The wages of fear

Should one read Hitler’s Mein Kampf?

Carlo Rovelli, the physicist/philosopher thinks one should if one wants to understand the roots of fascism. And what he learned from reading it was that the real root was ‘fear’. 

“This fear,” writes Rovelli, “is explicit in Mein Kampf; this feeling of inferiority, this sense of being surrounded by imminent danger. The reason behind the need to dominate others derives from a terror of being dominated by them….The reason why we close ourselves into an identity, a group, a Volk, is to create a gang stronger than the other gangs in a relentlessly dog-eat-dog world. Hitler depicts a savage world in which the enemy is everywhere, danger is everywhere and the only desperate hope of avoiding succumbing to it is to band together into a group and prevail.”

Rovelli believes that fear, the feeling of not being strong, is the main source of emotions which drive not only fascism but all beliefs of the political right. I think this is an oversimplification. Moreover, I can conceive of ‘leftist’ beliefs which could also, in certain circumstances, be driven by fear. 

But I think Rovelli makes an important point. Above all, it made me wonder about why we hold certain beliefs, and how the way we hold them may influence our behaviour.

We don’t normally focus on this. Instead, we tend to look at people’s beliefs, and judge them on the basis of these, while assuming that people who share a particular belief are all similarly aligned. But it’s possible that we can hold the same belief in very different ways, for different reasons and with different ideas about how it should be materialised, which is why people seeming to hold the same overall belief system can differ so much in their behaviour (something very pertinent to Auroville at the moment).

At the huge risk of oversimplification, I would say one motivation for holding a belief is, indeed, fear – for example, fear of the ‘chaos’ of existence which makes one embrace a belief as a bulwark of certainty – but another is the positive feeling that a certain belief makes absolute sense, that it resonates with one’s deepest feelings and understanding. I think it is the latter which has brought many people to Auroville, and to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. 

But I think even positive beliefs can become infected by fear. 

There’s a lot of fear in Auroville at the moment. Some people fear that the city won’t be built, others that it will be built in the wrong way. People fear that they will be told to leave their job or their house, or to leave Auroville and even India. Some fear that the very existence of Auroville is at stake. All this is very understandable – I feel a lot of fear myself – but this pervasive sense of fear is corrosive. It is corroding fellow feeling and making people reactive; it is destroying friendships and dividing people into opposing camps. It can also cause people to act unethically, even violently and with hatred, against those who they think is threatening their belief in ‘how things should be’. 

There is a world of difference between positively embodying a belief, having faith that it will triumph, whatever the present adverse circumstances, and feeling so fearful that one’s belief will be destroyed that one is willing to resort to any means to protect it. The positive holding of a belief does not prevent one from standing firm against everything that seems to threaten it – in fact it makes that stance even stronger – but it allows one to do this without demeaning others, and oneself. And without opposing thoughtlessly anything that doesn’t seem immediately consonant with it.