today about fear

there are very few people who create sth, which is actually new. nonetheless many seem to feel the urge to do so. originality. it seems, the use of the word ‚creation‘ already implies the idea of ’novelty‘. bringing sth into existence that has been brought into existence before is nothing but ‚production‘.

my experience is that i am more one of the producers although i feel this urge, too. what i’m about to tell you will be no surprise to you then. i feel it is my job, though, and something i am actually capable of doing, that is, to reiterate what people have said before. today i want to reiterate that fear is our biggest enemy! of course, there are all sorts of different fears but that is not what i want to talk about. we all have fears we will never overcome. for me, that is, as ridiculous as it sounds, missing trains or planes or what have you. but the important thing to realise is that those are only very few. most fears can be overcome even if it doesn’t seem so. the way we are brought up, most of us would shun away from showing the kind of civil disobedience people display in palestine, egypt, burma, china and all those kind of places. which is often a kind of civil disobedience we readily engage in over here, in western europe.

the point i’m trying to make is not that you should go some place where overcoming a fear could mean much more than a night at the police station or that we shouldn’t complain because we are in a privileged position anyway. no, a night at the police station is enough! i’m just trying to say: look, most of the fear of power and their execution that we have can be overcome.

a little indication: i think, sabotaging armies wherever possible is a defendable idea, even if sabotaging means setting military vehicles on fire. as i’m writing this i’m scared of publishing it given my personal fears of power and prosecution by police authorities. (which, admittedly, might be an unwarranted fear but that doesn’t count.)

it is not likely that we will be rewarded for doing sth we conceive of as a courageous action. at the end of the day, the bigger picture will mostly demand deeds of us that involve some kind of sacrifice, and if it’s just time – but most of the time more than that! otherwise, you wouldn’t really be fearing undertaking those deeds, would you?

it helps to try overcoming fear on a regular basis.

jakob schäfer