Breathing

I have long practiced one form or the other of mindful breathing. When I was a grad student in New York years ago, I met a guy who taught yoga. He introduced me to alternate nostril breathing (ANB), which I practiced off and on for a few years and then dropped. I had no idea, then, of its benefits, nor did I think I needed them. Then, when I began zen practice in the 1970s, I learned about breath counting—the basic practice for zen practitioners which simply teaches one to count and observe breaths from one to ten, over and over. If the mind strays into thinking, which it always does, one comes back gently to the breath counting. After many years, most practitioners begin to simply focus on the breath, watching it enter through the nosetip, go down to the lower abdominal region (about two inches below the navel) called the hara in Japanese (sometimes the word tanden is used), and exit with the out breath. In so doing, the upper chest and shoulders tend to relax, as does the mind, and some zen schools counsel focusing almost entirely on this hara as the key to practice. More recently, I have returned to a slightly different phase where one tries to simply become the breathing, as I noted in my blog “Earth Breath” (see my book of blogs with the same title, Earth Breath.) Just before that, on a zen walk or pilgrimage I took around San Francisco Bay, I stopped at one of the zen teaching places I was visiting, this one in Albany run by a Korean monk. There I was introduced to his practice of Sun Do breathing. This took place after morning meditation, and, in the first stage, consisted of lying prone, and breathing deeply into and out of the lower belly, called the tantien in Korean. This lasted for about an hour, with the breathing rate controlled by a musical rendering of the four Bodhisattva vows in Korean, one full breath per vow. It worked magically, I thought, and gave me uncommon energy to complete my walk. In addition to this practice, I also use Andrew Weill’s 4-7-8 breathing method (4 breath counts inhale, hold for 7 counts, exhale for 8 counts) for relaxation. 

            There is, of course, more development of this type of breathing in the various Buddhist and Yoga traditions, and now in many western medical traditions as well, but I have never actively moved towards those until recently. The impetus for this new look into breathing came from my cardiologist in Pt. Reyes. He emailed recently recommending a book and talks by one James Nestor. Nestor is not a doctor but a journalist who initially became interested in the ability of some free divers to hold their breath underwater for far longer than average, sometimes 8 or 10 minutes at a time. He began doing this himself, which eventually led him into a full investigation of the science of breathing. Though I haven’t yet obtained his just-published book, Breath (Riverhead Books), I have watched several videos of him and others discussing the benefits of deep breathing (all available on youtube) including why modern humans do not breathe as our ancient ancestors did.

            What Nestor claims is that proper breathing can heal, or go a long way towards helping with such modern diseases as hypertension (high blood pressure), diabetes, sleep apnea, heart disease, asthma, and many more. Truly fascinating is Nestor’s research into the evolutionary development of the human skull and its nasal opening. He claims that research has shown that, over the centuries, the human facial area of the skull has grown narrower, and the nasal opening smaller, a development that has made full breathing for moderns more difficult. This has also led to more humans having crooked teeth (due to the smaller mouth opening), something that causes more and more of us to need orthodontic work. But that is an aside here. Nestor’s chief investigation involves deeper breathing, and the many techniques that have now been proven by western medicine to improve human health in several areas. This appealed to me because I have been diagnosed in recent years with both high blood pressure and diabetes. If there were a method to help control both without drugs (I mainly control diabetes with diet and exercise, but blood pressure now requires numerous medications), that would be a major boon in my life.

            Of course, the advice to breathe deeply is a commonplace in calming people in stressful situations, most notably women during childbirth. But Nestor is referring to more conscious, regular breathing during all kinds of activities, and rest states as well. So, based on his talks and what I knew of zen breathing and yoga breathing (prana, the Sanskrit word for breath, is considered the foundation for all forms of yoga and spirituality), I decided to look up some of the materials he claimed now have scientific sanction. The literature is voluminous. For example, from Scientific American, a 2019 article by Christophe Andrè titled, “Proper Breathing Brings Better Health, Stress Reduction, insomnia prevention, emotion control, improved attention…but where do your start?” begins with the technique of cardiac coherence, said to help with relaxation. That is to say, slow, deep breathing 

increases the activity of the vagus nerve, a part of the parasympathetic nervous system; the vagus nerve controls and also measures the activity of many internal organs. When the vagus nerve is stimulated, calmness pervades the body: the heart rate slows and becomes regular; blood pressure decreases; muscles relax.

The vagus nerve is said to inform the brain of these changes as well, causing increased feelings of relaxation, but deep breathing may also act “directly on the brain itself.” Andrè cites a 2017 study by Mark Krasnow of Stanford, suggesting that breathing techniques may influence activity in the locus coeruleus (a brain region involved in attention and anxiety) by modulating the activity of a group of neurons that regulates respiratory rhythms—the pre-Botzinger complex in the brain stem. In addition, another study at the Technical University of Munich showed that “attention given to inhaling and exhaling” can “ease stress and negative emotions” by “reducing activity in the amygdala,” a brain section well known to be involved in emotional arousal. And what kind of breathing does this? One cardiac-coherence exercise recommends “inhaling for five seconds, then exhaling for the same amount of time (for a 10-second respiratory cycle).” Such deep, regular breathing is shown to regularize heartbeats. For more calming effect, one can spend more time on the exhale, because heart rate increases some when inhaling, while decreasing when exhaling. In sum, certain therapists recommend the “365 method”— three times a day deep breathing at six cycles per minute (five seconds inhaling, five seconds exhaling) for five minutes.

            This same article also provides several other breathing exercises to relieve stress, most, it seems, derived from yoga breathing exercises. One exercise simply advises following your breath as you breathe; another counsels “abdominal breathing;” another counsels “rhythmic breathing,” holding the breath before exhaling, with a variant to this being “alternate nostril” breathing similar to what is mentioned below. Also mentioned is a breathing exercise of “inhaling for panic,” which suggests rapid inhaling to acclimate to the feel of panic (this may be similar to so-called “holotropic breathing,” a psychological procedure invented by Stanislav Grof for emotional and spiritual advancement, which sometimes induces the bringing forth of hidden emotional traumas so as to deal with them). The website www.healthline.com more clearly lays out the benefits and rationale for alternate nostril breathing (ANB) with detailed instructions. Providing its name in Sanskrit, Nadi Shodhana, the site promotes ANB’s “ability to reduce stress and still the mind,” and asserts also that “it may decrease blood pressure and increase feelings of calm.” This assertion is backed up with results of a “study conducted in 2008” demonstrating that “a 30-minute practice [of ANB] lowered blood pressure, compared to participants who only practiced breath awareness.” The lowering of both systolic and diastolic blood pressure was said to be “significant.” The healthline site also notes that left and right nostril breathing have different effects, as yogis and modern studies have shown: i.e., that “breathing exclusively through the left nostril decreases blood pressure, whereas breathing exclusively through the right nostril increases blood pressure.” Other variants (Kapalabhatiand Bastrika) are also described, and their effects on both activity and mental acuity and lowering blood pressure are noted. What is remarkable is that the site seems to have no spiritual or commercial component, but merely points to the beneficial effects, from a strictly western perspective, of these ancient breathing practices on health. 

            This latter pattern is continued on the NIH-sponsored website, www.pubmed.gov. The article “Immediate Effect of Specific Nostril Manipulating Yoga Breathing Practices on Autonomic and Respiratory Variables,” by Shirley Telles and P. Raghuraj, describes the results of an experiment testing the heart rate, skin conductance, breath rate and blood pressure of practitioners with varying degrees of experience. The results showed that “following RYNB [right nostril yoga breathing] there was a significant increase” in blood pressure; in contrast, “pressure decreased after ANYB [alternate nostril yoga breathing] and the systolic and mean pressure were lower after LNYB [left nostril yoga breathing].” Another study on alternate nostril breathing on the same site indicates that “Alternate-nostril yoga breathing appears to improve performance in the digit vigilance test, along with a reduction in blood pressure.” In other words, alternating nostrils while deeply breathing decreases blood pressure without any loss of mental acuity. 

            With regard to diabetes, a study on the same website, pubmed.com, from the J Med Assoc Thai of January 2008, “Hypoglycemic Effect of Sitting Breathing Meditation Exercise on Type 2 Diabetes at Wat Khae Nok Primary Health Center,” concludes that “SKT1 [Somkorn Kantaradusdi-Triamchaisri, a type of sitting breathing meditation] practice had a post-prandial hypoglycemic [lower blood sugar] effect and a slight reduction to systolic and diastolic blood pressure.” Another site, www.breathing.com, provides a more thorough exposition of the causes and mechanisms of diabetes, and cites from several studies which have “recently discovered that oxygen levels in pancreatic beta cells regulate the activity of pancreatic cells through hypoxia-inducible factor 1-alpha.” Then, noting that “Optimal Breathing exercises can help in controlling blood sugar and bring insulin levels in the normal range,” a study [also on pubmed.com] by Martarelli, Cocchioni, Scuri and Pompei is cited—“Diaphragmatic Breathing controls complications attributed to elevated Blood glucose levels”—to the effect that “relaxation induced by diaphragmatic breathing increases the antioxidant defense status in athletes after exhaustive exercise,” inducing a “lower level of oxidative stress.” Another study from 2014 showed the same beneficial effect from a six-month breathing program. By filling the lungs with fresh oxygen through deep breathing, that is, all cells in the body are oxygenated, which helps burn off fat. More, such breathing helps control oxidative stress—an imbalance of free radicals and antioxidants—which “triggers diabetes-induced inflammation, insulin resistance, and thus elevated blood sugar levels.” By also helping to regulate better sleep, deep breathing works to “decrease levels of inflammatory cytokines” and to “reduce levels of stress-inducing hormones such as adrenaline and cortisol.” If true, all these effects combined can only aid in maintaining overall health, particularly for those with diabetes. My only complaint about this website is that several products to aid in deep breathing are prominently displayed for sale, something that always arouses my suspicion. I would rather go directly to the many pranayama yoga websites for the same information on breathing technique.

            The use of mindful breathing techniques to treat asthma is also worth mentioning. Numerous studies have been done to assess the effects of pranayama to help asthmatics, whose numbers have soared in recent years—probably due to the worsening quality of air in cities around the globe—to breathe without the use of drugs. One such study from the January 2009 International Journal of Yoga, displayed on the NIH National Library of Medicine website (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3017963/ ) is titled “The effect of various breathing exercises (pranayama) in patients with bronchial asthma of mild to moderate severity.” Fifty patients were studied and separated into two groups: one to do meditation focusing on breathing, the second to do breathing exercises, including deep breathing through both nostrils, alternate nostril breathing (here called Anuloma viloma), Bhramari chanting (deep breathing with humming for the exhalation), and Omkara, similar to the above, but with forceful exhalation and OM humming. The conclusions were unequivocal: after twelve weeks, there was a significant reduction of asthma symptoms in the pranayama breathing group as compared to the group that did only meditation. The important conclusions are cited:

Firstly, expiratory exercises are helpful. In bronchial asthma expiration is difficult, so exercises that support expiration are beneficial…Secondly, forceful expiratory exercises (expiration) are helpful and this is illustrated in Figure 4. In this figure, air is easily coming in and going out in a normal person, but in an asthmatic patient air is coming in easily but during expiration there is closing of airways and force is required to open the airways; hence, a high pitch/ forceful Omkara OOOOOOOOOO…MMMM was found to be helpful instead of oooo…mmm. Thirdly, prolonged expiratory exercises (expiration) are helpful.

            Finally, the website www.breathmeditation.org discusses the Buddhist tradition of breath meditation, citing from several sutras attributed to the Buddha’s time. One citation follows:

In the Dhatuvibhanga Sutra (M 140:4), Buddha’s entry into meditation is described in this way: “The Blessed One sat down, folding his legs crosswise, setting his body erect, and establishing mindfulness in front of him–that is, establishing his awareness parimukha–in front of his face at the tip of his nose.” So focussing attention on the tip of the nose is a requisite for meditation in general.

This site also references a book by Larry Rosenberg, Breath by Breath, as follows:

“Much of what the [Anapanasati] Sutra describes will turn up naturally if you just sit and follow the breathing, if you persist in that practice over the course of days and months and years. It is natural for your attention to deepen until it includes the whole body, and for that process gradually to calm the body.

The Anapanasati Sutra is said to be the Buddha’s own original teaching on breathing mindfully in meditation both for bodily relaxation, and for cultivating the Seven Factors of Enlightenment. In other words, breathing mindfully—from the very beginning of Buddhism—is said to lead not only to bodily health, but to spiritual advancement. The same is true in most Yoga practice: the end result is not simply bodily health, but spiritual health as well. And in truth, perhaps the two should not be distinguished one from the other: as the Romans used to say, mens sana in corpore sano— “a sound mind in a sound body.” The two are one. And at the core of both, it seems, from the ancients to our own time, is deep and mindful breathing.

            Of course, the problem for us moderns, as noted briefly above regarding asthma, is that we cannot count on the same virgin quality of air as could the ancients. Before industrial pollution, the air in most places, though it could be fetid in large cities, was not, until the last 300 years or so, laced with sulfur compounds or acids or fuel exhaust or, now, plastic micro-fibers that infiltrate and settle into our very lungs. And regarding the latter, no one yet knows what the long-term effects of this plastic lung residue on our breathing will be, though we can guess it won’t be good. But there is no guessing about the negative effects of fuel- and chemical-polluted air on those millions among us whose poverty forces them to live near highways and industrial corridors where the pollution is most concentrated, and where asthma is endemic. Eventually, though, no one, not even those high up in gated communities, will be able to escape the effects of having to breathe polluted air. What those effects will be on the efficacy of deep breathing, or even our ability to continue to practice it, is unknown. Until then, however, we could do worse for our health than just breathe—breathe deeply, breathe mindfully, and breathe as part of a regimen designed to maintain our hearts, our lungs, our blood and cells, our brains, our spirits. 

Which is—do we even have to say it about breathing?—our most fundamental activity.

Lawrence DiStasi

Progress, at What Cost

As we all sit here during the Covid-19 crisis pondering our mortality, my thoughts have turned to an age-old question: how much should humans do to try to save ourselves from the inevitable pains of life? This is not an easy question, especially these days. That’s because though we have all been raised to think of the glories of human progress and how much they have improved our lives, both daily and long-term, we are now finding out that some, if not most of the “advances” we humans have made, especially since the industrial revolution three or four centuries ago, have not turned out as rosy as we once thought. Nonetheless, there are still computer mavens and AI specialists who are gleefully predicting the massive improvements to come from robots and cyborg humans who will soon be able (they say) to directly upload to our brains all the human knowledge thus far accumulated, and more besides. In short, the optimism about ‘progress’ is proceeding rapidly to the next glorious phase. So there’s this disconnect and always has been, as far as I can tell, between what we humans can do, and what we should do; between what we can know, and what we should know; whether, as the Greeks saw, the stealing of fire from the gods by Prometheus, was a good thing or a bad thing. In the myth, Prometheus was made to suffer for eternity for trying to give humans the power that should only be possessed by the gods. The Genesis story gets to this same dilemma: Adam and Eve ate of the Tree of Knowledge which Yahweh specifically told them not to do, because it was presumably reserved for God alone. But Adam and Eve, prompted by Satan, did taste that forbidden fruit and, as a result so the story goes, we all suffered endless pain and difficulty in life from then on. In short, it’s not at all clear that humans are wise or foolish to try to improve their lot through knowledge, or learning, or invention. 

            Lest we think this is all the stuff of ‘out-of-date’ myth, this problem has become all too clear in our time. Consider only the problem of global warming, or ACD as I prefer to call it: anthropogenic climate disruption. This threat to our very existence on this planet—and to the existence of most other life forms as well—stems directly from alleged human progress. We have invented a source of energy, fossil fuel, to power almost all human activity. Wood burning powered steam engines; then coal took its place as a power source; then gasoline became the power source for all of our engines, including those that powered our automobiles, our trains, our planes, and our electric plants. Aside from the destruction that wood, then coal, then petroleum did to forests and miners and oceans from oil spills and air from smoke pollution, there is now the destruction of our atmosphere from the so-called ‘greenhouse effect,’ which , as a result of CO₂, traps heat in our atmosphere, making temperatures steadily rise planet wide. In other words, the price we are paying for motorized progress is the threatened death of our species on this planet. Worse than Prometheus and Adam and Eve combined. And all because humans dared to capture the energy of decaying plant matter and convert it to human convenience. We no longer have to walk; we can ride or motorboat or fly. 

            And that’s not the half of it. I’ve been really alarmed recently about the information that’s emerging about plastic—our modern convenience par excellence. It seems that most of the world we humans have constructed in the last century—from bottles to car parts to containers to bags to shoes to clothing to carpets to computers to phones to construction parts like insulation and waterproofing and paints (the list could go on indefinitely)—is constructed with plastic, itself a product of petroleum. The price for these endless conveniences in our daily lives showed up first (to me, at least) in the revelation of the monstrous garbage patch in the Pacific Ocean. A swirling island of plastic bottles and caps and every variety of plastic detritus has all made its way into our oceans, never ever dies (plastic is forever), and is floating like some nightmare ship of human folly in the Pacific. And the worst part is that sunlight breaks it down into tiny balls of plastic that fish and birds mistake for food, consume, and of course cannot digest. And some of that detritus makes its way into our guts too, as we consume fish flesh that is laced with plastic. 

            Now we are also learning that this plastic breakdown makes the particles so tiny that they travel on the winds as well. A recent article in Science Magazine, “Plastic Dust is Blowing into U.S. National Parks, more than 100 tons each year,” points out the horrifying fact that this stuff is deeply embedded in not just water and soil but our air, and thereby in our lungs, our guts, our very cells. A biogeochemist named Janice Brahney has done studies and her results are stunning:

After running the numbers, Brahney and her colleagues estimated that about 132 pieces of microplastic land on every square meter of wilderness each day. That adds up to more than 1000 tons of plastic per year across national parks and other protected areas of the western United States—the equivalent of 300 million plastic water bottles, they report today in Science. …Much of this microplastic might have been circulating for years, if not decades, she says. The particles may have first settled in farm fields, or deserts, or the ocean and then have been picked up again by winds as part of a global “plastic cycle.” (Erik Stokstad, Science, June 11, 2020.)

Just let that sink in. A global plastic cycle. Tons of plastic each year landing everywhere in our most remote, and heretofore pristine, areas. Brahney sums it up thus, according to Stokstad:

“We created something that won’t go away,” says Janice Brahney, a biogeochemist at Utah State University and lead author on the new paper. “It’s now circulating around the globe.”

That truth can be extended to all of our so-called disposable society; nothing, especially plastic, ever truly goes away. 

I’ve also gone to other websites to see where this plastic menace is coming from. Plastic bags, certainly. Plastic bottles. So convenient. But most of it comes from tiny plastic fibers that break down, like the ones we use to make carpets, and clothes. Here’s a few sentences from the critical and terrifying website, www.plasticsoupfoundation.org:   

Around 16% of the plastic produced annually in the world consists of textile fibers. In recent decades, production has grown by 6% every year and is now around 60 million tons per year. Synthetic clothing is responsible for endless amounts of microfibers, which can even be found in drinking water.

Synthetic clothing, like all our shirts made of rayon and dacron and who knows what else, and the fibers of which they are all made; all our shirts and pants and coats that are so waterproof and keep us warm and safe from the cold and elements and are so easy to wash and dry and don’t have to be ironed—well, unfortunately, they break down into these tiny micro-fibers and particles that get picked up by the wind, and rain down the way acid rain used to, only now they blow all over the planet and infiltrate our soil, our water, our bodies:

Research has already shown that we probably ingest microplastics at a rate of 11 particles per hour… The presence of microplastics in human lung tissue was already demonstrated in the 1990s by scientists investigating lung tissue of cancer patients, who expressed their concern that plastic fibers may contribute to the risk of lung cancer…Research showed that plastic particles might persist in the lungs, especially in people with lung disease. When particles would remain in the lungs, they likely stay there for a long time because they are bio-persistent, which could cause inflammation. It also matters how long the fibers are because longer fibers appear to be more damaging…Particle pollution has long been known to damage lung tissues, leading to cancer, asthma attacks, and other health problems.

There’s more, of course. Plasticsoupfoundation is doing yeoman service to, first, make the danger known, and second pressure oil companies to stop making more plastic and use recycled bottles instead. But the problem becomes one of cost: it’s cheaper in many instances (and certainly more profitable to Shell and other plastics makers charging full speed ahead with new production facilities) to manufacture new plastics. And, of course, governments tend to be reluctant to chastise large corporations and make them conform to recycling. So we’re left with the plastic menace, which consists not only of the plastics themselves, but of the additives that are used to make carpet and couch fibers flame-resistant, but which, many of them like BPA in bottles to make them harder, have been shown to be endocrine disruptors. But hell, what’s a little infertility when it’s all so convenient and long-lasting and profitable? 

            I could go on, citing the problems with the pesticides we’ve added to our crops to make them less vulnerable to bugs, and the fertilizers we’ve added to our soils to make them more productive, and the hormones we’ve added to our farm animals to make them less susceptible to disease, and the bioengineering we’ve done to plants and animals to make them more machine-pickable or tender or white-meat dominant for our chicken tenders, and on and on. But you probably know all that. The point here is not to list the modern horrors we’ve created that plague our world, and whose costs are only now becoming evident. The point is, what price convenience? What is the cost of progress? Is progress even possible? Can we clone ourselves and our animals to eliminate any chance of disease or waste or breakdown? And more important, should we, do we have enough intelligence and restraint and foresight to mess with our genes, our DNA, the very code of life? Or is it, has it always been, a fool’s errand? Have we been fooling ourselves all along, thinking that we can waterproof and waste-proof and infection-proof and illness-proof and work proof and gene-proof and death-proof ourselves?

            The myth of Prometheus suggests that perhaps we have been fooling ourselves. Comforting ourselves with our contemporary myth of progress. And that perhaps we should put more of our faith and our effort into trying to come into better harmony with our world, rather than muscle that world into a version that seems more convenient in the short run. Perhaps we should heed the wisdom masters, who have said all along that acclimating oneself to what is, rather than straining to invent or produce what might be, is the better part of valor. That is to say, we humans are not, ever, going to eliminate difficulty. Pain. Sorrow. Suffering. For these are the ineluctable elements of our human condition. Not the only elements to be sure. There is joy and happiness and ecstasy and discovery. There is the pleasure of friendship and family and community and useful work. And growing old. And seeing one’s progeny thrive. And seeing justice sometimes emerge from the courageous effort of some of us and, sometimes, all of us. But nothing can bullet-proof the human organism from suffering, decay, and death. One can be intelligent about the risks one takes. One can accept the advice of those who seem to know what prophylactic or corrective measures to take that give one more advantage in any crisis. But one cannot eliminate risk or effort or work or pain altogether. That being so, one is better advised to, yes, do the footwork, but in the end accept that the outcome will not always be success or even survival. But even there, when survival is questionable, there is the world, in all its daily beauty and complexity and persistence. There is the blood that courses through one’s veins on its own; the cells of one’s body that reproduce themselves on their own; the miracle of growth that seems to magically proceed on its own, even when humans do their utmost to fuck it up. And there is mostly and simply now, this moment when I am sitting here typing at my plastic keyboard on my plastic computer lamenting all this plastic coming back to haunt us, but still—still operating, somehow still alive and part of the inexhaustible, glorious and never-to-be-fully-comprehended or improved-upon universe. And sometimes, perhaps more of the time than we usually know, that might just be enough. 

Lawrence DiStasi

Fear

I have to admit it: it’s very difficult, if not impossible, to try to objectively assess the current president of the United States, or those Republican politicians like Mitch McConnell, who support his every inanity, or his base of supporters who dismiss every accusation of lying or chicanery against him as irrelevant and/or “fake news.” One really wants to condemn them all as idiots or traitors or worse. Ditto with the nation’s cops who are, many of them, clearly racist and militaristic and punitive in their alleged protection of the public. But this position, to a reasonable person seeking real change, is really not tenable. Nor does it reveal very much. Though we may be edging towards fascism in the United States, the way to combat its development (if it is not already too late for that) does not lie with name calling or insult or hyperbole. Nor does it lie in comforting oneself with perceiving and calling out those with whom one disagrees, in the hopes of somehow eliminating them. Gandhi and Martin Luther King were the latest true leaders to demonstrate that. Both name calling and insult only harden positions and lead to open and often violent conflict and the resulting repression. 

            Rather, it behooves us to see that people are motivated, when they are making the loudest noises and the most foolish decisions, by fear. For the most part, they think they are acting in their own ‘sacred’ self-interest. I put the word ‘sacred’ in quotes here to denote its unfitness as an adjective in this context, to indicate that though it may be a common conception in our time, it is not really apt because bloated self-interest is anything but sacred. May be, in truth, the opposite of sacred. But I digress. Most people, from what I have observed, do not or cannot see themselves as cruel or ignorant or racist. They do not see themselves as afraid, either. Or if they do, do not want to admit it, are afraid to admit they are afraid. And that is precisely why they rationalize their behavior with more acceptable notions like self-interest, or racist generalizations, or the ‘nature of things.’ Or perhaps the meanness and contempt of ‘others’: ‘They’ always get the best deal, and don’t care about us.’ Or, ‘they think they’re better than we are.’ Or, ‘they just don’t have the brains or the drive that we do.’ Or, ‘someone always has to do the dirty work; it’s what they’re suited for.’ Or, ‘I don’t have to apologize for looking out for my family.’ Or, ‘we work hard for our money and deserve all the rewards we can get.’ There are hundreds of such rationalizations, suitable for every occasion. And they all have the same basis in fear. Fear of losing what you have—or think you have. 

            This notion has been demonstrated in many psychological and economic experiments in recent years (first theorized by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky in their 1984 paper, “Choices, Values and Frames”). It has also been confirmed in one of the great comedic sketches of all time, Mel Brooks’ classic The 2,0000 Year Old Man. The conclusion of this hilarious alleged interview (Carl Reiner plays the interviewer) with a man who has lived through most of civilized history comes when Brooks answers the key question: What has driven all of this human history and misery? “Fear,” says Brooks. Simple fear. And though we laugh at the simplemindedness of the answer, we also laugh because we know it is so fundamentally true. What psychologists have added is that it is mainly the fear of loss—loss of what you have or think you have—that dominates most people’s decisions. That is, in economic situations especially, people’s fear of losing what they have far outweighs their belief or confidence in hoped-for gains. So they will refrain from betting (or investing or otherwise engaging in risk), even though the rewards might be very great and their chances reasonable. They are overwhelmingly driven to preserve what they have—which means that most people fear losing what they have too much to take risks for large, and in some cases, almost certain winnings. 

            This is relevant in a wide array of human situations. It is no secret by now that Trump supporters do not think of themselves as racist. Rather, they are largely white, working-class men and women who have lost a great deal in recent years, as factories have closed, or moved their operations to China or Mexico or Bangladesh, and American manufacturing has been hollowed out. Prior to these international moves, these were people, many of them, who had entered the middle class, and whose good jobs meant they could afford homes and even send their children to college. No more. Now many live in communities riven by addiction and closing shops and factories and the encroachment of people of color into their communities, their prospects very dim indeed. They blame it all not on their own fear, but rather on those perceived to be taking it away from them: coastal elites who ran the corporations moving into foreign countries, people of color getting ‘undeserved’ advantages, and foreigners, immigrants or interlopers who appeared to be taking the only jobs left. Anyone who could be blamed, aside from themselves, was  blamed, and when Donald Trump came along and blamed those same groups, they saw him as their savior. But at its root was fear, fear of losing advantages given them by their whiteness, and Donald Trump was savvy enough or paranoid enough himself to heighten that fear and provide the rationale and excuse for it. ‘They’ are coming to take your jobs, and they don’t deserve them, they’re drug addicts they’re rapists, and I’m going to build a wall to keep them out.’ And in that scorn and contempt coming from the top, we can probably see the same fear at its root. For Donald Trump, despite his constant self-aggrandizement of himself as an innate genius, betrays the fear of the man who knows quite well that he isn’t, not even close. On the contrary, he has always been terrified that he will be found out—first by his wealthy, adored father—and exposed for the fraud he is. A bankrupt several times over. A failure at college. A man who can hardly spell at the level of a grammar schooler, who spends hours preparing his “fake” hair, who has trouble reading anything more complex than a line at the bottom of TV screens that summarizes the news. Hence his scorn for those coastal elites, who read books and write books and hence know far more about any subject than the man who gets his information exclusively from watching TV. And heaps ridicule on the literate purveyors of real news which he calls “fake,” to protect himself from being found out for the actual fake he himself is. 

            But it is not just fake politicians who are driven by fear. It is also the powerful heads of corporations and the titans of Wall Street who are driven by a similar fear—the fear of losing what they have gained, no matter if it was gained by diligence, or by trickery or fraud or inheritance. Or by sheer luck. Fear of loss is what drives them all. Fear of missing out on a windfall. This is why they were so eager to transfer to foreign countries what used to be the glory of America, her manufacturing. They saw the writing on the wall: that foreign labor was so much cheaper (and workers there so much more malleable and desperate to work) than Americans, secure with their unions. So the fear-driven solution was obvious: either get undercut by foreign corporations and lose it all, or move the whole operation to the foreign country, with cheap labor and fewer regulations. And justify it as simply acknowledging the new reality of inter-global networks making everything more efficient. And top it off with foreign safe havens for your profits, which is really stoked by fear of losing one’s income to taxes, but can be justified as a more efficient way to maintain stock prices at their maximum. The massive buy back of stock options with savings from government tax breaks runs on the same logic. 

            Add to all this the toxicity of white fear—that is, the fear of white supremacists that their perceived reign at the top of American society is coming to an end, proved by the demographics showing that people of color will soon outnumber them—and you have a formula for what we are seeing in the United States today. A president who openly calls nazified and armed white terrorists “some very good people,” and ditto for groups like the Base and others who openly advertise their hateful programs and calls for the “boogaloo,” a plan for what they see as the longed-for and fast-approaching race war; to settle things with the all-out violence of civil war once and for all (or should we say twice and for all, since we’ve already had one Civil War). And it takes no very great perception to see that these crazies are in large part motivated, too, by fear: fear of losing what they have always had in American society: white privilege. If things proceed as they are, and whites are to compete on an even field with those people of color who will soon outnumber them (and who probably can outwork them as well), whites will no longer be able to count on their privilege to help them stay at the top. They fear they will be outnumbered at the workplace, in the marketplace, and at the ballot box. And they are right. Which is why the Republican Party also knows that its prime supporters, if voting rights remain in effect, will be outnumbered, and so must somehow be helped by disenfranchising or gerrymandering those “others” out of contention. In short, the Republican Party knows that it can no longer win elections fairly, and must cheat, using every trick in the cheaters’ playbook. As well as stoke the flames of discontent and outrage among its white, mostly male followers.

            Finally, though much has been said about them in recent weeks, it is important to note that the police comprise a similar case. For they too are motivated by fear. They are mostly white and therefore susceptible to the same alleged grievances and prejudices as others. But they occupy a unique position in our society, being in closer touch with the minority neighborhoods where much of the overt crime takes place (corporate crime is another matter), and have to contend with the prevalence of weapons that find their way into many of those neighborhoods. It is this prevalence of weapons that needs most to change. When policemen and women know that any person being stopped or chased could be carrying a weapon (and their experience and that of fellow officers tell them that too often they are), then no matter how well-trained or enlightened they are, that fear dominates their posture and procedure. That is to say, so long as American society is dominated by an insane gun culture that encourages citizens to arm themselves to ‘protect’ themselves, then policing will necessarily be dominated by the concomitant fear. How could it not be? There exist some 393 million firearms (at last count) in the hands of American citizens. That comes to far more than one weapon for every adult; and while some have dozens of weapons and many have none, their ubiquity certainly constitutes a danger for any person trying to enforce the law. And many others besides. This certainly does not excuse law enforcement personnel in general from their widespread tactic of punishing protestors and others rather than simply apprehending them as they are legally mandated to do, nor of their overtly militarized approach to law enforcement; but the prevalence of guns and the fear that stems from them makes the general attitude of cops somewhat more understandable.  

            Enough said. Many, if not most people whom we see as out of control in this nation, are driven by motivations that ultimately come down to fear. There may not be anything we can do about this, except to point out obvious things such as how much more dangerous driving a car is than flying, or being mugged, or robbed, or assaulted, or even losing your position in society to an outsider. But what we can do is understand and realize that we are all motivated, in part, by fear, and probably always will be, because from the point of view of this frail body with which we have been endowed, there is much to fear. That means, then, that we humans are more alike than we are different. That we are all struggling with what it means to be human in a world whose every passing year beings us closer to death—the ultimate fear. And that we can demonstrate a little more empathy towards our fellow humans than we have been used to. For in the end, it is not other humans so much that we have to fear, but dying before our time (which for most people is any time). And more than that, dying before we have come to realize how much we depend on each other, on all other beings, on life itself. That should be the real fear. Not “fear itself” as Franklin Roosevelt so memorably said, but the fear of never realizing who we are. And in this, we could do worse than empathizing and sympathizing with all those whom we want to exclude from our circles of empathy. The ones we see as depriving us or threatening us. If we could only do that—and I have had the sense lately, seeing these beautiful young people marching together in spite of all the risks, that they are seeing it and acting on it—then we might come to a greater realization, ourselves and perhaps those ‘others’ too, of what we all share. Both those who agree with us and think like us, and those who seem to have no understanding at all, and want to harm or eliminate us. Because all of us are alike in what really matters, our humanness, our basic nature, which is, yes, this flesh and bone we are so zealous to protect, but more than that too. And it is that “more” that we should really fear not recognizing and coming into some accord with. That “more” that can finally allow us to go beyond fear a little, or at least see through it sufficiently to smile at it and all it has driven us to do for so long and at such cost.

            And here I will end with a quote from a favorite poem of mine by Native American poet laureate, Joy Harjo. It is called “I Give you Back.” It’s well worth googling and reading the entire poem.

I 
release
 you,
 my
 beautiful and
 terrible
 fear.

I
 release
 you….

Oh,
you
 have
 choked
 me,
 but
 I 
gave
 you
 the
 leash.


You 
have
 gutted 
me
 but
 I gave 
you the knife.


You
 have
 devoured
 me, 
but 
I
 laid
 myself across
 the
 fire.

I
 take myself back,
 fear.

You
 are
 not
 my
 shadow 
any 
longer.

I 
won’t hold
 you 
in my hands.


You
 can’t
 live
 in
 my
 eyes,
 my
 ears,
 my
 voice, 
my
 belly,
 or 
in
 my
 heart my
 heart
 my
 heart
 my
  heart.

But
  come 
here,
 fear.

I
 am
 alive
 and
 you
 are 
so
 afraid
 of
 dying.


Lawrence DiStasi