11/02/2025
THE ADDICTION TO FEAR
We often talk about anxiety as if it’s just a personal condition — a chemical imbalance or a private struggle.
But what if the real source runs deeper — what if our entire civilization has become addicted to fear?
In earlier times, fear was a tool for survival. It warned us of predators and storms, helped us stay alive.
But in the modern world, those dangers are mostly gone. And yet, fear remains — searching for new hosts.
Now it hides in our headlines, our politics, our advertising, and our scrolling feeds.
We fear rejection, irrelevance, aging, poverty, loneliness.
We fear missing out, being unseen, being wrong.
Fear has become the atmosphere we breathe — invisible, chronic, and profitable.
Philosophers have been warning us about this for over a century.
Kierkegaard called anxiety “the dizziness of freedom” — the panic that appears when old certainties fall away.
Erich Fromm said we trade that freedom for conformity, so we can feel safe again.
Foucault showed how modern systems of power use fear not with chains, but with expectations that make us police ourselves.
And by the 21st century, fear became entertainment.
Social media turned outrage and alarm into a business model.
Each notification is a tiny spark of adrenaline — another crisis, another scandal, another reason to stay vigilant.
The result? A society that cannot rest.
Calm feels suspicious.
Joy feels naïve.
We have learned to mistake vigilance for meaning.
But here’s where another idea enters — one I first encountered years ago while studying with Saratoga, who channelled Telstar and wrote The Final Elimination of the Source of Fear.
Her teaching was simple and radical:
“If we are beings of love, then fear must be an alien virus.”
That idea changed me.
Because if fear is foreign to our true nature, then healing isn’t about fighting fear — it’s about remembering who we really are.
Love is the immune system of consciousness.
When we anchor in love — in compassion, in stillness, in connection — fear has nowhere to live.
Maybe this is the real work of our time: to detox from the addiction to fear.
To choose calm even when chaos sells.
To practice awe instead of outrage.
To reclaim our nervous systems and come home to our natural state — love.
Because once we remember that, fear can no longer rule us.
