The world, as God’s creation, is a place of beauty, goodness, and even awe-inspiring.
Yet it also can be a scary place. It contains things, including people, that reasonable, wise human beings should fear.
The current political climate is no different from virtually every other such climate in being ugly. Politicians, activists, journalists, and media commentators, however well-intentioned some individuals may be, constitute a system that is powered by stoking the fears of the citizenry. This is bad, but not because there is anything wrong with fear per se. There’s not:
Fear is not a malfunction. Fear is a performance system—a deeply integrated physiological process that exists to prepare the human organism for moments of extreme demand.
What makes the political system unhealthy is that partisan political actors in government and the media labor tirelessly to instill fear without recommending ways in which that fear can be managed or constructively expressed. This also explains why fear is invariably accompanied by anger—an emotion that, physiologically (even if not necessarily psychologically), is identical to fear.
Stop and consider what happens when the body experiences fear.
The amygdala, an almond-sized structure located deep inside the brain, is activated by information conveyed to it through the senses. It is an early warning system that danger may be on the horizon.
And it is early because, of necessity, it acts within milliseconds—well before the emergence of conscious thought. After all, if the brain had to wait for careful reasoning before reacting to danger, humans would not survive long. Imagine stepping off a curb and seeing a truck racing toward you. If you had to calmly analyze the situation first, you’d be dead.
The amygdala activates the sympathetic nervous system. This is the part of the autonomic nervous system responsible for what is often called the “fight-or-flight” response. This system sends signals through the spinal cord to the adrenal glands, which sit on top of the kidneys. The adrenal glands then release powerful hormones into the bloodstream, including adrenaline (epinephrine) and noradrenaline.
These are the chemicals that transform the body almost instantly: heart rate increases; breathing accelerates; blood pressure rises; vision sharpens; and the muscles are primed for explosive movement.
What’s crucial to grasp here is that, for as awful as this experience of fear feels, it is both necessary and desirable that it should occur in order to maximize our odds of neutralizing threats.
In other words, the body is not panicking. It is arming itself for action. Blood flow is redirected away from systems that are not immediately necessary—like digestion—and toward the muscles and brain. This ensures that the tissues responsible for survival receive the maximum supply of oxygen and energy.
Pupils dilate so that the eyes gather more visual information. Reaction time improves. Pain sensitivity often decreases, with adrenaline performing as an anesthetic. This allows injured individuals to continue functioning long enough to escape danger.
While many people interpret these sensations—racing heart, shaking hands, rapid breathing, clamminess, queasiness—as signs that they are losing control, biologically speaking, just the opposite is occurring.
The body is entering a state of heightened capability.
Still, the physiological benefits of fear are at once unpleasant and overwhelming, but mostly because of the psychological lens through which the physiology of fear is interpreted. If one interprets the sensations of fear as signs that one is weak or cowardly, then fear can readily lead to a state of paralyzing panic.
That athletes often experience the exact same bodily signals before competition—pounding heart, heightened alertness, adrenaline—but refer to this as a matter of being “pumped up” shows that the panic arises from interpretation, and not the physiology of fear itself.
It is not the body that has changed from one context to the other. It is only the interpretation that has changed.
Self-defense training is crucial both for the management of fear and for a healthy appreciation of the nature of real-world violence. Good self-defense training produces students who will no longer interpret fear as a sign of weakness, but as a signal that the body is preparing for battle. And because they know that they are capable of defending themselves with brutal efficiency, and train to use violence only in the event that they must, they are the most likely to avoid potentially violent encounters.
When, though, political commentators at once scare and enrage their constituents with accounts of the egregious offenses of their political rivals, they in effect “hijack” their amygdalae. They activate their nervous systems, priming their bodies for action, without providing them with any opportunities for taking action. They essentially tell them to be afraid, to be angry—but refuse to tell them what to do with that fear and that anger.
Training for mastery in the use of violence helps to integrate fear and anger into the practitioner’s very being. Those who haven’t assimilated these feelings into themselves are either constantly on edge to the point of despairing over the state of their country, or they engage violently with law enforcement or others whom they see as impeding “progress,” as they conceive it.
So, martial training (i.e., training in the use of lethal violence for strictly self-defensive purposes only) does not rid one of fear and anger. It helps one to reside within these feelings, to manage them.
Those who don’t train are all too easily dominated by them.
Thus, the divisiveness that belongs to any politics becomes less prone to crisis and violence when citizens train to acquire some level of martial excellence, for the latter consists in mastery over fear and anger—the two emotions upon which our political situation vitally depends.