Can I Be Safe If You Are Not?

We have organised security around superiority. But if my security requires your inferiority, you must eventually seek greater power to secure yourself. My attempt to eliminate fear therefore creates the conditions for your fear, which eventually recreates mine.

Read that slowly, because most of us live inside it without noticing.

This may sound idealistic in a world where some people really do mean harm. Locks and laws exist for reasons, and we are not saying they should vanish. We are saying they cannot, on their own, produce the safety they promise.

How the loop works

Each step feels sensible on its own. A household builds a higher wall than the neighbour’s. A company builds a moat around its market so no competitor can come close. A group makes sure it is stronger than the group across the road. Each one is only trying to feel safe.

But my higher wall is your new reason to worry. You build yours higher, and now I am less safe than when I started. Nobody in this story is wicked. Everybody is afraid, and everybody’s solution to fear produces more of it.

We have learned to measure the distance between galaxies, but have not yet learned to live without fear of the human being next door. Perhaps our understanding of existence has not kept pace with our knowledge of it.

Where fear actually lives

Much of our fear needs an imagined future. It is often less about what the person in front of me is doing right now than about what they might do later, in a story I have written for them. Some fear is about a real and present threat, and then it is a warning to act on, not a story to examine. This essay is about the other kind.

And the farther something is from our experience, the more it is shaped by stories. We rarely fear the neighbour we have eaten with. We fear the one we have only heard about: the stranger, the other community, the people far away whose lives we know only through headlines.

This is why making ourselves stronger does so little. Strength works on the present. Fear of this kind lives in the imagined future, where no amount of strength can reach.

“Fear is not a feeling to manage. It is a gap in understanding.”

Fear is a gap, not a feeling

We usually treat fear as an emotion to be calmed: breathe, distract yourself, think positive. That can help for an evening. But if fear is a gap in understanding, then managing the feeling leaves the gap exactly where it was.

Closing the gap means understanding the other person: what they actually need, what they actually want, what our relationship actually is. Madhyasth Darshan calls the state on the other side of that gap अभय, usually translated as fearlessness, and defines it simply as trust in the present.

What trust actually is

Trust is not a bet on the future. A bet is what we place when we don’t understand, hoping the other person turns out well. Real trust doesn’t need to gamble. It rests on what is already visible now.

Madhyasth Darshan describes trust (विश्वास) as values in a relationship being fulfilled continuously. Trust is what continuity gets called. When someone has been fair with me today, and yesterday, and the day before, I don’t need to predict tomorrow. I can see what kind of relationship this is.

That also means trust is something we can test in ourselves. If I can explain trust but cannot recognise it in my relationships, what exactly have I understood?

Security without superiority

If superiority cannot make us safe, what can? Only a relationship in which neither person needs the other to be smaller.

That asks something of both sides. You cannot respect someone while needing them to become like you. And you don’t have to make yourself smaller to recognise someone else’s greatness. Respect that requires sameness is just superiority in a softer form. Real respect leaves both people their full size.

We say all humans are equal. Then we organise ourselves into people who belong and people who don’t. Our principles need to show up in how we treat the next person who arrives.

And the planet?

The same loop runs through how we use the earth. A great deal of what we extract, build and store is not for living. It is for defence: bigger reserves, larger stockpiles, more than the neighbour, just in case. Every wall in the story above is made of something taken from nature.

If fear drives accumulation, then trust is not only good for relationships. It may be one of the most practical ways to ask less of the planet. A household, a company or a country that doesn’t need to be stronger than others has far less to accumulate and defend. That is a claim worth testing, and we set out how in One question, not two.

A protocol to try

Pick one person you are wary of. It might be a colleague, a relative, a neighbour.

Write down what you believe about them. Then go through it line by line and ask: how much of this comes from observing them, and how much have I filled in myself? Then, over the next few weeks, watch what they actually do, more than once, before you decide.

Next time they do something that makes you uncomfortable, try to separate two things: what they actually did, and the meaning you have assigned to it. Am I responding to the person in front of me, or to the picture I have made of them?

You may find the person was never the source of the fear. The story was. And a story can be checked, in the present, one conversation at a time.

Limitations

• Some threats are real and immediate, and understanding takes time. In those moments, protection may have to come first.
• Trust can be misplaced. Reading the present accurately is a skill, and people can be deceived.
• We describe the loop of fear in households and groups. Whether the same reasoning holds between nations is a larger question than this essay answers.

References

1. Madhyasth Darshan Paribhasha Sanhita, अभय (fearlessness), p. 21
2. Madhyasth Darshan Paribhasha Sanhita, विश्वास (trust), p. 175