January 2006 | Conscious Reading
Democracy’s Greatest Enemy
By Frances Moore Lappé
The greatest enemy American democracy faces today doesn’t come from Al Qaeda or from globe-straddling corporations trying to twist our elected officials to their ends. Democracy’s greatest enemy lives inside us. It is fear.
In Freedom from Fear, Burmese Nobel Peace Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi describes the relationship between fear and democracy, “It is not power that corrupts, but fear,” she writes. “Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it and fear of the scourge of power corrupts those who are subject to it.”
To understand fear’s threat to democracy, let me begin asking: What do humans fear?
Darwin surmised that primal people judged what was good or bad solely by how it affected the welfare of the tribe. That’s how well we grasped the importance of the tribe to our own survival. We understood that banishment was certain death.
Being hard-wired to feel that our survival depends on inclusion creates a huge opening for fear to walk in, fear which in our 21st century circumstances can function in ways opposite to its life-preserving roles in the earliest human societies.
Then, our bodies’ fear sensations most often meant that we faced real threats: The wild animal four times our size. The rushing rapids. The lightning strike. It made survival sense to trust our bodies — to go with that rush of adrenalin and pounding heart, or that instinct to freeze to avoid detection.
But what happens when we carry that baggage — unexamined — into today’s world? Into a world in which fear is being deliberately stoked and spread through powerful communications tools that infuse our consciousnesses virtually every hour of the day. It is being fueled by those who have much to gain from triggering our fear responses — be they narrowly based governments, advertisers, or communication businesses calculating their “crimecasts” to attract more viewers than newscasts.
Do our programmed responses to threats serve us in a world in which our whole tribe appears to be about to paddle our canoes right over 400 foot-high Victoria Falls? What happens if some see the high falls looming — today in the catastrophic consequences of global warming and deepening global poverty — but most of the tribe can’t or remains in denial? Does one try to turn the canoe toward a safer course and call others to follow?
The current state of our democracy demands that we choose — between belonging, which may lead to the demise of our species and the planet, and a new understanding of fear.
To create solutions for our own lives and to reverse planet-wide decimation of our life support systems requires two things:
That we do something different, which is just another way of saying we must walk into the unknown.
And that we be different, which by definition means that we risk separating from others.
While staying with the pack has historically meant salvation to our species, in such an era as ours a willingness to break with the pack may be our real hope. Our collective understanding of fear, the very meaning of the bodily sensations of fear must therefore evolve, or hope for the human project looks pretty dim.
Fortunately, evidence suggests that remaking our relationship with fear is possible.
How We Understand Fear
We humans are just learning, in the nick of time, to appreciate the power of our minds to reframe our perceptions and change what goes on in our bodies.
In her 1989 book Mindfulness, Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer relates the following simple story to suggest the effect of one’s mental frame on the response to stimuli.
“A woman walking down a country road is suddenly besieged by a swarm of bees. Like most of us would be, she is afraid; her blood pressure rises, her pulse quickens. She may freeze or run in fear. On the other hand, imagine the same woman walking down the same road with a young child by her side. The sight of the bees now signals a very different behavior. In this context she boldly protects the child instead of becoming afraid. The bees have become a different stimulus.”
I would disagree only slightly with Langer’s punch line: She says the woman protects the child “instead of becoming afraid.” I would say the woman is no doubt still afraid, but her fear responses are altered because she understands her duty differently.
In order to protect our democracy, we too must reframe our response to fear.
It’s possible that unpleasant fear sensations may be telling us that we are precisely where we need to be for our own mental health and the planet’s. Instead of a verdict telling us that we’ve made a huge blunder, instead of simply accepting that a tight stomach and dry mouth can only mean we’re in danger, we can reframe fear sensations as information, as signals that perhaps we’re simply in new territory. Right where we should be. Our species’ future may depend on how quickly we can acquire this new concept.
Three Tasks
So what can we do to bring about this shift?
One: We can help normalize fear. We can start by simply bringing fear out of the closet. We can acknowledge not only how entirely appropriate it is but that it may actually be a message telling us that we’re at our growth edge — not disaster’s edge.
Two: We can learn and encourage the teaching of specific skills of democracy that allow us to experience fear without resorting to the habitual flee, fight and freeze responses.
Standing apart means engaging in conflict, creatively using conflict. We can spread the notion that conflict has virtues. Conflict can shake us loose from narrow understandings of our interests, as we see through the eyes of others. It exposes essential key information — assumptions, prejudices, values, and needs — and offers more options.
Three: We can model courage. Neuroscientists are giving us new tools to think about the power of modeling. Their discovery of “mirror neurons” that fire as primates observe the actions of others gives us a hint of the depth of the impact of our own observations of others. Every time we see others “walk with fear,” we become ourselves more able to believe we too are capable.
It takes careful attention to respond to fear in a way that’s true to democracy. Let me share a personal moment in which the challenge hit home.
It is the final week before the 2004 election, and I’m seated in the social hall of a synagogue in suburban Philadelphia. A debate between Lois Murphy, the candidate I’ve traveled here to support in her race for Congress, and the Republican incumbent, Jim Gerlach, is about to begin.
The large room is overflowing, and I am eager to get my first glimpse of Gerlach, who had just released a message going to thousands of area telephones linking my candidate, an upstanding community member and strong advocate for women, to the Taliban.
I know his ad has had an impact. The day before, as I approached one house to leave campaign literature, an agitated man asked, “Are you with the Taliban lady?” When I’d tried to explain, he threatened to unleash his angry dog.
Murphy opens by asking Gerlach to disown his dishonest ad. He refuses, no one objects, and the debate proceeds. The audience has been told to submit questions in advance but not to speak.
Only later do I realize what democracy demanded of me that morning.
Instead of going up to Gerlach afterward and telling him his ad was an assault on democracy — something I prided myself for doing at the time — I could have simply stood up when he refused to disown his ad. I could have announced that I would remain standing until Mr. Gerlach acknowledged his mistake. Even if not one person had joined me, everyone there would have been called to reflect on the need to defend democracy itself.
I didn’t even think of doing this at the time. And if I had, my fear of embarrassment might well have stopped me.
Perhaps it would have helped if I’d remembered Ellen Langer’s tale of the woman and the bees, how her body reacted differently once in a situation in which she felt a higher calling — protecting the child. I believe I had that day, and we have, a higher calling — protecting our fragile democracy.
To move an unjust, life-denying order, history has shown that sometimes one has to break the law and suffer the consequences. This practice of “civil disobedience” is remembered in the work of Gandhi, and in the Society of Friends’ efforts to end slavery 200 years ago.
But what I could have done at the debate breaks no law. I think of it as “civic obedience” — obeying what democracy asks of us even if it means risking embarrassment and creating distance between ourselves and others.
We alive today may be the first in human evolution able to look at how our biology serves us — or does not serve us — and then to choose: We can respond in old, programmed ways, or we can know fear simply as information and energy to use for creative ends.
Frances Moore Lappé is the author of 15 books, beginning with Diet for a Small Planet. This article is based on her most recent release, Democracy’s Edge: Choosing to Save Our Country by Bringing Democracy to Life (Jossey-Bass, $24.95).
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