"What Fear Can Teach Us"

https://www.ted.com/talks/karen_thompson_walker_what_fear_can_teach_us 

This TED Talk is called “What Fear Can Teach Us” by Karen Thompson Walker.  Walker is trying to convince her audience that fear should be analyzed and seen as a story that can be acted upon to change the future.  She starts with a powerful hook about a whaleship in 1819 called the Essex that wrecked in the Pacific ocean when it was struck by sperm whale.  The sailors were more than 1000 miles away from land.  Walker says that this terrifying shipwreck inspired parts of Moby Dick.  Walker then segues into her talk’s theme by saying that most of her audience members have likely not experienced such a frightening situation.  Fear is taught to children to be a weakness, and she says that, “In English, fear is something we conquer.  It’s something we fight.”  Walker then offered a counterclaim, saying that perhaps we should look at fear as an awesome act of the imagination.  This is especially true when considering the vivid fears of children and creative thinkers like Charles Darwin.  She gave an example of her own childhood in California, where she was terrified that an earthquake would destroy her house.  Walker then went back to the story of the Essex, explaining the sailors’ options.  One option was to go to the closest islands, but they had heard frightening rumors of cannibals there.  Another option was to go to Hawaii, but the captain was worried about the storms likely occurring there that time of the year.  Lastly, the most dangerous option was to go south in hopes to catch a wind about 1500 miles away that could take them to South America, which would likely result in them running out of food.  Their fears, Walker said, were like stories.  All fears are similar to stories--they have characters (us), a plot with a beginning, middle, and end; intense imagery, and are full of suspense.  Walker gave an example, explaining that for her first book, she thought for months about what would happen if Earth’s rotation slowed.  She asked herself what would happen to our days, crops, and minds.  These thoughts were similar to her thoughts about earthquakes when she was little--what would happen to her family, house, belongings?  All of these fears create stories.  

Walker then went more in depth into her purpose.  She talked about how we should all read and analyze our fears.  Some of our deepest fears actually come true, thus some fears predict the future.  However, it is difficult to decide which fears will likely come to reality.  Mentioning another novelist, Walker explained that the best readers are said to have two parts--one artistic and one scientific.  The artistic allows them to become involved in the story and feel the story’s depth.  The scientific offers a more logical approach that allows a reader to make reasonable decisions about the story.  Walker applied this idea of a two-part reader to fears.  She used this as a connection back to her whaleship story, saying that the sailors’ vivid fears of cannibalism outweighed their logical reasoning, so they chose to head south to try to get to South America.  Because of their decision, over half of the crew died before being rescued by another ship more than two months later.  Some of the other crew members succumbed to their own form of cannibalism.  Had they thought logically about the more bland and probable fear of starvation, more of the soldiers could have lived.  Ultimately, Walker says that we need to read our fears better, and listen to the more subtle fears like clogged arteries and climate change.  Those slow fears can become truth.  The fantastical, more vivid and unlikely fears like plane crashes and serial killers should not take a person’s focus.  She concluded by saying that fears can be full of wisdom, insight, and truth.

The purpose of Walker’s speech was revealed at the end of her talk.  She wanted to change peoples’ definitions and ideas of fear.  Instead of shaming and burying fear, it should be utilized and analyzed.  She did this mainly through logos, although she also used ethos and pathos.  She used pathos at the very beginning, when she explained her childhood fear of earthquakes.  Children are often used as pathos in various texts, and in this particular lecture she chose to use her own childhood memory to inspire understanding.  She wanted to make her audience members sympathize with her memory and remember their own childhood fears, increasing their understanding of how vivid fears can be.  Walker’s own credibility was only mentioned twice.  At one point in the speech, she said, “If I’ve done my job as a storyteller…”  She did this to remind the audience of her story about the whaleship Essex, and how she kept leaving it unfinished until the end of the speech to keep the suspense of the fear.  This allowed the audience to draw parallels between fears and stories.  Her other use of ethos came about when she talked about writing her first novel, called The Age of Miracles, and how she spent months thinking about what would happen to the Earth if it started rotating more slowly.  This example added to her credibility as a novelist and a speaker, because she was giving the audience an example of how fears can take the shape of stories.  Lastly, her use of logos was prevalent throughout the speech.  First she talked about neuroscientists’ view that humans are inherently optimistic, and used this as evidence of why fear is thought to be shameful.  This set the background of what fear means to many people.  Then she started to introduce the positives to fear by pointing out creative people whose vivid fears did not leave them as they went from children to adults--Charles Darwin, Charlotte Bronte, and Marcel Proust.  These three distinguished and credible people supported Walker’s view that fear can be harnessed to create positive things.  She later said that humans are the only species that are able to imagine themselves in the future, providing evidence that fears can have truth to them and act as predictors of the future.  Lastly, Walker provided a method to harness fears as tools by citing Vladimir Nabokov, who said that the best types of readers have an artistic part and a scientific part to them.  She used this idea to explain that people can analyze their fears by first understanding the intuitive images that they carry, and then use logic to determine the most important and reasonable fears that can be prepared for.

    I chose this speech because the title intrigued me.  I, like many other people, have many fears.  My problem is that I often let my fears control my actions, which can prevent me from having experiences that could be positive.  An example of this is my stage fright.  Although I enjoy dancing, I chose to stop taking dance classes at Millbrook after Dance I because of this all-consuming fear.  I thought that this speech could enlighten me on a way to see my fears differently in order to prohibit them from having such control over my actions.  It did succeed in doing so, I think, because I can now try to dismiss ridiculous, vague fears while planning for more important ones.