good example of humans fearing fear is in a novel called the Lord of the Flies by William Golding. In this novel and in my real life examples, the readers can clearly see that because humans are scared of being scared, they will do anything to get rid of that fear.

To prove my point, there is a section in the Lord of the Flies that I would like to analyze. In this section, the children were doing a ritualistic dance around a campfire chanting “Kill the beast. Cut his throat! Spill his blood!” The beast is a creature of the night that one of the little ones claimed he saw and has taken form in many of the children’s mind. Suddenly Simon, one of the children of the camp,  runs towards the group of children. He comes bearing news of what he found while he was away. He had found out the truth of the beast. That there is no beast. It was just their fear taking over their imagination. But of course, things does not go as planned. When the children saw Simon, they didn’t recognize him, though he was the beast and attacked him. ´¨“ The beast was on it’s knees in the center, its arms folded over its face. It was crying out against the abominable noise, something about a body on the hill.“ (152) This relates back to my thesis because the children were too scared of being scared they tried to hide the fact that they were scared and instead put on a brave front. They decided to kill the beast, the epitomy of their fear. Many people would think that this would not be them running from their fear but instead just being completely crazy. It is easy to argue that case but I myself, never liked thinking of things inside the box.

The example from the book relates to the Trayvon Martin case. In the Trayvon Martin case, Trayvon Martin was walking home from the store, when he was shot and killed. George Zimmerman, the man who shot him, claimed it was out of fear. He did it because he was scared that Trayvon would kill him. “I know that if I didn't act, act the way I did, um, I wouldn't be here.” George Zimmerman says as quoted in the Tampa Daily. George Zimmerman was so convinced that Trayvon was suspicious that he acted out of fear. He tried to get rid of the object of his fear by killing the person who emitted this fear. George Zimmerman was scared to be scared so he tried to get rid of it even if it wasn’t the right thing to do.

Another example in the Lord of the Flies that proves my point is the killing of Piggy. Piggy, is a character in the book that is very underappreciated. He is a very smart fellow and knows how to keep a calm head in the face of danger. However, because he has this much knowledge, the kids don’t like him and never take him seriously. In fact they insult him even when he presents good ideas. One day, Piggy is trying to help them out but they were all scared of listening to what Piggy said because they did not want to admit that Ralph was better, they killed him. “ Which is better- to be a pack of painted Indians like you are, or to be sensible like Ralph is?“ (180). By this point in this story, the readers would just think that the children of this island is crazy but in fact that they are just acting on normal human instincts. They just do not want to be scared so they are running away from that fear.  Like in this example, they are just running away from their fears and are trying to save what little of their human selves they have left.