From lions on the savannah to witches on Twitter
A little more than three centuries ago, in the cold soil of 17th-century Massachusetts, a wave of hysteria swept through a provincial town and left bodies swinging from ropes. The Salem witch trials: our favorite moral cautionary tale.
From today’s enlightened vantage point, we dismiss those villagers as pious barbarians—credulous zealots drunk on superstition. They killed out of fear, we say, fear born of whispers and shadows, of feelings parading as facts. And the stories that fed the frenzy? Fabricated, exaggerated, or ripped from context.
But we flatter ourselves. Salem was no aberration—it was simply one episode in the long serial of human terror. Every century finds its witches: heretics, communists, viruses, carbon dioxide. Once the early Christians wore the target; now the blasphemers are branded “deniers.” The choreography never changes, only the costumes.
Does any of this sound familiar? You needn’t look far to see the same old script—this time with the planet itself cast as the damsel in distress, burning not in hellfire but under the righteous heat of human industry.
So why are we still so easily frightened—by everything, by nothing?
To answer that, we must walk backward through time—far past the age of crucibles and catechisms, past even the invention of the plow—into the long dusk of the Paleolithic, when humanity was little more than a shivering experiment in survival.
For two and a half million years, our ancestors roamed grasslands and forests, forever alert for tooth and claw. Death lurked in every shadow. Lions, snakes, starvation—all demanded quick reflexes and quicker terror.
Two and a half million years. To put that in scale: from the first primitive agriculture to moon rockets took us ten thousand. From the first carved symbol to the smartphone—a mere five. The span of human civilization is a footnote in the evolutionary ledger.
In that vast prehistory, fear was our greatest ally. It was sculpted into us by nature’s most patient artisan: time. The little almond-shaped organ that governs it—the amygdala—was there long before our species drew breath. It hums at the center of every mammalian brain, triggering the ancient sequence of fight or flight, flooding the blood with adrenaline, sharpening reflexes, narrowing perception. It’s the original alarm bell, ringing for hundreds of millions of years.
Against that immense chronology, five millennia of civilization barely register. Our nervous systems are tuned for predators in the tall grass, not for the bureaucratic abstractions of modern life. We are lions’ prey trying to negotiate stock options and social media.
And so the reflex that once kept us alive now keeps us obedient. It is not some evolutionary relic—it’s an engine, still purring, still running, still misfiring at ghosts. Fear was meant to help us survive the savannah; today, it makes us panic over tweets.
You can’t excise it, and you can’t medicate it away. The amygdala is woven too deep into the circuitry of being. It doesn’t malfunction; it overperforms. Our problem isn’t disease—it’s overclocked biology. Knowledge helps, sometimes. But even the well-educated often dance to its rhythm, reciting rationalizations to disguise their panic.
Courage is the only antidote—but courage, unlike fear, is not instinctive. It has to be learned the hard way.
I learned it from my son.
My eldest is autistic—not the whimsical, Hollywood kind who cracks ciphers and quotes Shakespeare, but the kind that redefines your understanding of chaos. He’s nearly two meters tall, nonverbal, and wrestling with puberty like a biblical plague—no language, no comprehension, no outlet, only the hormonal thunder inside his own body.
When the storm hits, it’s not a tantrum—it’s an eruption. One moment he’s calm; the next, a raging force of nature. Imagine a toddler’s meltdown scaled up to the size of a rugby forward.
The medical establishment, in its infinite wisdom, prescribed the usual sacrament: sedation. Pills to take the edge off. To make him “manageable.”
We refused. Not because we’re masochists, but because peace at the price of personality is not peace—it’s surrender. You can sand down a soul only so much before it disappears entirely. And once you begin medicating discomfort, the dosage only climbs. The drug wins.
So we endured the chaos until he learned, in his own impossible way, to endure himself.
Society could learn something from that. Because what pharmaceuticals do to the body, fear propaganda does to civilization. Feed the public a steady diet of doom, and soon it grows numb. The threshold for alarm rises. Each new crisis must scream louder than the last. Eventually, the system burns out.
Sedating a troubled teenager isn’t good for his heart. Sedating a civilization with a drip-feed of apocalypse isn’t good for its soul. You may get obedience—but at the cost of empathy, curiosity, and will.
Our modern amygdala now feeds on curated horrors. It panics at the approved evils and yawns at the forbidden truths. Algorithms are the new witch-finders, sorting heresy from holiness. The villagers no longer gather around the gallows; they gather around hashtags.
And all the while, our children learn that discomfort is a disease to be medicated, that belonging is more important than integrity, that fear of exclusion is worse than fear of mutilation. I made foolish choices when I was young—two ill-advised earrings, long since abandoned—but today’s youth carve their confusion into flesh more permanently, driven by social contagion, desperate to silence the primal dread of being unloved.
The medieval peasant feared only a handful of things: God, Satan, and famine. His world was small enough to make that manageable. Ours is infinite—and so is our inventory of terrors.
A farmer in the crumbling Roman Empire scarcely noticed the fall. When the last emperor’s regalia was sent east to Byzantium, the baker and the blacksmith went on with their days, oblivious to “collapse.” You can’t fear what you don’t perceive.
Today, a headline from Pyongyang or a cough from Wuhan can trigger anxiety in Vienna. We fear the invisible and the irrelevant with equal passion. Our demons are infinite because our world is infinitely connected. Every idiot with Wi-Fi can conjure a new apocalypse.
Very few of us ever confront this inner beast directly. Most prefer to make peace with it—to feed it, to let it guide them, to mistake obedience for safety. Even the best of us cannot banish it; we can only chain it, knowing it will one day gnaw through the links again.
That, more than any political theory, explains the endless cycle of creation and collapse. Fear enthrones the idiots; the idiots destroy; the ruins teach courage; courage rebuilds—until fear returns to demand obedience once more.
Let’s be clear: problems are real. But fear has never solved one. Fear doesn’t build; it corrodes. It demands submission, not understanding. The villagers of Salem obeyed fear with ropes; we obey it with pharmaceuticals, algorithms, and social conformity. Different tools—same servitude.
Every civilization that forgets how to suffer consciously soon learns to suffer unconsciously.
We can’t escape the generator of fear inside our skulls, but we can learn to tame it. Individually, if not collectively.
The world hasn’t outgrown witch hunts—it has digitized them. The bonfires are online, the sermons televised, the priests replaced by “experts” clutching data instead of crosses. The liturgy is unchanged: fear the unseen, obey the herd, trust the medicine.
I know what that trust costs. I’ve seen it in my son. Sedation buys silence—but it’s the silence of the grave. When you tranquilize the will to struggle, you tranquilize the will to live.
He fights his storm every day without surrender. And in that defiance—in that raw refusal to be pacified—I glimpse the last flicker of our humanity: the will to remain untamed.
That, in the end, is the true price of fear. Not the trembling or the panic, but the calm that follows once the wildness has been smothered.
Courage isn’t the absence of fear. It’s fear, unmedicated—endured until it bows its head.
