What you label as irrational fear, I label as rational fear.
The difference is that I acknowledge that the thing I fear is possible, and likely enough to matter; you believe that it is impossible because it’s not happened to you.
I wanted to label people who talked about danger as crazy too. It was easier than acknowledging the danger. Then the danger manifested, and I could no longer avoid the awareness of it.
Just like teenagers speed around in cars, “knowing” that it’s dangerous but never really grokking it unless they kill a pedestrian or something, people have an ability to just … not connect the dots about the fact that a person bigger than you can literally hold you down and keep hitting you until you die.
99.99% of the time you drive recklessly, you don’t kill anyone. Then one day you kill a pedestrian and it’s suddenly real, in a way you were in denial about before.
99.99% of the time the person in front of you isn’t gonna kill you. But it only takes ONE person out of the hundreds of thousands you meet, to take decades off your life on a whim.
But if you have the ability to just say “that’s crazy” to that, you will. I would have too, before reality broke my lucky streak and forced me to consider the other category of experience.
No you read as if that’s what I said, because I’m categorized by two bits of information in your head.
What I said was that encountering violence made me a conservative.
Conservatism is wholly driven by irrational fear so this makes perverse sense.
What you label as irrational fear, I label as rational fear.
The difference is that I acknowledge that the thing I fear is possible, and likely enough to matter; you believe that it is impossible because it’s not happened to you.
I wanted to label people who talked about danger as crazy too. It was easier than acknowledging the danger. Then the danger manifested, and I could no longer avoid the awareness of it.
Just like teenagers speed around in cars, “knowing” that it’s dangerous but never really grokking it unless they kill a pedestrian or something, people have an ability to just … not connect the dots about the fact that a person bigger than you can literally hold you down and keep hitting you until you die.
99.99% of the time you drive recklessly, you don’t kill anyone. Then one day you kill a pedestrian and it’s suddenly real, in a way you were in denial about before.
99.99% of the time the person in front of you isn’t gonna kill you. But it only takes ONE person out of the hundreds of thousands you meet, to take decades off your life on a whim.
But if you have the ability to just say “that’s crazy” to that, you will. I would have too, before reality broke my lucky streak and forced me to consider the other category of experience.