From: "Phil Roberts, Jr." 




[email protected] wrote:
> 
> In article <[email protected]>,
>   [email protected] wrote:
 >
> > Although I already responded to this, I should also add that status, or
> > at least pecking order, can all be maintained using the ancient emotion
> > of fear, rather than relying on a far more lethal means which actually
> > ends up incapacitating those who become sufficiently overwhelmed with
> > a sense of worthlessness.
> 
> I don't see why 'a sense of worthlessness' cannot simply be described as
> 'fear of what worthlessness means to the organism' (ie, fear of no
> status, fear of no food, fear of not reproducing etc). 

Because fear and worthlessness are different sensations, for me at least,
although fear of worthlessness (e.g., guilt) is probably the dominant 
motivational factor in human affairs, at least to the extent that you
assume that worthlessness can be a primary motive without having to 
be actually present.  The term for this fear is probably simply 
anxiety, and which, according to Nate Branden, is often mistaken for
someone just having a lot of gusto for life:


  The percentage of people in the world who suffer from an acute form of
  mental or emotional disturbance is high.  yet such persons constitute 
  only a very small percentage of the total number of men and women 
  who suffer from pathological anxiety throughout most of their lives, but 
  whose disorder never reaches a sufficiently alarming degree of 
  intensity to command the attention of a psychotherapist or to gain 
  recognition in any statistical survey.  These individuals would, in most 
  cases, be regarded by those around them as quite normal and would 
  not themselves think of questioning their psychological health merely 
  because they are prey to fits of inexplicable, objectless apprehension.

  These are the persons who, for instance, cannot bear to be alone; who 
  cannot live without sleeping pills; who jump at every unexpected sound; 
  who drink too much to calm a nervousness that comes too often; who 
  feel a constantly pressing need to be amusing and to entertain; who 
  flee to too many movie they have no desire to see and to too many many 
  gatherings they have no desire to attend; who sacrifice any vestige of 
  independent self-confidence to an obsessive concern with what others 
  think of them; who long to be emotional dependents or to be depended 
  upon; who succumb to periodic spells of unaccountable depression; 
  who submerge their existence in the dreary passivity of unchosen 
  routines and unchallenged duties and, as they watch their years slip by, 
  wonder, in occasional spurts of frustrated years slip by, wonder, in 
  occasional spurts of frustrated anguish, what has robbed them of their 
  chance to live; who run from one meaningless sexual affair to another; 
  who seek membership in the kind of collective movement that dissolve 
  personal identity and obviate personal responsibility -- a vast anonymous 
  assemblage of men and women who have accepted fear as a built-in, 
  not-to-be-wondered-about fixture of their souls, dreading even to identify 
  that what they feel is fear or to inquire into the nature of that which they 
  seek to escape.





-- 

                  Phil Roberts, Jr.

       The Psychodynamics of Genetic Indeterminism:
Why We Turned Out Like Captain Kirk Instead of Mr. Spock
     http://www.fortunecity.com/victorian/dada/90/