How To Choose Your People Chapter 8

Chapter 8 — Fear (1.0)

FEAR (1.0)

Fear: A feeling of alarm or disquiet caused by the expectation of danger, pain, disaster, or the like; terror, dread, apprehension.

– American Heritage Dictionary

"Now, Fred, slow down. Watch this car up here, Fred. Better get into the left lane, Fred. We have to turn eight blocks from here. That dog might run out. Be careful, Fred!"

(Scream)

Driver panics (at scream, not at any outside threat) and hits brakes; he nearly gets rammed by the car behind. Everyone is a nervous wreck.

Fear.

This tone wears many disguises. It slips down to influence the Sympathy person (who is afraid of hurting others) and Propitiation (where we see the strange manifestation of a person attempting to buy off imagined danger by propitiating), and it sneaks upward on the tone scale to lurk behind Covert Hostility and No Sympathy tones.

Most people harbor a few select, temporary fears. We see the tough, swaggering student who turns to a quivering butterfly in the seat of an airplane. We see a housewife who has the courage to be a Cub Scout den mother, but who quails at the sight of a harmless snake. We see the bull strength of the business tycoon melt into a pool of limp terror when forced to give a speech. Although irrational, these fears are not necessarily chronic, so they don't indicate that the person is a 1.0.

There is a time to be afraid, just as there is a time for joy or grief. It's sensible to have a respect for danger when caught in a burning house or a New York taxicab. That's survival.

Acute Fear (whether rational or irrational) causes a pounding heart, a cold sweat or trembling. This may be fear of actual death, injury or merely some harmless menace. Stark terror is the highest volume of Fear. In low volume, we see Fear expressed as excessive shyness, extreme modesty, or unwarranted suspicions. We find the person who gets tongue-tied easily, who withdraws from people, who jumps at a door slam.

CHRONIC FEAR

The person in chronic Fear tone lives with one or another of these manifestations all the time. He's continually frightened; everything is dangerous. He's afraid to exist. He's afraid to own things (he might lose them). His solution to life is to be careful – about everything. So, whether he's in terror, mild anxiety, dread or insecurity, he's at Fear on the tone scale. He talks about fearful things, real or imaginary.

In Grief we find anxiety taking a limp form ("Oh, dear, how am I going to handle this? I just don't know what I can do.") but at the higher tone of Fear the person tries to handle all of the anxieties. Of course, he's pretty ineffectual, but he does work hard at it.

DISPERSAL

This person is scattered – like a Kleenex that's been through the washing machine. He's trying to be somewhere else – anywhere else. He flits around, physically or mentally. His attention jumps from one thing to another. His conversation takes grasshopper leaps from subject to subject.

Sometimes (not always) you can see this dispersal in his eyes when he talks to you – they flit over here, over there, up, down – everywhere but straight ahead. He can't look at you.

LIFE IS THREATENING

Fear is careful because he knows that nearly everything is threatening. I once knew a man who insisted that all of the doors and windows of his house be locked, day and night. He called his wife half a dozen times daily just to see if everything was all right. If she went on an unscheduled visit to a neighbor, he phoned every house in the block until he located her. His speech was peppered with phrases such as "You can't be too careful," "You never know what might happen," and "It doesn't pay to take chances."

Where a higher-tone person will plan his attack on the enemy force, Fear is always planning his defense (if he's on the high side) or his retreat (if he's on the low side of Fear).

When there's a robbery on the other side of town, Fear puts extra locks on his doors. If he lives in Minnesota, but learns of a deadly new mosquito breeding in the tropics, he get anxious about it. His attention flits all over the universe trying to cover every possible danger.

In case you think there aren't many people at Fear, let me remind you of the now famous Orson Wells radio broadcast "The War of the Worlds" in 1938-a realistic but fictional report of a Martian "invasion." An estimated one million listeners missed the three announcements about the fictional nature of the program and panicked. Telephone lines were hopelessly jammed and people were running in the streets. A Fear person is gullible and credulous about fearful things. He selectively hears only communications on his own level.

A smooth-talking insurance salesman chalks up a bonus day when he meets up with a Fear person – the poor devil will buy one of everything.

SUBURBAN SECURITY

He's afraid of losing things, so he walks around constantly fearing that he'll get bad news – news of a loss. He's afraid he'll hear that his house burned down; he's apprehensive about getting fired; he wonders if somebody is going to die; he worries about his wife leaving him.

I once lived across the street from a Fear couple. His face compressed with deep worry lines, completely bald at the age of twenty-nine ( I don't know if that's relevant; but I'll mention it anyway), he and his wife worried constantly about germs, diseases, bad health, burglaries, accidents and disasters. Name anything dreadful – they dreaded it. Before letting their children out to play, they bundled them up like Eskimos for fear of catching colds. Interestingly, their two youngsters suffered more colds and illnesses than any children on the block.

One quiet Sunday morning I saw this neighbor cautiously emerge from his house. After carefully testing the door to make certain it was locked, he walked to the garage and unlocked it. After unlocking his car, he drove out to the gate, which he also unlocked. He backed the car out, returned to the garage and locked it, walked down the drive, put the chain padlock back on the gate and drove off.

Impressed, I thought: he must be leaving for a month. (We weren't living in the heart of the crime belt, you understand. The most serious wrongdoing in this bland suburban community during the previous six months was when a three-yearold youngster down the street toddled off with another three-year-old's tricycle). Ten minutes later, however, the neighbor returned with the Sunday papers. He unlocked the gate, the garage, and went through the whole lockup routine in reverse. This chap could put the security system at Fort Knox to shame.

While we were living in the same neighborhood, a salesman called one evening trying to sell a fire alarm system. We turned him down, but as he left I thought: If he would only stop across the street, they'll surely buy one.

Well, he did, and they did.

LOVE AND CHILDREN

At 1.0 love shows up as suspicion of proffered affection. Filbert offers Belinda his class ring. Instead of happily accepting it, she queries, "What does this mean?"

He tells her he loves her and she wonders what that really means: "I don't want to say I love you; it might turn out that I don't."

There won't be much free-wheeling love from a Fear partner. He's too careful to be spontaneous.

Fear parents strongly influence their children. I once knew a woman who actually hid in the bedroom closet whenever there was a thunder storm. Her fearful mother taught her to do this. I knew another woman who was afraid of cats, "My mother always said they were dangerous. You know, they're supposed to carry all sorts of diseases-at least that's what Mother told me."

A contagious emotion, Fear. Unless he takes the trouble to examine all the boogies himself, the child grows up convinced that nearly everything is dangerous.

IN BUSINESS

The Fear person performs poorly on a job. He constantly worries about protecting himself. He's afraid to make decisions, worries about taking on new projects and invents amazingly insurmountable obstacles to any new plan. "This is a dangerous time to get into that market. We could lose our shirts." "I'm afraid we'll get sued for patent infringement if we try this." "It's a nice idea if it weren't so risky."

Convinced that huge effort and energy are necessary to overcome his imaginary barriers, he'd rather put off than confront them. So he invents reasons why he can't do a job.

He tries to avoid responsibility at all cost (he thinks he'd be hurt): "Oh no, you're not going to get me to take on that job. Everybody would be passing the buck to me. I'd have to take the blame for everything that goes wrong."

While he's better than all the tones below this, you have a poor job risk here.

THE THREE LEVELS OF FEAR

Fear represents a crossover point on decision making. At the lower part of Fear, the person is afraid to do things. Retreating, on the run, he's a master at avoiding. At the high point of Fear the person is afraid not to. He defends against every possible eventuality. In the middle of Fear tone, we find the absolute maybe. Here is the person frozen into indecision; he can't make up his mind.

This is not the apathetic indecision of Grief ("I just don't know what to do"). At Fear the person actively vacillates between "Should I ?" and "Shouldn't I ?"

When a higher-tone person hits this level of the scale, he finds it uncomfortable. Here we see the young girl faced with the choice between two eligible men. She likes them both; she can't decide; she wavers back and forth. Finally, the indecision becomes so painful that she impulsively makes a choice (she may even run away with a third man who is totally unsuitable). Anything to move off that maybe.

Some Fear people, however, live in indecision for years – waiting for some occurrence to tip the scale. Such an individual is afraid to be right and he doesn't dare be wrong. He's afraid to and he's afraid not to. He can't commit himself. He can't plan the future, and he can't face the present. If you ask him to set up an appointment a few days in advance, he can't: "Call me later. We'll see what happens." (The more high-tone a person is, the more willingly he will commit himself to something in the future.)

Here we find the couple who date each other for seventeen years because they're afraid to get married. He's the man who wants to change jobs, but can't muster the nerve; he grows old waiting for the right impetus. Here's the miserable marriage that continues on because neither person works up the courage to resolve it or end it.

HOPE

Hope is a marvelous quality when it is quickly transferred into specific plans, actions and accomplishments. Every great doer starts with a dream. At Fear, however, we find the vacuum of blind hope – the deadly initiative killer. He doesn't progress; he doesn't give up. He simply postpones living today. It's too frightful, so he waits for something to happen. What is that something? I don't know. I've seen people who waited for years, but "it" never arrived. They spend their lives living out of mental suitcases; they never unpack and settle down to something and they never take off and go anywhere. They wait. They day-dream. They think wistfully. The next moment, the next hour, the next day, surety, will bring that magic something that dissolves all doubts.

That's blind hope. Waiting. Indecision. That's the dead center of Fear.

Fear is the last of the soft emotions. Now we're going to leave the mushy marshes and pick our way through a stretch of barbed wire.. .