BY:GILBERT PILAYRE
Understanding Fear
Most of us probably have been told that money is the root of all evil by our parents, mostly by our mothers. It didn’t occur to me as important since I was still a child then and didn’t hold a job yet. But the brain – washing was a bit engaged already. Some of us may have already formed, while young, some form of irrational aversion to things that we thought didn’t conform to the values of the generation before us. Some thinkers saw this as a kind of peer pressure from dead people who saw tradition as a kind of philosopher’s stone that cures all the maladies of existence. They become voices that whisper to us whenever we face some form of crisis in life. So, when philosopher Hannah Arendt presented that some people have no capacity to think like how she describes Nazi functionary Adolf Eichmann in her thesis on the “banality of evil”, she was not suggesting about “stupidity”. She even recognized Eichmann’s intelligence in keeping up with the “schedules” and “logistics” of trains as it propelled its way towards the dreaded Nazi concentration camps.
Fear is one of those experiences that strips life down to its essentials—it reveals what we value, what we cling to, and what we dread losing. It’s a kind of mirror of the soul. Jesus tells of the rich man who hoards grain in bigger barns, thinking he has secured his future. But God calls him a “fool” because that very night his life would be demanded of him. Fear of losing wealth or security blinds us to the deeper reality that life is fragile and belongs to no one except to the Cosmos or Universe in the end. But he assured us that we should not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear Him who can destroy both soul and body in the Hades. Though it’s a bit part of dogma, it offers us some hope that there is a better form of existence other than what we have at the present. But He does not leave us there unsettled. Jesus wants us to seek God’s Kingdom which is within each or among us. In short, God’s Kingdom is not a place but a new way of living where love, justice, peace, and mercy overturn the world’s systems of greed and violence. Jesus’ miracles—healing the sick, freeing the possessed, feeding the hungry—are signs of the Kingdom.
Our fears often act like mirrors: they reveal not just what we avoid, but how we see life itself. If I fear losing my job, I reveal that I see life as survival through work and stability. If I fear loneliness, I show that I view life as meaningful only in relationships with others.
To be hungry is not only to lack food—it is to feel invisible, discarded. The fear of want is tied to the fear of being forgotten, excluded from the table of life. Food is more than sustenance; it is fellowship, belonging, and recognition. To fear hunger is to fear being treated as less than human.
Kierkegaard might say that the fear of want reveals our dependence: we are not self-sufficient. Heidegger would frame it as the anxiety of finitude—we are beings who must receive life from beyond ourselves. This fear discloses our radical vulnerability: we are creatures, not gods. So, to think of our leaders, and the men and women that toil beside them, what dread consumes their hearts each day, that they would sell their souls for fleeting comfort, and barter the ruin of an entire country—our country.
