Why We Fear

This is a repost of an old article, originally written on 2011/07/28

Honestly, I’m kind of a coward.

When I was a kid — elementary school, I think — we had a VCD player at home, and of course plenty of pirated VCDs to watch. I saw a Hong Kong horror film called Ling Qi Bi Ren back then. That was my first real brush with horror movies, and frankly I didn’t even understand it, but it scared the hell out of me. Later in elementary school I heard classmates talk about ghostly stuff — dead relatives appearing in dreams, that sort of thing. What do you call it now, urban legends? Anyway, that kept me up at night too. Then came middle school, and I got lucky enough to read some horror fiction — doujin stuff, really. I remember reading it in Popular Software magazine, a novel based on Silent Hill. By then it didn’t faze me at all. In high school, a girl sitting in front of me kept buying horror story collections, and I borrowed them constantly — and the more I read, the more I enjoyed it… By college I was actively hunting down horror novels, and I’d gotten picky about them too: I wanted suspense, I wanted something to think about — not the cheap crap where the protagonist suddenly turns into a Maoshan Taoist priest, chants ji ji ru lü ling, and the final boss just keels over. I read Na Duo, Cai Jun, and all sorts of web writers — including Ma Qinwang before he got famous.

So by now I’m a veteran of horror fiction, and horror novels don’t feel “scary” to me anymore. That doesn’t mean I’ve grown brave, though — show me a horror picture or video and my combat power is still trash.

About fear — sometimes I get curious: why do people fear a thing at all? A few days ago Da Cao was on Weibo lamenting how short life is, and I raised the question. Crafty Da Cao didn’t answer, but that shamelessly sentimental picture he posted gave me some ideas.

A lot of the time we fear the dark, we fear loneliness, we fear death. Is that innate or learned? So many people in the world are afraid of the dark, of dying, of being left alone — it seems reasonable to say the fear is built in. But think about it and it doesn’t quite hold.

If a baby were born in darkness and stayed in darkness forever, I think that baby would be just as terrified the day it saw light. I figure people fear things only because they’re afraid of losing something.

People don’t fear the dark; they fear suddenly losing most of their sight. People don’t fear loneliness; they fear suddenly losing the companions they can talk to. People don’t fear death; they fear suddenly losing the right to keep living in this colorful world.

Because every one of us is a little selfish, we all feel fear. Which makes me admire people who aren’t afraid to die — they’re the real models of selflessness. How else would they become heroes?

But recently, reading about the train crash on Weibo, I felt fear again — not about the present, but about the future.

Someone said: We want the truth.

Someone else said: This is the damn truth!

And someone else said: You’re all fakes — I’m the truth!

“So who’s the truth? Something so simple — how did it get this complicated?”

The Minister of Railways said: It’s a miracle.

Yeah. Believe it or not, I believe it.