On
December 8, 1941, immediately following the Japanese attack
on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt hobbled to the
podium to deliver his famous, Day of Infamy speech. On that
day of supreme crisis, he could have returned to his inaugural
address on March 4, 1933. That address was delivered during
the depression when banks were closing and the nation was
on the brink of a collective panic attack. Speaking from the
capitol steps, FDR pounded out the immortal words, “We
have nothing to fear but fear itself.”
While
this line is frequently quoted and applauded, the penetrating
psychological insight embedded in Roosevelt’s words
have long been glossed over. The epiphany was this: we frequently
feel as though we are in terror of some external event when
the real object of terror is not the event itself but the
sense that we will be undone by our feelings about that event.
The
shrinks have a clinical term for this, ‘affect intolerance’,
i.e. the conviction that under certain circumstances we will
be consumed, not by the situation itself but by the surges
of anxiety, sadness, anger, hopelessness, or some other emotion
we feel incapable of handling. For example, when I finished
my doctorate and was applying for very hard to secure faculty
positions, I would go to the mailbox in fear and trembling.
But in truth, I wasn’t as terrified of getting hit with
another rejection as I was of the numbing sense of hopelessness
that would paralyze me for days after opening that letter.
Coward that I was, I would frequently give the key to the
mailbox to my wife asking her to act as my emotional buffer.
What
Roosevelt grasped is that fear and anxiety become genuinely
destructive when the looming inner clouds hypnotize us into
thinking we will not be able to weather the storm on horizon.
Today, we have medicalized nearly every unpleasant feeling.
Many of us pop pills to dissolve anxiety about an upcoming
exam or job interview. These chemicals may help us function
but they also weaken our emotional immune system, diminish
faith in our own resilience, in our ability to manage defeats,
disappointments, and yes, the death of loved ones.
In
the darkest hours, Roosevelt was concerned that we would paralyze
ourselves not with fears about war, financial woes or whatever,
but with the fear of the emotions those blows would deliver.
That was the real paralysis he aimed to shake loose in 1933
and in other speeches during World War II.
There
is biographical evidence that Roosevelt’s wife, the
first lady of wisdom, Eleanor Roosevelt, convinced her husband
to read the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard’s path-breaking
Concept of Anxiety. In that intellectually taxing
text, Kierkegaard (1813-1855) insists that our feelings of
anxiety/dread, are a mark that humans are uniquely blessed
with spirit and freedom. On his reckoning, this blessing is,
however, also a curse. It rattles us with anxiety about the
future, with possibilities of what we might or might not do.
No less than therapists today, Kierkegaard recognized that
if handled improperly, anxiety could drive us off the cliff.
On the other hand, he also posited, “Whoever has learned
to be anxious in the right way has learned the ultimate.”
There’s medicine for those of us ready to reach into
the medicine cabinet for anti-anxiety meds and so deprive
ourselves of the lessons to be gleaned from learning to sit
with our jitters.
To
return to our 32nd president, Roosevelt wasn’t expecting
Americans to banish fear, but rather to trust that the fear
will not shatter us. Timely advice, because we live in an
age that treats every tremor of discomfort as a panic attack
and undermines the self-trust that we can survive and even
grow from the bogeymen in our chests. Roosevelt might as well
have said, there is another less dramatic day of infamy than
Pearl Harbor, namely the day we surrender the belief that
we can weather our own feelings.
also
by Gordon Marino:
On
Comparing Pains
Ali:
Couldn't Stand Him Back Then
Boxing
& Aristotle
