Fear of the Dark

“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” – H.P. Lovecraft

The world is full of unexplained phenomena. Some of them seem unexplainable. And the unknown, the unexplained, the unexplainable, is not only uncomfortable, it’s a reminder of a world full of abysmal dangers which we can’t even imagine. As such, one would expect every conscious being would fear the unknown, the mysterious, as many do fear the dark.

Some of us however, this writer included, love mysteries. There’s a significant market for the unexplained and the occult. Well, there’s a market for horror movies, there’s a market for puzzles. But the fascination with the unknown despite its implicit horror can also be understood in other ways.

One of them is that the fear of the unknown can be fought with the mere illusion of knowledge. One can simply make up and, this is important, believe in an arbitrary explanation for the unexplained to stop being a nuisance, at least to our own minds. Believe those stories, have faith in those explanations,and the fear will be appeased. Is there a strange unexplained light in the sky? Oh, those are Zeta Reticulli spaceships showing off, part of the hybrid program. Or rather just swamp gas, simply ignore them. Either way, those who find and easy and certain answers to everything very probably don’t actually have an answer to everything, they just believe they do. They don’t actually love mysteries, but the explanations they think that answers them.

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