Yesterday, in the final installment of my series on The Singularity and the 12th Imam, I briefly explained the distinction between anxiety and fear. When you know the object of your worry, the feeling is fear; when the worry is about the unknown, it is anxiety. While this is an over-simplification, it is a decent working definition. A little fear and anxiety has obvious survival benefits.
[Anxiety and Depression are the two main dysphoric affects that serve as motivators for Psychological defenses. Depression is the feeling you have that a disaster has taken place in the past; anxiety is the feeling you have that a disaster will take place in the future.]
Children have innate separation anxiety, when they are in unfamiliar or dangerous environments. This has obvious survival benefits. In ancient days, a child separated from his parents would be at great risk of death from exposure or predation; while we live in a much safer world, children still face such risks, unfortunately. In this case, the anxiety serves as a signal. In other words, when a child starts to wander, after a short time without visual or auditory contact with his mother, he will start to feel a low level of anxiety. This signal anxiety induces him to stop his wandering and look around or call out, in order to make contact with his mother; once he sees her or hears her, the anxiety dissipates; if he cannot make contact with his mother, he will be motivated to take further action to find her, as his anxiety increases. In some cases, the signal anxiety escalates and can eventually turn into traumatic anxiety, or panic. Once the anxiety has escalated to such a degree, it no longer serves a signaling function; the intensity of the anxiety has become disorganizing and dangerous. Once traumatic anxiety has ensued, the person, in a panic, can no longer think logically and act rationally, and their ability to function is dangerously impaired.
Everyone knows about the "fight or flight" response to danger, but traumatic levels of anxiety, can engender paralysis, which renders the "fight or flight" response useless. I used the example of crossing the street and noticing a speeding car coming your way. The fear can mobilize you to run out of the way, but if the signal fear becomes overwhelming and you freeze, your signal fear has betrayed you by becoming traumatic fear, or terror.
When the fear (or anxiety) becomes overwhelming, and when it appears when it is not warranted, it causes serious, someitmes life threatening, problems.
Children who are so terrified of separation that they become traumatized when their parents leave them, for example, children with school phobias, can be seriously impaired by their anxiety. In such cases, the anxiety has morphed into traumatic anxiety.
There is one other aspect of anxiety that is worth noting. In my examples, the anxiety producing situation is circumscribed in time and space and easily resolved. In cases where a person is subject to more chronic, unresolved, or unresolvable, anxiety, we are no longer dealing with an acute trauma but with strain trauma, the effects of trauma experienced over long periods of time, which cause more subtle and chronic disruptions of thinking and feeling.
I bring this up now because I think it is relevant for our current situation:
I tried to explain in my posts on The Singularity & the 12th Imam why I think that both in the West and in Iran, people are trending toward increased irrationality. For many different reasons, most people who are in contact with the world of modernity are facing a future that is more poorly understood and defined than at any other time in human history. The West is dealing with an accelerating pace of technological development that threatens to upend all expectations, and in fact, on an almost daily basis presents us with new discoveries that suggest our sense of the world as a predictable place is no longer tenable, even in the short run. They wonder if their pensions will disappear before they can reach retirement, if social security will still exist in a meaningful way, whether their jobs will change into something unrecognizable that a young person in Bangalore can perform better and cheaper, or that their health insurance will be inadequate; all these insecurities exist in a booming economy which is overdue for a correction but with no signs that anything can slow it down. It is extremely disconcerting to imagine that our speeding technology has passed the point where a Moore's law for the over-all economy would suggest that as time goes on everything will become cheaper, faster, and better; has the business cycle really been repealed or is a greater bust coming? And even if you are optimistic about the economy, you see warnings everyday that bird flu, or global warming, or a new terror attack can take it all away in an instant; the world is too small, moving too fast, and as a result, too frightening.
On the other side of the divide, the Islamists who insist that the world must function according to the dictates of a 1400 year old book, sense that their world is skewing out of focus and control. The Iranians continue to make overt threats of genocide, and open professions of faith that the 12th Imam's return is imminent; whether they want to keep oil prices high, provoke a confrontation, or believe they are paving the way for the 12th Imam, tensions are likely to remain high, and the risk of confrontation is more than a little unsettling.
We are living in very uncertain times, where even within our own small circle, we know that tomorrow can, and almost certainly will, bring unpredictable changes. Almost no one can escape feelings of insecurity and anxiety. The great danger is allowing the anxiety to become traumatic anxiety.
There are many criticisms that can be made of the Bush administration's handling of the crisis with Iran. Unfortunately, almost all the criticism, even when very well articulated and supported, never suggests an alternative. From the left, the recommendation is to either rely on the UN and the International Community, which is merely a way to use talks to disguise inaction, or to learn to live with an Iranian bomb. The implication is that the Iranians do not really believe in their own Apocalyptic religion and do not really mean what they say when they threaten to bring on genocide and the Apocalypse. It might be easier to ignore their words as simply the ravings of a lunatic or for local consumption, but they just keep repeating and escalating their rhetoric.
Iran: Israel 'A Tyrannical Regime That Will One Day Be Destroyed'
By ANTHONY DEUTSCH - Associated Press
May 11, 2006 updated 8:40 am EDT
JAKARTA, Indonesia (AP) - Iran's president on Thursday intensified his attacks against Israel, calling it a "a tyrannical regime that will one day will be destroyed," but also said he was ready to negotiate with the United States and its allies over his country's nuclear program.
Most people who have looked at our military options with Iran have recognized that an attack on Iran would almost certainly be successful in setting their nuclear program back 5-10 years, a time frame long enough, in my opinion, to allow for the development and deployment of technology that would make the Iranian ability to reconstitute their nuclear program unlikely. Unfortunately, any attack would be likely to destabilize the entire Middle East, almost certainly involve a flood of terror attacks against the United States and our allies around the world, and would have unintended consequences that no one can predict at this time. In short, it would be a disaster.
The current strategy would seem to include allowing the UN and the Big Three, (UK, France & Germany) to exhaust diplomacy until ... ? Here is the question that everyone must grapple with:
At what point do we concede that talking is over? And what do we do at that point?
Those who oppose action need to explain whether or not their opposition to action is global and permanent (as it often appears to be) or if they would support action (and what kind) at some future date. I have stated, and firmly believe, that the only opportunity we have to avoid disaster is to have a credible threat of painful consequences to the Iranians ongoing efforts for a nuclear bomb. It is possible that I am over-estimating the Iranian threat. Perhaps in my anxiety I have allowed irrationality to cloud my thinking, but I have presented my evidence for why I think the threat exists and will increase as time goes on; for those who disagree, where is the evidence that Iran has any intention of renouncing the use of nuclear weapons, is ready to declare their religious beliefs null and void, and are ready to give up their program and rejoin the civilized world? Unless you can convince me (and, more importantly, convince the Israelis, who face an existential crisis in Iran's nuclear program) all you have left to counsel is inaction.
There are times when inaction is much worse than taking action. We do not know when we will reach that moment, but every time Iran perceives evidence that convinces them the West is weak, divided, and conflicted, and only willing to talk and never act, the day of decision draws closer and the violent clash becomes more likely.
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