The Power Of Fear: Lessons From Ft. Hood

This week I found myself asking a simple, yet extremely complex, question: What causes someone to pick up a gun and shoot innocent people?

The situation of Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan is complicated for me.

First of all, his family is originally Palestinian. My experience working in human rights over the past decade has brought me in contact with many Palestinian activists and I have read countless accounts of the brutal reality Palestinians endure in the Occupied Territories. That amount of trauma and frustration is often passed down through generations and were perhaps part of Maj. Hasan's early childhood understanding of how the world is. In Palestine, innocent people die all the time and there is no justice for it.

Despite protests from his family, he joined the US military to protect the country of his birth. He was probably more patriotic to this country than many people I know, myself included.

He served dutifully for 14 years, 6 of which he counseled and supported countless soldiers upon their return from Iraq and Afghanistan. CBS news reports that in 2005 (among 45 reporting states) there were at least 6,256 suicides among those who served in the US armed forces. That's 120 each and every week, in just one year. Some are calling it an epidemic.

Maj. Hasan had to have had a view of the war in Iraq that was quite different than what most Americans hear on the news. According to his cousin, Maj. Hasan "was mortified" at the thought of being deployed to Iraq after the stories he had heard. And to be a practicing Muslim, the internal conflict he must have felt at fighting in a war that is all but declared along religious lines.

So bad was the harassment he endured from other soldiers after 9/11 that he had hired a lawyer to try and get discharged from service, even offering to pay the US government back for Med. School. No luck, he was forced to serve and was facing imminent deployment.

But even with all of those complexities, I wonder, what causes someone to actually pick up a gun and open fire on unsuspecting people?

The victims at Ft. Hood, like Maj. Hasan, were facing deployment to Iraq or had recently returned. Did he think he was saving them from something? Did fear have such a tight grip on him that he simply lost his mind and saw that as his only way out? Many of the details have yet to come out and I'm sure we will understand more, hopefully from Maj. Hasan himself, about his motives.

Being from Colorado, home to several horrific and nonsensical shootings in both schools and churches, I have often wondered about the point to which a person has to be pushed, how confused or deranged must they be, to justify such an act.

For me it all comes down to fear.

And this post is really about the Power of Fear.

Fear causes us to clam up, to search for the source of our fears and to target them with a vengeance. This level of fear leads to extreme hate and causes people to believe they are acting out of self-preservation when harming others. Perhaps somewhere deep down, it is in our DNA to react to overwhelming fear with violence.

But I believe that we all have the ability to override the Power of Fear.

I have been deathly afraid more than once in my life. While working in the Congo I was held at gunpoint. In Sri Lanka, I was locked in a room by three men with seriously bad intentions, and barely escaped through a bathroom window. And I spent three terrifying days being interrogated by the Chinese Armed Police in Tibet.

Although I have made friends with fear, I have not conquered it. Fear arises as an instinct. But the more we work with it, the less it controls our actions.

By taking the time to face what scares us, mentally putting ourselves in fearful situations, we can better recognize our emotional responses to fear (anger, hate, violence etc.); not react to them, just recognize them. Next, we can picture transforming our responses from reactive to proactive, from violent to safe (for ourselves and our adversaries).

The more we do this visualization from safe protected spaces, the lower the chances are that we will react to unanticipated fear with violence.

Try it for yourself, see what happens.

Instead of panicking when we are afraid and lashing out, we become familiar with fear and learn how to move through it skillfully.

I am not saying that when it comes down to actual self-preservation, one shouldn't do what they must to disarm or disable an attack. But rather that when we do not examine our fears, when we are slaves to the power of fear, we become unable to determine the difference between real and perceived danger.

Before long we are operating on auto-pilot, completely controlled by our fears...and I imagine that this is how someone picks up a gun and believes its OK to shoot innocent people.

Truthfully,

Kiri Westby
Change-Maker/Rule-Breaker/Story-Teller

Kiri Westby is featured in BE THE CHANGE, How Meditation Can Transform You And The World, by Ed and Deb Shapiro, with forewords by HH Dalai Lama and Robert Thurman. Contributors include Marianne Williamson, Seane Corn, Edgar Mitchell, Ellen Burstyn, Michael Beckwith, Jon Kabat-Zinn, Jane Fonda, Ram Dass, Jack Kornfield, Byron Katie, Dean Ornish, John Gray and others.

 

Comments

[Rallo4u]

Kiri, I commend you on your words, on the bold actions that you have taken in the name of peace, of love. You are one of my heroes. My love for you is deep. And when fear does come and rule in me I look to the likes of you for inspiration to resolve my fears in a constructive fashion. May you walk in the light.
Where is there to go from there?
Much Love
Rallo

[adnnd74]

when you say, "What causes someone to pick up a gun and shoot innocent people?" I think you are asking the wrong question. I'm unsure who all was hurt in the end, but I believe that Maj. Hasan was shooting at soldiers that were getting prepared to be deployed into a situation where he had personal experience of how not-innocent their experience would be.

[CollinJE]

I think you hit the nail on the head that fear can motivate so much violence, that said...

The elephant in this room is the institutions that promote fear, organized religion.

And I mean all religions. Religion thrives on fear, effectively uses it to garner support, and makes sure that fear is a consent force in their follower's lives.

I know we can't know exactly what role Hasan's faith played in his shooting but I believe it to be naive to not think that at least part of his strong motivation to not go to war, was a fear of angering his God by contributing to the killing of fellow Muslims.

If you want to eradicate fear, you will need to start with biggest cause of it: religion.

[Kiri Westby - Huffpost Blogger]

I agree that religions often use fear as a way of controlling their devotees. And to have such concepts as a holy war, or a jihad, seems counter to the teachings of love and peace and compassion that most religions espouse.

No way to know that Maj. Hasan was thinking in terms of his faith...not yet anyway. I hope we get a change to hear from him directly.

I wonder these days if religion or TV/Media are bigger fear producers? The news seems to thrive on fear tactics.

Again, the only way to free ourselves from the grip of fear is to look it straight in the face and refuse to be controlled by...our actions are always our own.

Thanks for commenting!
Kiri

[doninsbca]

ah, fear . . . . such an effective tool to control populations . . . .

[Brus Westby]

Hi Kiri,
Thank you for taking on such an important topic. Whereas most of us won't find ourselves in such a crazy fearful place as Major Nidal Malik Hasan that we see only one way out, we do make choices everyday based on lesser fears and their resulting actions. Fear is so pervasive and can be so subtle. We so easily give in to fear in so many ways. I often wonder what a world would be like with no fear.

[Kiri Westby - Huffpost Blogger]

Thanks Dad,

I'm not sure I can picture a world without fear...they say we are all born with the fear of falling and loud noises.

But a world in which people are not swayed into violence by fear is possible...at least in my mind, which is where it starts.

You're the best,
Kiri

[Momklok]

It is a huge assumption to suggest Hasan was crazed by fear. Even if he was, he still picked up weapons and slaughtered 13 innocent, unsuspecting, unarmed people in cold blood.

[CaveatMagnusFrater]

HuffPost's Pick

Hi Kiri,

Glad to see you back.

Fear is powerful, but so is love. I think that fear, love and normal needs are the catalysts for almost everything people do. We go to work and pay our bills to have home, food and some degree of comfort; we're addressing normal needs. When we are motivated by love, we look for ways to help others whether it's friends and family or for the community, we feel better.. When fear drives us, we at least harm ourselves emotionally and at worst, cause suffering to others. Seldom are we under actual or likely attack., it's usually fear of the unknown or others blown out of proportion. As you said, "This level of fear leads to extreme hate and causes people to believe they are acting out of self-preservation when harming others."

We in the military are trained to kill people. We joined to support and defend our nation but things change. Once a threshold has been crossed in the mind, there is often no going back. Once you learn that taking a life is okay, you might open the window further and consider it a way to solve more personal problems. That's one reason why propaganda vilifies the enemy as different and bad. It helps salve the soldiers conscience once they've taken a human life and minimizes the chance that they'll kill at home. This will happen again. Pandora's box cannot be closed once opened.

Best wishes,
little brother

[Kiri Westby - Huffpost Blogger]

Little Brother,

Thanks for your important words. As someone actually in the military, you know a lot more than I do about this stuff. I loved your comment about the thin line between being ordered to Kill to solve the governments problems, and thinking its OK to kill to solve your own...brilliant.

I wonder, is there a way out of this madness? Better services for Vets?

Thanks for always reading and giving me feedback,
KIri

[lisaozzello]

Kiri, great article. It helps in understanding motives and our own fears.

[Sezin]

As a sidenote what I find disturbing about this story is the fact that after he shot all those people, the first thing the media started doing was talking about his "ideological" and "religious" motivations because he is Muslim. The next day a white man opened fire on his colleagues in Orlando and there was certainly talk that the man was crazy, but they did not mention his ideologica­l/religiou­s background at all.

But back to your topic of the power of fear, I struggle every day to really understand what brings someone to murder another. I can understand all of the theories behind it in an intellectual sense, their background, desperation, fear, trauma, but I do not know how they get to that point of actually pulling the trigger. Self-defense is the only thing that makes "sense" to me, but then when our lives are run by fear every little action of another's can make us feel threatened.

My solution: Get rid of every single gun worldwide and put a moratorium on their manufacture. People might reconsider murdering if they actually have to get blood on their hands.

[Kiri Westby - Huffpost Blogger]

Thanks Sezin!

I too wondered why the media needed to focus so much on Maj. Hasan's Muslim Faith, and so little on the obvious second-hand trauma he had from his years at Walter Reed...when both are important in trying to understand his motives.

Thanks for sharing a bit about your own struggle to understand the mind of a murderer...I know you must have played out the murder that you witnessed a million times in your head in trying to understand WHY?

Even if there is no clear answer to the WHY, every case being different, we must begin to examine the root causes, such as fear, and ask HOW DO WE CHANGE? Like Little Brother commented above...Pandora's box is opened, this will happen again (A school? A church? A military base?).

I say that if we can prevent it from happening by talking about the hard stuff, like admitting the rates of suicide in the US forces or just talking with each other about the Power of Fear, then how dare we stay silent!

Kiri

[Ed and Deb Shapiro - Huffpost Blogger]

HuffPost's Pick

Kiri - great blog and compassionate point of view

I often try to put myself in the mindset of others and try to understand what makes them tick. It seems like this guy was suffering and kept it inside and it just exploded like a cannon.

It is so sad he took it out on innocent people.

Fear is a really powerful energy that when it gets our of control can overcome anyone if it becomes crazy fear or insane fear. A person can go mad and anything is possible.

BE THE CHANGE,

Ed