The Foundations of Personality by Abraham Myerson (color ebook reader .TXT) 📕

And all that beauty, all that wealth e’er gave,

Await alike the inevitable hour.

The paths of glory lead but to the grave.”

[1] Hobbes made fear the most important motive in the conduct of

man.

“Why strive, thou poor creature, for wealth and power; sink

thyself in the, Godhead!” “Turn, turn from vain pursuits; fame,

the bubble, is bound to break as thou art.” This is one type of

reaction against this fear,—for men react to the fear of death

variously. If man is mortal, God is not, and there is a life

everlasting. The life everlasting—whether a reality or not—is

conjured up and believed in by an effort to compensate for the

fear of death.

I have a son who, when he was three, manifested great emotion if

death were to enter in a story. “Will anything happen?” he would

ask, meaning, “Will death enter?” And if so, he would beg not to

have that story told. But when he was four, he heard some one say

that there were people who took old automobiles apart, fixed up

the parts and these were then placed in other automobiles.

“That’s what God does to us,” he cried triumphantly. “When we

die, He takes us apart and puts us into babies, and we live

again.” Thereafter he would discuss death as fearlessly as he

spoke of dinner, and all his fears vanished. Here was a typical

rationalization of fear, one that has helped to shape religion,

philosophies, ways of living. And the widespread belief in

immortality is a compensation and a rationalization of the fear

of death.

If some men rationalize in this fashion, others take directly

opposite means. “Eat, drink and be merry, for to-morrow we die.”

The popularity of Omar Khayyam rests upon the aptness of his

statement of this side of the case of Man vs. Death, and many a

man who never heard of him has recklessly plunged into

dissipation on the theory, “a short life and a merry one.” This

is more truly a pessimism than is the ascetic philosophy.

“Well, then, I must die,” says another. “Oh, that I might achieve

before death comes!” So men, appalled by the brief tenure of life

and the haphazard way death strikes, work hard, spurred on by the

wish to leave a great work behind them. This work becomes a Self,

left behind, and here the fear of death is compensated for by a

little longer life in the form of achievement.

Many a father and mother, looking at their children, feel this as

part of their compensation for parenthood. “I shall die and leave

some one behind me,” means, “I shall die and yet I shall, in

another form, live.” Part of the incentive to parenthood, in a

time which knows how to prevent parenthood and which shirks it as

disagreeable, is the fear of death, of personal annihilation. For

there is in death a blow to one’s pride, an indignity in this

annihilation,—Nothingness.

There is a still larger reaction to the fear of death. I have

stated that the feeling of likeness is part of the feeling of

brotherhood and in death is one of the three great likenesses of

man. We are born of the labor of our mothers, our days are full

of strife and trouble and we die. Men’s minds have lingered on

these facts. “Man that is born of a woman, is of few days, and

full of trouble.” Job did not add to this that he dies, but

elsewhere it appears as the bond for mankind. Reacting to this,

the reflective minds of the race have felt that here was the

unity of man, here the basis of a brotherhood. True, the

Fatherhood of God was given as a logical reason, but always in

every appeal there is the note, “Do we not all die? Why hate one

another then?”

So to the fear of death, as with every other fear, man has

reacted basely and nobly. Man is the only animal that foresees

death and he is the only one to elaborate ethics and religion.

There is more than an accidental connection between these two

facts.

Fear in its foreseeing character is termed worry. As a phase of

character, the liability to worry is of such importance that book

after book has dealt with the subject,—emphasizing the dangers,

the futility and cowardice of it. It is surely idle to tell

people not to worry who live continually on the brink of economic

disaster, or who are facing real danger. But there are types who

find in every possibility of injury a formidable threat, who are

thrown into anguish when they contemplate any evil, remote or

unlikely as it may be. The present and future are not faced with

courage or equanimity; they present themselves as a never-ending

series of threats; threat to health, to fortune, to family,

reputation, everything. Horace Fletcher called this type of

forethought “fear thought.” Men and women, brave enough when face

to face with actualities, are cowards when confronting remote

possibilities. The housewife especially is one of these worriers,

and her mind has an affinity for the terrible. I have described

her elsewhere,[1] but she has her prototype among men.

[1] “The Nervous Housewife.”

Fear of this type is an injury to the body and character both and

is one of the causes and effects of the widespread neurasthenia

of our day. For fear injures sleep, and this brings on fatigue

and fatigue breeds more fear, —a vicious circle indeed. Fear

disturbs digestion and the energy of the organism is thereby

lowered. The greatest damage by worry is done in the

hypochondriac, the worrier about health. Here, in addition to the

effects of fear, introspection and a minute attention to every

pain and ache demoralize the character, for the sufferer cannot

pay attention to anything else. He becomes selfish, ego-centric

and without the wholesome interest in life as an adventure. I

doubt if there is enough good in too minute a popular education

on disease and health preservation. Morbid attention to health

often results, an evil worse than sickness.

Sometimes, instead of the indiscriminate fear of worry, there are

localized fears, called phobias, which creep or spring into a

man’s thoughts and render him miserable. Thus there is fear of

high places, of low places, of darkness, of open places, of

closed places,—fear of dirt, fear of poison and of almost

everything else. A bright young man was locked, at the age of

fourteen, in a closed dark shanty; when released he rushed home

in the greatest terror. Since then he has been afflicted with a

fear of leaving home. He dares venture only about fifty feet and

then is impelled to run back. If anybody hinders his return he

attacks them; if the door is locked he breaks through a window.

He is in a veritable panic, and yet presents no other fears; is a

reader and thinker, clever at his work (he is a painter), but his

fear remains inaccessible and uncontrollable. Often one

experience of this kind builds up an obsessive fear; the

associations left by the experience give the fear an open pathway

to consciousness, without any inhibiting power. As in this case,

the whole life of the individual becomes changed.

Throughout history the man without fear has been idolized. The

hero is courageous, that he must be; the coward is despised,

whatever good may be in him. Consequently, there is in most men a

fear of showing fear; and pride, self-respect, often urge men on

when they really fear. This pride is greater in some races than

others—in the Indian and the Anglo-Saxon—but the Oriental does

not think it wrong to be afraid. In the Great War this fear of

showing fear played a great role in producing shell shock, in

that men shrank from actual cowardice but easily developed

neuroses which carried them from the fighting line.

There is this to add to this little sketch of fear: it turns

easily to anger for both are responses to a threat. I remember in

my boyhood being mortally afraid of a larger boy who one day

chased me, caught me and started to “beat me up.” Before I knew

it, the fear had gone and I was fighting him with such fierceness

and fury that in amazement he ran away. So a rat, cornered,

becomes fierce and blood-thirsty and there is always the danger,

in the use of fear as a weapon, that it become changed quite

readily into the fighting spirit.

7. Anger is a primitive reaction and is the backbone of the

fighting spirit. It tends to displace fear, though it may be

combined with it, in one of the most unhappy —because

helpless—mental states. Anger in its commonest form is a violent

energizer and in the stiffened muscles, the set jaw, bared teeth,

and the forward-thrust head and arms one sees the animal prepared

to fight. Anger is aroused at any obstruction, any threat or

injury, from physical violences to the so-called “slight.” In

fact, it is the intent of the opponent as understood that makes

up the stimulus to anger in the human being. We forgive a blow if

it is accidental, but even a touch, if in malice or in contempt,

arouses a fierce reaction.

We call becoming angry too readily “losing the temper,” and there

is a type known as the irascible in whom anger is the readiest

emotion. The bluff English squire, the man in authority, is this

type, and his anger lasts. In its lesser form anger becomes

irritability, a reaction common to the neurotic and the weak.

When anger is not frank, but manifests itself by a lowered brow

and sidelong look, we speak of sullenness or surliness. The

sullen or surly person, chronically ill-tempered and hostile, is

regarded as unsocial and dangerous, whereas the most lovable

persons are quick to anger and quick to repent.

As a man’s anger, so is he. There are some whose anger is always

a reaction against interference with their comfort, their

dignity, their property and their will; it never by any chance is

aroused by the wrongs of others. Usually, however, these folk

camouflage their motive. “It’s the principle of the thing I

object to,” is its commonest social disguise, which sometimes

successfully hides the real motive from the egoist himself.

Wherever wills and purposes meet in conflict, there anger, or its

offshoot, contempt, is present, and the more egoistic one is, the

more egoistic the sources of anger.

The explosiveness of the anger will depend on the power of

inhibition and the power of the intelligence, as well as on the

strength of the opponent. There are enough whose temper is

uncontrolled in the presence of the weak who manage to be quite

calm in the presence of the strong. I believe there is much less

difference amongst races in this respect than we suspect, and

there is more in tradition and training. There was a time when it

was perfectly proper for a gentleman to lose his temper, but now

that it is held “bad form,” most gentlemen manage to control it.

If it is common for men to become angry at ego-injury, there are

in this world, as its leaven of reform, noble spirits who become

angry at the wrongs of others. The world owes its progress to

those whose anger, sustained and intellectualized, becomes the

power behind reform; to those like Abraham Lincoln, who vowed to

destroy slavery because he saw a slave sold down the river; to

the Pinels, outraged by the treatment of the insane; to the

sturdy “Indignant Citizen,” who writes to newspapers about what

“is none of his business,” but who is too angry to keep still,

and whose anger makes public