Tip of the day – What’s inside the fear of the unknown?

Strange as it may sound, the ‘fear of the unknown’ is just cliché and a wrong one at that! If something is totally unknown, it would never be in your consciousness and consequently not felt. If so, it cannot invoke any feeling or emotions like fear. Or for that matter happiness, sorrow, anger…anything.

Let us take a closer look at the anatomy of an emotion and its definition to get a better understanding of fear. There are, in fact, two key words one would come across in any dictionary definition of the word emotion. One is experience and the other is consciousness.

If you have to experience an emotion, you ought to be experiencing what causes an emotion in the first place. Somewhere, emotion follows from an experience and what you learnt from that experience. If you gained complete knowledge from an experience, there remains no unknown. Usually, therefore, there is no fear attached to that experience. If you learnt nothing at all, you never experienced anything consciously. And if you didn’t experience anything consciously, there is no fear. If you learnt something but not all of it, is when you might experience fear.

Let us explore this further. Why does incomplete knowledge cause fear? When knowledge about something is complete, one is certain about all possible outcomes and what can be expected in every scenario. From the point of view of knowledge, and as we will see, fear, it does not matter if the outcome is a success or a failure as long as there is certainty about the process of producing it.

However, when knowledge is incomplete, there is a lack of understanding of which scenario and which course is likely to lead to what outcome. This is the paradigm of uncertainty. And this paradigm is defined by the rules of probability. And that is not in one’s control. At least, not till it is understood in its entirety! This is what translates into fear. On the same lines, fear of failure is a misnomer. It is the lack of understanding of what would lead to success and hence the uncertainty that surrounds the outcome when in the zone of incomplete knowledge that causes fear.

The fear is of uncertainty that is caused by incomplete knowledge and understanding of what one is afraid of. It really is fear of the not fully known.