The Utopia of Fear

The horror that is freezing you; you catch yourself thinking that nothing as bad as what you feel through simulated fear can happen to you in real life - especially in that same moment of experiencing the simulation. Fear today is a merger between a form of virtual mental fitness and random Superstition. ‘It’s just happening on screen’ – you are safe, you are in control. But are we safe? Shows like America Horror Story or Stranger Things are trending all over the Internet nowadays. The horror genre today helps us research parts of our nature without confronting them physically, it is producing a simulacrum of fear, an emotion that never existed in the first place. We fear idyllically, we fear utopically. We feel the rush, we don’t experience the consequence, perfect match, perfect catch. We use fear as a stimulus for escaping our dumb realities, for coping with our boring actions, our boring relationships, our overall boring lives. We are romanticizing terror and we distance ourselves from the true narrative of events. Virtual fear has its tentacles spreading in today’s society, especially in the Western world. Alienation and isolation, never exiting our comfort zone and living in a way too safe to be a true World make fear an Utopia. We end up freezing in our homemade prisons – embracing fear as a utopic fact, as an ideal place to be, apart from the real horror, apart from reality altogether. That reality that we don’t even want to experience again and that we fear of remembering it all too well. Besides his vocation of a fearless man, the artist has the most fears that a man can encounter. On top of the ordinary daily fears, the artist has the fear of never being understood, relevant, original, successful, ruthless enough, tireless enough, productive enough. The artist hopes to be useful, hope to reveal another dimension of the world, but he’s often in charge of creating utopias. Representations of ideal, alternative worlds, safer worlds in their virtual quality. Think about ‘fear’ as a Transworld organism. Today the relation between being afraid and being courageous emerged into the relation between living virtually and living into reality.