Fear P*rn
Cold Truths About Hot Takes
Welcome to Polymathic Being, a place to explore counterintuitive insights across multiple domains. These essays explore common topics from different perspectives and disciplines to uncover unique insights and solutions.
Today's topic investigates our addiction to fear and how people leverage that addiction to drive engagement, similar to pornography. While it’s not a new problem within the human psyche, our constant connection to social media dramatically increases our exposure and exacerbates the negative outcomes.
The news, social media, and everyone everywhere is a cacophony of chaos full of hot takes, people planting their flag to defend a position, and seemingly everyone demanding a reaction. Headlines are loaded with clickbait (Did mine get you here?), Algowhores whip up frenzies with skillfully crafted content that gets served straight to your eyeballs, regardless of the truth.
The technical term is Fear P*rn,1 and it’s as addictive as naked women or the original pornography, romance novels.2 Travis Monteleone wrote Our Negativity Addiction, in which he delves into great detail about the mechanisms. Suffice it to say, it’s addicting because it triggers something incredibly deep in the human psyche: Survival.3
Fear P*rn is all about hot takes drawing from, or inventing a divisive view, and then seasoning it with outrage. It’s designed to trigger your base instincts of survival and get your emotional elephant to stampede.4 Much of our current politics is inherently divisive, as parties strive to control the levers of power. Saturate that with the hot takes in the media, and you end up with a dumpster fire. But let me remind you that your reaction gives control into the hands of those who are demanding that reaction.
Is someone trolling you? You rise to the bait.
Is someone posting something that triggers you? You have to act.
Did someone question your personal view? You must attack.
The key to all of this is that you’re letting them control you. You’re ceding your agency to the outrage of others and becoming their pawn. And to what end? What benefit are you getting? Are you happier? Healthier? Are your relationships stronger?
What happens if you refuse to play the game and stop the cycle of fear p*rn?
Alternative Framing
Thankfully, there’s a different way to look at things. Instead of focusing on each element as its own unique situation, step back and consider the larger picture. A great example is this Chinese parable:
There was once a farmer in ancient China who owned a horse. “You are so lucky!” his neighbours told him, “to have a horse to pull the cart for you.” “Maybe,” the farmer replied. “Too soon to tell.”
One day he didn’t latch the gate properly and the horse ran off. “Oh no! This is terrible news!” his neighbours cried. “Such terrible misfortune!” “Maybe,” the farmer replied. “Too soon to tell.”
A few days later the horse returned, bringing with it six wild horses. “How fantastic! You are so lucky,” his neighbours told him. “Now you are rich!” “Maybe,” the farmer replied. “Too soon to tell.”
The following week the farmer’s son was breaking-in one of the wild horses when it kicked out and broke his leg. “Oh no!” the neighbours cried, “such bad luck, all over again!” “Maybe,” the farmer replied. “Too soon to tell.”
The next day soldiers came and took away all the young men to fight in the war. The farmer’s son was left behind. “You are so lucky!” his neighbours cried. “Maybe,” the farmer replied. “Too soon to tell.”
The cold truth about hot takes is that you don’t need a hot take. Typically, if you wait just a little bit, everything changes. However, that doesn’t mean you’ve landed on the right answer yet. The dust is still settling. You may recall the Ranger adage, “Slow is Smooth, and Smooth is Fast.” This concept is related to the Taoist concept of Wu Wei. It involves pausing to assess the situation, shifting your response from a reaction to an intentional action or even non-action, as the situation warrants. Importantly, it restores the agency of the action to you, rather than what others are demanding.
What this means in application is that the truth of the parable isn’t in any of the extremes of reactions but in the central understanding that life gives and takes away. There will be things that seem good and things that seem bad. Most importantly, it is the ability to step back and contextualize a singular situation into the culmination of multiple situations that show the larger picture.
Now, this might sound familiar to you because it’s also the root of our Systems Thinking concept I’ve written about, where we are challenged to have:
Insatiable curiosity
The humility to accept we don’t know everything
Intentional reframing to see if we understand the situation completely
As we distilled it further, Yes, And… So!, let’s apply this back to the parable:
Yes, each situation can be taken as a blessing or a curse.
And… The situations together tell a more complicated but accurate story about life.
So! We can better understand that a hot take isn’t necessary for each situation, as the larger truth takes more time to understand.
It’s also more than just perspective. It’s about retaining your agency and avoiding becoming an unaware pawn of someone else’s game. David Dennison captured his rationale to embrace a flavor of this concept as follows:
My New Term’s Resolution to be less angry isn’t some zen thing. It’s not inspired by a Christian will to forgive, or to turn the other cheek. It’s an attempt to make myself less manipulable. (emphasis mine)
The concept of Wu Wei in Taoism aligns closely with Stoic philosophy. Marcus Aurelius said in Meditations:
Choose not to be harmed—and you won’t feel harmed. Don’t feel harmed—and you haven’t been.
Let that sink in for a moment. We get to choose how much harm we feel. It may seem counterintuitive, but consider taking a punch. When I was boxing, I got to choose how much I let a hit affect me. I could shake off a massive punch that, ironically, if I allowed it to hurt, would hurt a lot more. I get to choose the impact I let it have.
Regaining Agency
We have the power to control ourselves, and that agency is essential to embrace. It’s the foundation of both Stoic and Taoist philosophies and is an antidote to outrage, victimization, and fear. In fact, it’s becoming a superpower as Stephen Parato shares:
Let this splash of cold reality shock you out of a frenzy of reaction; you don’t have to have a hot take all the time. Pause long enough to recognize whether you are allowing others to control you. See if your actions are collapsing heaven into hell and dragging the emperor to reign rent-free in your brain as many do with politics.
The media profits off of the addiction to Fear P*rn. When you recognize this and regain your agency, you are taking a crucial step toward healing the divisions that others intentionally sow to maintain their power and control. The cold truth is that many of us are addicted to Fear P*rn, but we can, and should, break that addiction.
This essay is the close cousin of Psyop, Until Proven Otherwise, which provides a series of key tools for how to put the brakes on the deluge of content flowing at us each day. These two essays go hand in hand to help us handle the world today.
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Further Reading from Authors I Appreciate
I highly recommend the following Substacks for their great content and complementary explorations of topics that Polymathic Being shares.
Goatfury Writes All-around great daily essays
Never Stop Learning Insightful Life Tips and Tricks
Cyborgs Writing Highly useful insights into using AI for writing
Educating AI Integrating AI into education
Socratic State of Mind Powerful insights to the philosophy of agency
I may be the only one to use that term in a professional context, but I’ll still claim it’s the most accurate technical term. 😆
Pornography is the combination of two Greek words. The first one is “porne,” which means prostitute or erotic. The second is “graphien,” meaning to write. Pornography is erotic/sexual writing.
The reason porn works so well is that, like the addiction of fear is deeply rooted in a survival mechanism, the porn addiction is deeply rooted in a related psychology: reproduction. Both mechanisms are encoded deeply in our lower brains, and both are tightly wired into our dopamine systems for fast and addictive rewards.
James Horton, PhD. also captures the related concept he titles “Gloom P*rn” which “refers to content — tweets, articles, videos, comments, and so on — that stoke negativity, pessimism, and anger, with the aim of getting attention. It is the full spectrum of human darkness, reduced to content and put on lurid display.”
Behaviour change can be very difficult. The Ego uses fear to sustain behaviours we know are unhelpful for us. Understanding what drives our behaviour is important to changing. Replacing bad behaviours with more beneficial ones only happens with good reflective practice. But that’s exactly where better outcomes lie.
The Chinese Farmer! My favorite.
Did I send this to you? I post it so often, I forget who I send it too sometimes.
Alan Watts version is so good. He just has the best voice.
It is just so perfect in explaining right, wrong, good bad, and the infinite other dichotomies, depend on what story you tell yourself, not reality.
The reality of the situation depends on context, and becoming too attached to one aspect too quickly blinds you, and traps you in a world of illusion, you make for yourself, that is the wellspring of human suffering.