Human Primal Fear And Irrationality

The German Urangst

When you Bing or Google either term, i.e. “primal fear” or “urangst”, you will not be very successful but finding a same name movie from 1996.

The German language Wikipedia has an entry for “urangst”. This article refers to Sigmund Freud’s understanding of Urangst, which he views as resulting from the act of birth. Curiously, Wikipedia does not have a link to a corresponding article in English. The English language Wikipedia disambiguates the term “primal fear” only as the movie, a novel, a German heavy metal band and so on.

Sometimes it is beneficial to be fluent in more than one language, because in some cases the people of one language have expressed an important concept better than the other people and vice versa. I would suggest that the German language “Urangst” and its lesser developed English language counterpart “primal fear” is such a case.

Another Interpretation Of Primal Fear

I would postulate that all humans suffer to some degree of primal fear (not necessarily related to their birth) as an important part of their self preservation instinct.

Presumably, primal fear like love, language or music is one common universal denominator among human beings.

It is probably primal fear that contributes to the age old human extinction scenarios (e.g. apocalypse or doomsday). E.g. environmentalism (a pseudo religion of our time), overpopulationism etc. are probably inspired by primal fears.

Presumably, primal fears are often not admitted or concealed.

Consequences Of Primal Fear

Primal fears can be your worst enemy!

The Age of Reason or Enlightenment and what followed presumably did little to reduce the primal fear of humans. Consequently, to this day superstition and irrationality of humans govern their lives and are a daily fact of life.

Representative democracy is too often not much more than an excessive outpouring of those fears or the exploitation of these primal fears of constituents cloaked in pseudo rational arguments besides staying in power and serving vested interests.

Primal fear tends to elicit bad or worse remedies outweighing the perceived fears. Overreactions are too frequently the outcome.

To Counter Primal Fear

Start with better and more private education of the people at every age! Education should become more interesting to people than trivial entertainment! As they say, the mind is a terrible thing to waste.

More individual freedom, accountability AND responsibility to set free the potential of each human being!

Start with more participation of the people in government, e.g. by strict and short term limits for everyone in public office or service to increase personnel rotation and the chances of more people taking part in government affairs.

No public office should be automatically restricted/reserved to people with special formal education or certification (e.g. teachers, judges, doctors etc.).

I am sure, I am missing something. J