One can navigate adeptly through the frightened global landscape if they shape themselves as fearlessness-tempered
Published Date – 11:45 PM, Fri – 1 December 23
By B Maria Kumar
Why do we have to live? What is the purpose of our existence? Is it for attaining the Kingdom of God as the Danish theologian Soren Kierkegaard sermonised? Or is it for seeking pleasure and to avoid pain as the ancient Indian sage Charvaka philosophised? Or is it to eschew craving for pre-empting suffering as Lord Buddha preached? Or is it for realising true potential and essence by choosing choices freely as the French Nobel laureate Jean-Paul Sartre reasoned? Or is it to accept absurdities and rebel against odds and uncertainties so as to find meaning in life, as another French Nobel laureate Albert Camus exhorted? Though each of these ideas looks cogent and plausible, the new insights that Desh Subba introduced in his latest book, ‘Fearmorphosis’ make a mind-boggling, authentic and more convincing advocacy on how to enrich the quality of life experience.
Psychosocial Evolution
Subba, a Hong Kong-based Nepali thinker who originated the theory of fearism about three decades ago, studies the human condition from the lens of fear. He insists that life is conducted, directed and controlled by fear. He looks at fear as an endless universe, expanding into imaginations, dreams, consciousness, physical bodies and even invisibility. To him, fear is like a black hole sucking everything towards its gravitational field. With an innovative fearist bent of such analytical prowess as his probe, he doesn’t hesitate to challenge the seminal ideas of giants like Sartre and Camus. He applies deductive logic to substantiate his argument, tracing the volatile state of contemporary unstable human affairs back to the original cause and advances ways and means as to how the uncertainties and insecurities could be dealt with rationally and credibly.
He largely banks on Kafkaesque term metamorphosis as well as Camusian Sisyphus with a view to deciphering and explaining the realities of man’s psychosocial evolution, hitherto almost unimagined. When he states that humans are by nature fearful animals, we observe in his assertion that there is something in it which is very radical from a metaphysical perspective. He contradicts the first-nature notions such as man is a thinking animal or a social being or a political species and boldly keeps such sweeping interpretations simply at the tertiary level. He reckons fear-stricken man being in a secondary level.
Firstly, he categorises man as a free animal at the instant moment of birth, similar to the lines of Rousseauian postulation but subsequently evaluates man as turning a stranger to himself as fear takes over his being by then. Borrowing from Marx’s ideation, he laments that everyone is an alien to their own self like Sisyphus. Because Sisyphus was a free man before he was intimidated by the unkind gods and he feels alienated when fear traps him. Because, fearful Sisyphus is alien to his previous status when he was a free man. Subba sympathises with all humans by virtue of the fact that everybody’s fate is not dissimilar from that of Sisyphus.
Existentialist Thoughts
Likewise, Subba daringly contradicts many established existentialist thought systems and conscientiously refurbishes his ontological inquiry by presenting a Camusian version of Sisyphus in the clothing of Kafka’s Samsa, inserting simultaneously his variant of fearist psyche. Thereupon he impressively delves into deep philosophical issues which the unified fearful Sisyphus-Samsa entity encounters while experiencing the world. Sisyphus feels the bitterness of a panopticon-like society whether it is watching him mindfully or ignoring him vigilantly. Here Subba treats Sisyphus as a resultant product of fearmorphosis but not as an outcome of an absurd milieu nor as a consequence of hostile circumstances Kafka was obsessed with. Sisyphus is not either an aftermath of his indecisive attitude as Sartre ponders. He is a victim of his own inability to emerge from the cocoon of fear he himself fabricated while moving on his existential journey.
Fear-morphed
Subba, for better elucidation, brings in various forms of constructs such as scapegoat, panopticon, capital and proletariat to back up his stance on how Sisyphus has been fear-morphed. Born free but metamorphosed into a fear-ridden being, Sisyphus consequently becomes victimised as a scapegoat, as a surveillance target and also as an exploited proletarian; simply because he could not disobey the unjust diktats of the authoritarian gods. But it is only his self-imposed fear which forced him to blindly carry out the satanic commands.
American psychologist Stanley Milgram proved this kind of tendency in his experiments while researching how the people in authority or at the receiving end behaved in their typical ways. As per the findings he arrived at, the fear of survival is usually the critical determinant in such pressing situations and it is exactly the same factor that drove Sisyphus to toe the line accordingly. The autocratic god who was wielding power threw the moral and ethical values to the winds. Lord Acton corroborates this phenomenon stating that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Corollary to Acton’s maxim, Myanmarese Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi expresses her view rather intensely in a more comprehensive manner. She clarifies that it is not the power in the literal sense which corrupts but in fact, fear itself. It is the fear of loss of power that compels the powerful to threaten and exploit the victim’s fear of loss of survival. The same fate has been meted out to Sisyphus.
It is in this context that the South African Black Consciousness leader Steven Biko felt that the victim’s submissive frame of mind has ironically turned into an oppressive weapon in the hands of the powerful. Though Subba’s method of deducing such dialectics seems to be pessimistic illusively, his well-devised technique involves uplifting optimism. He has full faith in the indomitable willpower of humanity. To solve the puzzling fear conundrum, he resorts to the fearlessness paradigm as postulated by R Michael Fisher, a Canadian philosopher and educator who conceived and formulated its essentials.
Since fear propels the individual to perceive people, things and situations as absurd, restricted and hostile, Subba stresses that a fearless spirit can certainly turn the tide. He exudes confidence that his fear-morphed Sisyphus will be able to navigate adeptly through the frightened global landscape if he shapes himself as fearlessness-tempered. No doubt, it is within the control of Sisyphus himself to achieve freedom from fear and it is this message Subba delivers to the world through his book.
