Fear is Authentic

You hear less about authenticity than you used to.  That’s not because our culture has stopped caring about it.  It’s because its become so widespread that its just an unspoken assumption.

I’m feeling out a few ideas about being authentic that I think have a bearing on our current situation and on  the Book of Mormon.

(Reminder that we have quite a bit of prior work on authenticity that many of our JG readers contributed to–

The Contradiction of Celebrity

tag The Cult of Authenticity)

Fear, anger, depression, victimization, pleasure-seeking, “identity” are all aspects of authenticity gone so mainstream that its just an unspoken assumption.  Lets start with fear.

We live in fearful times, with much to be fearful about.  And that’s the point.  Fear is always going to be authentic.

Fear is a future-oriented feeling.  When you get right down to it, no one is afraid of what is happening right now.  If the boogey-man jumps out at me, I might feel a huge spike of fear.  I am afraid that I will be hurt and devoured.  But when the boogeyman catches me and is biting my flesh with his sparkly-darkly teeth, fear is no longer my emotion.  It is pain.  Or if I am still afraid, its because of what I think will continue to happen after.  If you feel differently, lets hash it out, but for now I take it as a given that fear is a future-oriented emotion, which is why you can have ‘nameless fears’ and ‘fears of I know not what.’

The future is uncertain.  Therefore fear can always be genuine.  You can always say “I am afraid X might happen” and no one can say you are wrong, because X might happen.  In secular mortal terms, it is always possible for things to get worse (you can die), so fear is always grounded in secular reality in a way that hope isn’t.

The upshot is that fear is an authentic genuine emotion that is pretty much available to everyone.  If you want to be authentic and you want to feel something, sure, be afraid, its easy and free.  The emotion is just right there.

Fear is meant to be a spur to action.  As an emotion, its a journey, not the destination.  But if your  main concern is having genuine emotions, fear becomes your destination.  The feeling becomes the point, not the reflection and action the feeling was meant for.  So you feel afraid until your capacity to feel gets burned out.

I see lots of (secular) signs of bad times coming.  When I pray about it, the Spirit tells me, “all your concerns are real, you are right to worry about these things and take steps.  But everything is going to be all right.”