I was just reading this article which talked about the ability to turn off fear receptors in mice. Of course, mice out in the wild who didn’t know enough to be afraid of predators would end up dead pretty quickly.
But it got me to wondering about how a lack of fear would affect a person living in the modern world, if at all. The ability to rationalize means that, for the most part, we still wouldn’t go stepping out in front of busses because we know that would kill or seriously injure us, even if that thought didn’t necessarily scare us. Are there ways that our daily lives would be changed if we simply lacked the ability to be afraid? What can you come up with?
I think a lack of fear would have seriously curtailed our evolution, or perhaps even stopped it in its tracks. Humans as well as many animals make decisions, sometimes life or death decisions, based on fear.
Fear is a factor in the value of “suspense.” Fear of loss/fear of an undesirable outcome. So we wouldn’t experience suspense, fear of loss, and thus we would lose any sense of desire I expect.
Everything would be like one big Moody Blues song.
I think it would seriously lower stress levels, as well as psychological problems from certain phobias and bad memories - but on the other hand it would certainly lead to more danger for children who haven’t learned enough common sense to take over for primal fear yet, and might affect motivation in adults who procrastinate.
Although I haven’t overcome my stress response entirely, I certainly have learned to take actions counter to my fears (yay bungy jumping!), and just the same could learn to take action entirely rationally without the need for fear. I definitely think the absence of general lingering dread and worry would mostly be a positive thing, as well as paralysing fright, and the anger part of the fight/flight response. But we could get in some trouble without our basic danger-avoidance reflexes that remove us from hot, sharp, and fast things before they can seriously injure us…
A lack of fear would not make us any more rational – we’d just be able to pay more attention to the other emotions that motivate us (lust, desire, anger, boredom, loneliness). We’d all become lazy, self-obsessed psychopaths.
People would fight more. We would no longer fear embarrassment, ostracism, or punishment for breaking society’s rules. Kids would drop out of school and adults would turn to a life of crime. Theft, assault, rape, and murder would skyrocket, but we wouldn’t do much about it because nobody would fear these things. Society would become extremely brutal and chaotic if it didn’t collapse entirely.
