There’s nothing left to fear
“Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” President Franklin D. Roosevelt told the country in 1933, in his first inaugural address.
His words inspired a nation floundering in a sea of Depression and hard times. Wise as Roosevelt’s counsel was, eliminating all fear from our lives would be a mixed blessing. Fear has its positive side, too.
I sometimes wonder whether a lot of our crime doesn’t stem from the disappearance of fear in our lives. We used to be afraid of hell — but we don’t believe in hell any longer. We used to have a fear of God — but today we are taught that God is loving and forgiving. Offending him, or anyone else for that matter, doesn’t frighten us anymore.
A nephew of mine, when he was 4, was told by his mother not to eat any of the candy on the coffee table because it was for company.
“What will you do to me if I eat it?” he asked.
“You’ll get a spanking,” his mother told him.
David’s 4-year-old mind weighed the alternatives. He decided to take the candy when his mother wasn’t looking and risk a spanking. He knew his mother’s spankings were never very hard.
The criminal mind works like that, too. It has learned to count on the leniency of our legal system just as David had learned to count on the leniency of his mother. Punishment meted out by the courts for wrongdoing is often so slight, the fear of being caught acts as no deterrent.
It does in other countries, though. In Saudi Arabia, the Shari’ah law is the basis of justice, and judgment is usually according to the Hanbali tradition of Islam — meaning the law tends to be conservative and the punishments severe. Aggravated theft, for example, can be punishable by the amputation of a hand or other appendage. While a cruel and unusual punishment (and, to say the least, a human rights violation often reported by such organizations as Amnesty International), its consequences are that there has been very little stealing historically in Saudi Arabia.
Is this carrying fear too far? Sure. But is it unreasonable to hope that if we could get people to again fear spending an eternity in hell, we could cut down significantly on crime in our society?
Stephen King’s short story “Quitters, Inc.” is a spine-tingling thriller about how fear can be put to use in a good cause and even save your life. As the story tells it, Quitters, Inc. is a program for people who want to quit smoking. It is only after a person signs up that he learns that the Mafia runs the organization. But by then it is too late to drop out.
The punishments get successfully worse each time a participant in the program is caught smoking. The first time a man smokes after enrolling, for example, the Mafia snatches his wife and tortures her. And after the fifth offense, Quitters, Inc. absolutely guarantees that the enrollee will never smoke again — because he will “wake up dead the next morning with a bullet in his head.”
Of course, this, too, is extreme. But if we ever get to the point where we feel there is nothing to fear — that God no longer makes us toe the line, that a smart lawyer can always get us off no matter what we have done, that our country has gone soft on wrongdoing — at that point society will be in grave danger.
Are we approaching that point now?
George Plagenz is a syndicated columnist.