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Fear and Prospect in Balance

By Charles Rush

September 28, 2008

[ Audio (mp3, 6.7Mb) ]

e Economist had a picture of all these Humpty Dumpty eggs on a wall falling down. AIG, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, all crashed and broken. Right next to them, an announcer is holding a tube of glue looking at the viewer saying “The good news is glue futures are up”…

Jesus says, “Do not worry about what you shall wear or what you will eat”… You would be forgiven for thinking, “Jesus never had a mortgage to pay off or tuition bills that keep coming just before Christmas. Jesus never watched his deferred compensation vanish in a bankruptcy.” All of this would be true. And yet, the challenge of anxiety has been a presenting human problem since we evolved into Homo sapiens sapiens, which probably places it as an issue we've been dealing with for 200,000 years. And we don't seem to have advanced much on this front.

Part of the reason is that anxiety is hard-wired into human consciousness. I was interested to learn that the center for planning for the future, located in our frontal lobe, is right next to the center of the brain that emits anxiety. Researchers presently believe that this future planning capacity is actually what distinguishes us from other higher primates.[i]

As you may know, our studies in neurology over the past couple of decades have shown that our emotional make up, the largest portion of our brains, are largely the same as other higher mammals. That is why we communicate so well with our dogs. They understand us because we use the same facial gestures to communicate emotionally and that goes a long way. This is also true for a range of other higher primates from whales to elephants to monkeys. You may have seen some of those videos on YouTube that document this. The one I like appears to be about 30 years old and features a couple that rescued a lion in England and raised it for a year until it was too big, released it into the wild, and then went to find it in the wild a couple years later. When the lion sees them at a distance, he comes running towards them, jumps up on their shoulders, and hugs them over and over and over again. I think average people are just now realizing that we completely under-estimated how much we share in common with dolphins, manatees, horses, and a whole range of higher primates.

And for centuries, philosophers used to say that it was the human capacity for rational thought that made humans unique. That turns out to be not as true as we thought it to be. Once we actually started doing experiments with chimpanzees and Great Apes, researchers were quite surprised at their ability to use sign language and to manipulate abstract symbols. The rational capacity of humans, as such, had been overstated.

Humans have this ability to forecast. We can imagine the future, make plans to enact it, derive a certain pleasure from anticipating the future of, say a longed for vacation to the Great Barrier Reef. And we also have quite a capacity to ‘fearcast'.[ii] We can imagine our worst scenarios actually coming to pass.

Why we do this is a question for evolutionary biologists, although it seems clear enough that having the capacity to envision the future and make it happen gives us quite an advantage over other higher primates that primarily adjust their behavior based on the changing seasons and have rather predictable patterns of migration.

Humans are just hard-wired to think about the future. And humans are also hard-wired for control. My grandson Charlie, 6 months, just figured out how to splash water in the tub. He will sit there and splash and splash and splash and splash- as long as I'll smile with delight. Every time it is like the first time. “Papa watch this…. Amazing”. He is intoxicated with his budding ability to control.

As it turns out, the exercise of control is intrinsically fulfilling in humans. We engage in it reflexively, all of our lives, and it is usually the very last thing we relinquish. We want to know the future so that we can control the future. Here I quote Professor Gilbert at Harvard, “Our desire to control is so powerful, and the feeling of being in control so rewarding, that people often act as though they can control the uncontrollable. For instance, people will bet more money on games of chance when their opponents seem incompetent as opposed to competent- as though they believed they could control the random drawing of cards from a deck and thus take advantage of a weak opponent. People feel more certain that they will win a lottery if they can control the number on their ticket, and they feel more confident that they will win a dice toss if they can throw the dice themselves. People will wager more money on dice that have not yet been tossed than on dice that have already been tossed but whose outcome is not yet known, and they will bet more if they, rather than someone else, are allowed to decide which number will count as a win. In each of these instances, people behave in a way that would be utterly absurd if they believed they had no control over an uncontrollable event. But if somewhere deep down they believed that they could exert control- even one smidgen of an iota of control- then their behavior would be perfectly reasonable. And deep down inside, that's precisely what most of us seem to believe.”[iii]

An important corollary of this is that we tend to become anxious over imagined futures that we don't feel that we have the capacity to control. Just now, everyone around us is experiencing this first hand. The economic upheavals have just recently led to such broad shifts through the investments banks that no one is really quite sure how this is going to shake out and what it will actually mean for me individually.

I just got through talking to my father as he was facing a surgery that had a number of complications possible, and the doctors explained it to him as best they could, but he didn't really understand all of it, just that no one could really tell him if this was going to make him better or not, whether he would live or not, so he just couldn't sleep because he kept going over and over thinking about this future that he couldn't control.

Another interesting insight is that when we envision the future, we reflexively imagine it in relationship to our present. What we are sensitive is the magnitude of difference. More than anything else, this affects how we feel about it. So, a guy making a million dollars a year, and gets a hundred thousand dollar extra bonus he wasn't counting on, tends to think, ‘eh, it's good, but it is only 10%.' But most Americans would come home and say ‘Honey, we hit the jackpot, $100,000… let's go to Disneyworld'.

The second thing interesting insight is that people respond to ‘good news' quite different than they respond to ‘bad news'. One study that I found particularly curious offered people a choice between two jobs: Job A- makes 30 k the first year, 40 k the second, and 50 k the third. Job B: makes 60 k the first year, 50 k the second, and 40 k the third. The majority of people interviewed actually chose job A over job B, despite the fact that Job B pays more in terms of total dollars. That is because people prefer to live their lives with even a slight (but steady) increase in their standard of living.[iv]

A large part of this is explained by the simple fact that we see potential big losses as having more emotional and spiritual impact than potentially big gains. So, in a related study, most people refused to take a bet that offered them an 85% chance of doubling their total assets with a 15% chance of losing their total assets. Despite the fact that, statistically speaking, you ought to take that bet, people don't actually make straight rational decisions because their fear of loss significantly outweighs the prospect of great gains.

What that means is what you already know. When the market is going up, up, up most people are remarkably casual towards their windfall gains. Rarely do they question whether or not they are actually worth the incredible gains that they are realizing. Very quickly they become used to these expanding assets and their expanding sense of self. They take all of this for granted and this is why people from the middle part of our country resent Wall Street people so much.

But, things turn south and panic sets in easily. People suddenly focus on holding on to everything they have like we are still hunter-gatherers hording a precious food source to feed our families through the winter. But that day has passed and that scarcity mentality is obsolete too, despite the fact that this is still our reflexive reaction.

Our reflex is to absorb the negativity of the present, project it onto our perceived future, and worry. Or become aggressive. Or become sarcastic and cynical. Or just to become tense… All of these the myriad heads of the Hydra of Anger.

So, Jesus says, about the future, ‘do not worry'. It turns out that this is very important advice psychologically as well. It turns out that worry is peculiarly human concern about the future and it is widely besetting to all of us. Transcending it to achieve a sense of personal centeredness is an important challenge.

Psychologists have one other insight here that I want to share with you. Professor Gilbert calls it the “Psychological immune system”. And what it means is that when you envision the worst thing that you can imagine that can happen to you, and you try to imagine how you will feel about it, how devastated you will be, you are probably wrong.

People are hard-wired to survive. And when these genuinely awful things happen to us, and they do, people find a resilience to absorb it. They adjust. They change. They find a way to go on. And soon, they begin to actually articulate reasons why this awful thing that has just happened to them has actually allowed other good things to come to them, it has allowed other parts of themselves to develop that wouldn't have developed otherwise. Our ‘Psychological immune system' is kicking in and we are surviving.

Leaders will regularly practice this. They learn to do it. When they get to these crossroads and it is ambiguous about which way to go, they will envision all the possible outcomes. And in situations like we are in right now, they will focus on one question, “what is the worst thing that could happen here?” And they will really flesh that out. This stuff will appear in your dreams occasionally. It is important to think about that seriously. What does the worst thing look like? Usually when you are done with that exercise over a couple of days, you realize that the worst thing is not really that bad.

And that is not even taking into account that when these really bad things happen, we mobilize and we are different people than we are right now. We are hard-wired survivors. Jesus didn't teach us this technique but he might have. Envision the worst, get your spirit around that image, and let it go. If it happens, you will be stronger than you think you will be and more resilient than you anticipate.

In fact, and this is important to remember at times like these, something like 15-20% of people who actually live through their worst feared futures report that this tragedy was the best thing that ever happened to them. They report this because after they go through it, they become different people, and what is spiritually and emotionally accessed in that wrenching change becomes so important to them that they don't actually want to go back. They were grateful for the experience of being knocked off the track that they had chosen for themselves which they didn't know wasn't as fulfilling as other ways of being until some tragedy forced that change in them.

And secondly, Jesus tells us, ‘Don't worry too much about what you will eat and what you will wear.” Don't worry too much about assets. Don't worry too much about things. That is because there is so much more to you than your assets. And actually most of your genuine pleasure, your genuine happiness and fulfillment come from… other people.

But you know what is also true? The vast majority of us will jeopardize relationships that are really important to us for money. We do it over and over again. And what it brings us is genuine discontent and frustration.

Jesus always taught us that assets are tools in the service of people. Invest yourselves in people, in a spiritual community, where you are surrounded by all kinds of genuine fulfillment. And think about that for just a minute. Think of the rough stuff you've actually been able to get through because you were surrounded with your people.

Invest yourself roundly, broadly in community and people. Work on that balance, particularly when things are difficult. It is intrinsic in helping you to work through your anxiety.

And zoom out. I know that when you are in the middle of managing a crisis that is hard to do. I know there are lots of us that are working under a lot of pressure at the moment. But when a genuine moment of reflection avails itself to you, zoom out.

Zoom, and zoom again. The truth is that our bad days are still pretty good. The truth is that if you were given the choice of places to be born, of times to live, of challenges to face, you would probably conclude that this time and these challenges and this place is still full of more promise and less ignominy.

I just spent the last month in and out of the cardiac center, watching families going through losing loved ones around us, ultimately losing my father with them. My family was there when he died and we spent I guess an hour just sitting there together. You don't think about much in those moments. There is just a lot of existential gravitas.

I get home at 2:30 in the morning after the funeral, back to New Jersey, my own bed, can't sleep. I pick up all the papers – I've been out of touch completely for 5 days – Merrill's gone; Goldman is a commercial bank – I just couldn't believe what I was reading. I'm lying there with that low-grade dread about what it all means for Summit, for the Church, for people I know.

I turn off the lights, laying there in the dark… I'm thinking to myself, “What a privilege it is to be anxious about the future.” Zoom out. Remember the wonder of life in gratitude. Get ready for profound change. God will be with you and that will be enough. Amen.

[i] Daniel Gilbert. “Stumbling on Happiness” (New York: Vintage Press, 2006). See the foreword, I believe, as this thesis was Professor Gilbert's central assertion for the book. Professor Gilbert teaches psychology at Harvard.

[ii] Ibid. p. 21. ff

[iii] Ibid. p. 24. The actual studies for those interested were from E. J. Langer, “The Illusion of Control” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 32:311-28 (1975; and D. S. Dunn and T. D. Wilson, “When the Stakes are High: A Limit to the illusion of Control Effect”, Social Cognition 8:305-23 (1991).

[iv] Gilbert, p. 152; Ge. F. Loewenstein and D. Prelec, “Preferences for Sequences of Outcomes, Psychological Review 100:91-108 (1993).