On fear

Fear is the fuel that can drive humans to do anything. It leads people to make irrational decisions, go against their values, and flock towards the general consensus, even when that consensus is illogical. I particularly recall a moment at the beginning of the semester, when about 95% of the students agreed that "people should not focus on money or materialistic things". The most ironic thing about this: we had just listened to a presentation about marxist theory. In my mind, I thought that everyone agreed that marxist philosophy sounded very idyllic, yet when put into practice, failed time and time again, leading people into poverty and despair. So why was I the only one standing in the corner, strongly disagreeing with the seemingly ridiculous statement? Surely I was not the only one out of thirty that attributed importance to material goods. This is when I realized that some behaviours have been embedded in our mind, deep in the subconscious based on social conditioning. Growing up, we're told over and over again that "money isn't important", that it has become a sort of taboo topic. People frown upon those who strive for money and material wealth as if it were a crime to have it; yet everywhere I go, it seems like money is incredibly important. It was not their genuine belief that money should not be a point of focus, it was simply the right thing to say. The years of conditioning and reinforcement by peers led us to believe not that wealth isn't important, but that saying that it is, is wrong. There is a well known experiment that depicts this phenomenon with monkeys and bananas The researchers would pour water on all the monkeys in a cage if just one tried to climb up the ladder to get a banana. Then, through a series of substitutions, there would be no longer any of the original monkeys in the cage, but when any one of them would try to climb up the ladder, the rest would beat him up and pull him down to avoid the consequence. The astonishing part of this experiment is that the final group of monkeys had never actually had water poured on them. None of them had faced the actual consequence, yet they knew that it was wrong to climb to the top of the ladder, and reinforced this to their peers. Now, although this seems like an effective method to prevent misbehaviour and enforce compliance, it stifles exploration and thus creativity. Negative reinforcement does a good job at controlling populations, rather than encouraging the desired outcome. Sometimes, control is needed, like on the roads, where any exploration of the speed at which you can go could cause a fatal accident, but when it comes to educating the future generation of engineers, doctors, lawyers, artists and even educators, negative reinforcement fosters not love for learning, but apathy, continuing the cycle of students doing the bare minimum to get by. When I polled fellow classmates on whether they enjoyed school or not, over 90% said they didn't. The sad thing is that none of them felt like they could, or even wanted to do anything about it. The reason students come to school today is not for their love for learning, but because of their fear of the punishment that would come if they didn't. I know that for myself, the only reason I'm writing this exam is out of fear of not getting the credits to get my diploma, and having downstream repercussions. And while I know now that I will be alright, it puts into question the entire incentive system of contemporary education. We are teaching the future workforce to do the bare minimum to avoid getting punished, and not to explore frontiers never seen before by human civilization. Now that is something to be afraid of.