FEAR AND CIVILIZED MAN

FEAR AND CIVILIZED MAN

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 17, 2008

“The wise man has his foibles as well as the fool. Those of the one are known to himself, and concealed from the world; while those of the other are known to the world, and concealed from himself.”

John Mason (1706 – 1773), English clergyman

“Fear is implanted in us as self-preservation. Its duty is to support reason rather than burden reason. Ergo, fear should not be allowed to tyrannize our imagination with phantoms of horror, but rather be a constant reminder of our mortality and how best to use it. It is not enough to know oneself. It is necessary to understand oneself which activates self-acceptance and its function, self-preservation.”

James R. Fisher, Jr., “Fragments of a Philosophy” (unpublished)

A WRITER WRITES:

Jim,

Here's a question you may be no more able to answer than I, but here goes: has every society suffered from PTSD? I read "Red Badge of Courage" as a boy, so I know the Civil War took its emotional toll. Soldiers came home suffering from "shell shock" in WWI. What about pre-gunpowder societies? What about warrior societies, like the Greeks of Medieval Europeans, where bloodshed was an every-day occurrence? Is PTSD a byproduct of being civilized, of thinking of killing as wrong while we're growing up and home, then doing it ourselves when called to war?

Just curious. I'm inclined to think the problem may always have been with us, but in the days before psychology it went unrecognized. I'd enjoy some confirmation, though.
T

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

T,

I am not a clinical psychologist, but I’m not sure clinicians have successfully explored the depths of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Otherwise, psychiatrists with their prescription drugs, and psychologists with their talking cures would have had more success than they have had to date.

My expertise is at the organization level where I have seen PTSD palpable in the dying corporation.

I mention this because my sense is PTSD is less about killing than escaping dying. That said my interest is in the emotion of fear and its relationship to our mortality both as individuals, and collectively as a society.

My sense is that post traumatic depression (PTSD) has existed as long as man has killed man, and suffers the apprehension, indeed, the accelerating anxiety of escaping being killed with the depression of that reality which inevitably follows.

My sense, too, is that when a person has had a narrow escape from death, there is a posttraumatic realization that he is alive, causing a psychophysical shock to his system.

When I was in high school, and a basketball player, Del Ploen’s father took us to a basketball game in Davenport (Iowa) to scout our next opponent in the state high school regional tournament. I stepped off the curve near the fieldhouse and a car traveling at great speed almost hit me. It would have killed me. The realization of that, once it hit my conscious mind, threw me into a faint, and Del had to catch me before I fell to the pavement.

Imagine when that scenario, escaping from death is repeated day after day after day as is the case in a combat zone such as Iraq. The escape from that punishing reality is denial that is, pushing that reality far back from the conscious mind.

It is why, I suspect, combat veterans can become heavy smokers, drinkers, druggies, or lose their programmed civility and do terrible things, things that they would never think or imagine doing were they still totally in charge of their faculties.

You would think that the killing would be the cause of PTSD. I don’t think so. It is seeing body parts of your comrades on the road realizing that could have been me.

We demonize the enemy as being less than human and deserving being killed. It is the mantra:” kill or be killed!” Murder in war is justified homicide, and often gravitates to genocide. “We are protecting our way of life,” and the enemy is trying to take it from us.

When I was a boy, we took in renters during WWII. One was an outpatient at U.S. Schick General Army Hospital in my hometown. This ex-G.I. had a good deal of his butt shot off by a sniper at Guadalcanal.

My parents were good listeners, and I as well, often hiding behind the sofa, as he talked incessantly about his escape, while his buddies died. He talked about using flamethrowers to kill Japanese soldiers that made my hair stand on end, but that was not his concern. It was why had he escaped and not them. He was a wreck but I thought he was only strange. My mother told me one day, “Be kind to him. He is hurting, and remember, he is why you can grow up to be a man.”

What I remember most about that ex-G.I. is his eyes. They were wild, restless, and although I didn’t understand at the time, full of terror. He was still in that foxhole at Guadalcanal. My wonder now is how he would have behaved if ordered to return to the Pacific Theater during that war.

My reason for mentioning this is because the other night on “The News Hour with Jim Lehrer” on PBS the widow of a G.I., who had committed suicide, was interviewed.

She said her husband was fun and funny, and a joy to his children before he went to Iraq. He came home and he couldn’t sleep, yelled all the time, was critical of everything she did, and constantly badgered their two small daughters. The older daughter said one day, “You’re not my daddy. I want my daddy back.” This reduced him to tears.

The G.I. tried to be treated for PTSD but the Veterans Administration claimed he didn’t qualify. He sought help from a private psychiatrist, who prescribed medication, which his wife claimed did not help. Then, he was ordered to return to active duty in Iraq, and he committed suicide. He was twenty-six.

Incidentally, he had told VA counselors, according to his wife, that he saw buddies blown up in the Humvies with body parts all over the road. The VA counselors wanted to know the names and units of each of these incidents, and soldiers, something he was unable to deal with much less recall.

It was not the killing that was his anxiety; it was the dying.

From your question, I sense that you see it more in terms of the killing and not the escaping death.

My experience, and I should caution you again, is not from actual combat but from the proximity of it in 1957.

As a member of the US Navy Sixth Fleet, and as a hospital corpsman striker on the USS Salem CA-139, I was assigned to a company of US Marines as their corpsman when we were ready to go down the nets and into an LST to invade Port Said, Egypt in support of the British and French as they bombed the Suez Canal.

At the last moment, all of us in battle dress, President Dwight David Eisenhower withdrew support and commitment for this incursion. We were ordered to “stand down!” I nearly fainted. All I could think was that I would never see my son who was born while I was in the Mediterranean, that I would never be able to do all the things I had ambition to do. I was in shock and didn’t know it.

On the other hand, the Marines in my company were gun ho to kill some Egyptians. They were trained killers, fit, focused and fearless. They accepted me because I might help save their lives. It was funny in a way. Marines look down on sailors in general, but have a special bond with corpsmen, who have shown great bravery in battle with them. I felt hardly brave. I was terrified.

My experience, as you can see, is limited, but that G.I. mentioned here who committed suicide was a Marine Reserve.

The twenty-first century Veterans Administration does a fair if not excellent job in treating veterans with physical battle scars but it does an inadequate job treating veterans with invisible scars.

My parents were not educated, especially in matters of the mind as psychiatrists and psychologists are, but in retrospect, I think they saved that Guadalcanal veteran's life.

They stayed up for hours listening to him go over in minute detail the agony of his war. They didn’t interrupt or ask him embarrassing questions. He was a hero to them. He trusted them and increasingly talked about things that I didn’t understand, grown up things.

I think that young Marine that committed suicide might be alive today if he had had my parents to listen to him, to accept his pain, to share his horror, and let his mind release all its pent up confusion and see it dissipate into thin air.

More than 700 returning veterans from Afghanistan and Iraq have committed suicide, 700 men and women that escaped death in the battle zone only to have death haunt them and never release them from that horror once in the safety of their home environment.

Fear is something from which there is no escape but from which we can become self-estranged. We are supposed to be brave, but physical courage demands a separation from psychological fear. It is by embracing fear that we become brave, not by denying fear for fear is the mother of safety, not the opposite.

By a curious coincidence, most quotations with regard to fear are masked in the idea of evil, and not in the reality of mortality.

If we are truly in touch with the fact that we are all afraid of death, then we are ready to live. I have called this confident thinking.

If we are afraid to live a full life with all life's vicissitudes, then death haunts our ever move. There is no way to display confidence. We are obsessed with safety and there is no safety from death. Death is inevitable. There is safety in fear because it is Life’s providence.

It is ironic but true that people who are devoted to death defying feats are actually afraid of life. It is how they cope with fear.

It is also why the theater of violent sport is so appealing. It is a way to experience pain and danger vicariously. We have become a spectator society to life finding it more appealing to live vicariously through others we make celebrity because they live the glamorous dangerous existence to which we prefer fantazie.

It is a substitute for an active life without the pain of the reality of being hurt, disappointed, embarrassed or possibly destroyed. Why do you think scandal magazines are so popular? The scandalized are doing what we fear but find tantalizing.

The Roman Empire understood this syndrome and used it by having gladiators fight to the death in amphitheaters filled with passive spectators.

We haven’t made much progress with all our electronic and technological wonders at understanding our mortal selves. We have opted for distractions, not realizing that the less actively we are engaged in life the less fulfilling it can be. And what is the greatest problem of modern society? Depression. It is as if Mother Nature is telling us there is no escape from fear. So, use it!