I used to want to be fearless. This made sense as an aspiration at the time – I reasoned that many people avoid doing things out of fear, and to move beyond fear was to be freer, more able to do what you wished to do. I was wrong, and this aspiration damaged my mind, but it made sense at the time.
I don’t believe any more that you can really become fearless. As long as there is desire, whether it’s a selfish greedy desire or a openhearted generous desire, there will be the fear of having that desire frustrated. We all have things we wish to see happen and things we wish not to see happen – thus we all have fears. What believing in fearlessness does, though, is it steals the word ‘fear’ from you. You become controlled by unnameable aversions, you find that you simply don’t want to do things and can’t understand why, because you have taken away a tool you had to understand your own mind.
This was a difficult lesson, but one of the most important ones I’ve learned. I don’t know if I’m wise, but I’m quite certain that this is a part of whatever wisdom I’ve found. Deciding that a part of yourself doesn’t exist doesn’t cut it away, only cuts away your ability to see it, to understand what it’s doing. I’ve written about this before, but it seemed worth writing about again now as we as a country come collectively to grips with our racism, misogyny, classism, and other sundry bigotries.
The same way I convinced myself I was fearless, we have convinced ourselves we are not racist. We said it over and over like a mantra, that the bigotries of the past were dead, that we’d moved past all that and into a new era where these petty discriminations were left behind. Saying it doesn’t make it so. By repeating this to ourselves over and over again, all we were doing was blinding ourselves, cutting away our ability to see bigotry. “I don’t see color,” indeed.
We are afraid. We are bigoted. We may not like these things, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t in us, and simply denying their presence does nothing to defeat them. While there’s nothing wrong with being afraid, there’s lots wrong with being racist – but that cruelty existed long before us, and these seeds were planted long ago, embedded into us at an early age. The task now is to uproot them, and it can’t be easy because those roots are old and go deep.
A coward is a person who is controlled by fear. When I thought myself fearless, I was definitely a coward, because I had thrown any tools that might let me harness my fear. Nowadays, I may still be a coward, but I know how not to be. As long as we consider ourselves by definition to be not-bigoted, we will be controlled by our biases, because they will be invisible to us.
I do not want to condemn us for these sins. I want to set us free – but the only way to become free is to see how one has been imprisoned.