The Fear Factor and Conformity

Today we use science, statistical data, patriotism, religion, popularity, wealth, health, and love, as ways to control. We are manipulated by what we may or may not be, have, lose or never get if we do not do, think or verbalize, exactly as we are told to.

Hung over our heads are images of everything from physical suffering, isolation from our tribe, to imprisonment or death. Even then, we're threatened with the loss of our ete
al souls, cast into the hell fires of damnation. These are among the ultimate forms of peer pressure.

Did you think that peer pressure stopped when you graduated from high school? It didn't. High school is just the training ground. It prepares you for a lifetime of conforming to peer pressure.

Your peers include your family, workplace, church, age group, educational level, and even your class level. You spend your whole life surrounded by varying groups of peers with various rules. Whether or not you follow those rules determines whether you're accepted, ostracized, or even punished.

When applied with enough authority and tenacity, those rules can seem almost unshakeable. Even if misused information and power are revealed, their power to intimidate and control doesn't seem to lessen. Generations of abuse may continue before the victims challenge the fear mongers. It took decades of abuse for American colonists to declare their independence from the mother country.

Likewise, hundreds of years of abuse transpired before for the Protestant Reformation reached critical mass.

It's time to examine fear as a factor in our personal and spiritual growth.

Fear is a powerful weapon of control because so much of our early training and role modeling tell us not to believe in ourselves. We are taught and guided to doubt our own experiences. We learn to question our ability to process and reason. We become afraid to trust our own intuitive connection, especially if it is not in alignment with the beliefs and thought process of the authorities in charge.

Fear mongers prevail because we do not challenge them. We don't risk the consequences of speaking our truth.

When we find other people ready to speak the truth, we estimate their size. The greater the number of people on our side, the less the risk and the more likely we are to join that group.

Unfortunately, the more a group becomes cohesive and grows, the more likely it is to recreate its own peer pressure. Within it, we see the same need to control and authoritarian approach that it left behind.

For example, the "land of the free" sometimes misuses and abuses its power, and some factions of the Protestant Reformation have abused theirs.

The less we believe in ourselves, our own knowing and our relationship with a higher being who loves and guides us, the more readily we are manipulated by fear. It takes a greater sense of self and inner confidence not to be threatened by someone else's beliefs or ways of being. It can be an even bigger challenge to accept them, and to explore and understand them.

Faith is among the most recommended tools to use to help deal with fear. To a certain point that can be true. However, faith can represent an attachment to an even greater sense of fears.

True faith is a sense, a feeling and a knowing. It's not making choices out of fear of what will happen to you if you do not.

In conclusion, when you move into greater places of empowerment, be willing to explore and question all the cobblestones of the pathway of your journey. Pay close attention to your faith and beliefs; be sure they are not just fears in disguise.

There will always be moments of pain, discontentment, questioning and frustration. Overall, make sure you are enjoying the journey and discovering your own unique self. We really weren't put here to suffer. We're not target practice for an angry God with a fistful of lightening bolts.

Or as I sometimes put it: Smiting is so last millennium.