Chapter 3: The Formula of Fear
Fear is not the enemy. The enemy is what fear becomes when you don't read it.
3.1. Return to a Phrase from the Prologue
In the prologue I threw out a formula in one line and moved on. Now I unpack it.
Here it is:
Fear of death → fear as background → anger → hatred → hierarchy.
This is not my invention. This is the ordinary mechanism into which anyone falls who tries to hold the current of life alone. I fell into it too. I still do — sometimes. The difference is only that I know the scheme. And when I feel myself being pulled — I recognise which link I'm at.
This chapter is about how to read the formula from the inside. Not to "defeat fear." Defeating fear is impossible, and unnecessary. Fear is a signal. If you have no fear at all — you're not a hero, you're a broken sensor. The operator's task is not to switch the sensor off, but to learn to read its readings. To know whether this is a useful survival signal in a dangerous environment, or lingering noise that is already organising order in your head for you.
Below I'll break the formula down link by link. Each one — a short section. Where I can, I give my own live examples. Where I can't — I name the phenomenon directly.
3.2. The Root — Fear of Death
As a child I was afraid of the dark. Darkness is a background of indeterminacy, of all possible probabilities.
That is the fear of death in its pure form. It's not about physics. It's about the absolute scale of the unknown. A teenager who hasn't managed to do anything yet fears dying. Fears that he as if never existed. Next it transforms into a fear of not making it in time. Of not leaving a trace, of not realising why he came, of disappearing — without a receipt. In an adult the same fear goes by different names: "didn't make it," "missed the window," "life passing by," "need to change something." Different words — one structure. The root — existential dread of a person responding to this facet of reality. The memeplex of the human bio-body is constantly aware of itself, and it sees around it illness, death, violence — and sees that the people around it are in fear.
Under all other fears lies this one. You're afraid of losing your job — because without the job you as if cease to be. You're afraid of being left by someone — because without them you as if disappear. You're afraid of judgement — because another's gaze, rejecting you, erases you. Each time the root is the same: the fear of ceasing to exist.
And here is the most important thing.
This root is not healed by consolation. Not healed by positive thinking. There is only one thing that can be done — redirect it. Convert "I will disappear" into "I am unfolding." This is the very operation that in the prologue is called the moment the picture flips. The current stops being a threat — because you yourself are the current. Not in the beautiful sense, but the engineering sense: your structure moves through you, and as long as it moves — you're not disappearing, you're manifesting.
That's easy to say and hard to do. That's why the formula of fear works so tenaciously — it's simpler than the redirect.
3.3. The First Link — Fear as Background
If the root is not redirected, the fear of death doesn't go away. It just smears. Becomes a background. A steady, almost inaudible compression that you stop noticing roughly the way you stop noticing the hum of a refrigerator.
Signs that a background fear is present and working in you:
- You lie down to sleep, and in the five minutes before sleep your head starts "rattling" — not about anything specific, but about everything at once. Tomorrow, the day after, the project, a conversation, what someone will think.
- You open a work chat after the weekend and before you've even seen what's inside — your chest is already tightening. Before you've seen what's there.
- You have a sense of perpetually falling slightly behind. Never catching up, never quite resting, never finishing reading — and this is no longer a temporary state, but the norm.
- You notice that it feels better when you're doing something. Because when doing — you don't feel the background. Stop — it rises again.
This isn't "you have depression." This isn't "you have an anxiety disorder." This is the basic functioning of the first stage of the formula. You have a living biological organism that feels there's no solid footing beneath it — and compresses slightly, constantly, just in case.
The compression is small. But it's constant. And over time the bio-body pays for it. First — fatigue that sleep doesn't lift. Then — colds that catch on level ground. Then — the back, the stomach, the blood pressure, whatever comes. The bio-body is your first complaint channel from the system. If you don't hear it, it starts to shout. If you ignore the shout too — it breaks down for real.
I didn't hear for a long time. I considered fatigue simply "a lot of work." Biobody got tired — lay down, rested, and went on. In fact the bio-body was getting tired not from the work. It was tiring from the background compression that lived in me constantly, even when I was resting. I simply wasn't resting for real, because the background didn't let go.
First step — notice the background. Without evaluation, without fighting it. Simply see it: okay, I have this. Already easier. From there you can work with it. While you don't see it — you're inside it.
3.4. The Second Link — Anger
Fear that has not discharged needs somewhere to go. The background doesn't simply dissolve. Biology is arranged so that tension must either be released or converted. If it's not released — it's converted. And the first conversion is anger.
Anger comes in different kinds. There's clean, situational anger — at someone who is genuinely getting in your way. That's a healthy emotion, a normal one. I'm not talking about it now.
I'm talking about anger from fear. That's a different breed. It comes without reason. More precisely — the reason can be anything, trivial: a car didn't yield, a messenger is slow, a colleague wrote in the wrong tone, a wife set a fork the wrong way. And you suddenly feel a hot ball rising inside that is much bigger than the occasion. And you understand — I'm going to snap. Sometimes you hold it. Sometimes not.
This isn't because of the reason. This is fear that finally found somewhere to drain. The reason was only a trigger.
Signs of fear-driven anger:
- The reaction is far bigger than the situation warrants.
- After the flash — shame. Not "I was right but went too far," but shame at the very disproportionality.
- It often lands on the closest people, because they're the only ones it's safe to land on. You won't snap at your boss — they'll answer back. You'll snap at your wife — she'll forgive it.
- It repeats in cycles. Once — nerves. Five times in a month — that's already a system.
I know what this looks like. I had periods when fear fired a reaction and I snapped into aggression. Not because something was wrong at home. But because all day I'd been holding the background by hand — and at home the hands dropped, and the ball came out.
Anger in this stage is not a personal trait. It's an overheated battery. If it's not discharged carefully — it will shock random passersby.
And here's the most dangerous thing. If anger is repeated again and again, it begins to harden. Stops being a flash and becomes a mode. You live in mild anger as in background music you've grown accustomed to. This is already the next link.
3.5. The Third Link — Hatred
If anger is repeated for weeks, months, years, it thickens. Becomes hatred.
The difference is fundamental. Anger is a flash about something. Hatred is a tint on the gaze, colouring everything.
The angry person snaps, cools down, goes outside to breathe, makes up. The person in hatred hasn't "snapped." He looks at the world through a dark glass, and this is no longer exciting to him — this is normal. He doesn't get angry at a specific colleague — he in principle dislikes colleagues. Doesn't get angry at his company — he in principle despises corporations. Doesn't get angry at a specific partner — he in principle is tired of people.
"In principle" is the marker. When instead of "this one gets on my nerves" there appears "they're all the same" — you're in the third stage of the formula.
Hatred is convenient. It has one big advantage: it relieves you of responsibility. If everyone is the same, bad, stupid, corrupt — then your fatigue, your unrealised potential, your fear become not yours. It's their fault. The world is like this. The era is like this. People are like this. You're normal, among the abnormal. A very comfortable position, I mean it. I know it from the inside.
But hatred has its price too. It's the most expensive fuel. It burns faster than it can be replenished. A person living in hatred burns out. Not because they work a lot — but because their internal background is running at full throttle constantly, even while they sleep. The bio-body can't sustain that.
And the main thing — hatred blinds. Through the dark glass you don't see people. You see functions, types, threats, fools. You stop distinguishing. This is a very dangerous state for an operator, because all of an operator's work rests on distinction. If you don't distinguish — you're not managing, you're simply defending against everything.
I don't like to say "I had no hatred." I did. Not for years, but in episodes — definitely. And when I caught it in myself, there was always the same sobering moment: I would stop and ask — "what am I protecting with this hatred?" The answer was always the same: fear. I hated in order not to be afraid. To be on the side of strength, not weakness. To at least stand somewhere.
Hatred is fear that put on armour and is passing itself off as strength. It's not strong. It's tired from having nowhere to discharge except into this mask.
3.6. The Fourth Link — Hierarchy
The finale of the formula — the strangest part. Hatred, as it accumulates, begins to structure itself. It needs form. It finds form in hierarchy.
Hierarchy in this sense is not a company org-chart and not Maslow's pyramid. It's an internal grid through which you sort people: who's above, who's below, who to tolerate, who to suppress, who is worthy of your attention and who isn't.
This is convenient. Hierarchy saves cognitive resource. You don't need to assess each person from scratch — you look at the tag, understand how to talk with them. Subordinate — command. Boss — smile. One of yours — openness. A stranger — coldness. Lower — condescension. Higher — mild envy and imitation.
And here it's worth stopping. Because at this stage the formula becomes invisible. You no longer feel fear. You don't feel the background. You don't snap in anger more often than usual. You don't walk around in open hatred. You're structured. You're adult. Your worldview has settled.
This is the formula's final disguise. It dressed itself in order. It no longer pulls you by the hands — it's built itself into your coordinate system. And now, when you meet a new person, your calculator automatically fires: is this person above or below me. Not from malice. From fear. Because in hierarchy you know who you are. Without hierarchy — you don't know.
The most outwardly calm people often live in the densest hierarchy. They don't argue, don't get angry, don't panic. They simply sort coldly. And you, talking with them, feel — you passed the filter or not. You passed — there's warmth. You didn't pass — there's politeness without warmth. This is very recognisable. In corporate corridors I've seen dozens of such people. Not bad people — simply completed up to the very top of the formula. They have it running on its own by now.
And one more thing. Hierarchy generates its own physics of life. In it, decisions are made not by facts but by positions. In my archive there's an exact case — in the materials for this chapter you can read it yourself; I'm not retelling it in detail now. In short: at work a release was burning, and the cluster lead at one moment had to decide — to ship a broken release to production or not. By the data, it should not be shipped. But over the lead stood his boss, and for the lead fear of the boss was stronger than the risk of an incident. The release shipped. The incident happened.
That is the formula in action at the corporate level. The decision is made not by the data but by fear. And this fear isn't the lead's personal fear. It's systemic fear, permeating whole companies, whole cultures, whole eras. A dysfunctional system is not one where people are bad. It's one where the formula of fear has become the operating model.
3.7. The Alternative — Fear as Signal
When you see the formula, fear goes nowhere. It remains. But its role changes.
In the formula, fear is the driver. It sits at the wheel, drives you through anger, hatred, and hierarchy to a dark place where you lose discernment. In the alternative, fear is a sensor on the dashboard. It shows, not steers. It lights up — you look at what it shows, make a decision, drive on. Fear itself doesn't make decisions.
To learn to read fear this way, three things are needed.
First — grounding in the bio-body. Every fear lives in the body. A compressed chest, caught breathing, tense shoulders. If you don't feel the bio-body — you don't feel fear as a signal, you feel it as an emotional background. And emotional background converts easily into anger and down the chain. You feel the bio-body — fear becomes local. Here it compressed. Here it released. It's not that I'm in fear — it's that an impulse passed through me.
Second — a frame. You need an ontology in which fear is not a catastrophe. I described my own frame in Chapter 2 with the Sadako example. When the onryō was standing in my room, the fear was monstrous. But it didn't drive me toward anger and hierarchy. It drove me toward action. Because I had a frame: "a threat has come → I need to work." Not "a threat has come → I'm doomed." The frame makes fear operational. Without a frame it becomes ontological.
Third — the retrospiral. This is from Chapter 2, and I'm repeating it deliberately. When you see that you already managed with something similar — even if you managed in the future while in the past you haven't yet — fear loses one important function. The function of saying "you won't survive." Inside the retrospiral you already have a version of yourself who survived. Fear loses its main argument.
If these three things are present in you — the formula of fear stops working as a formula. Fear becomes one of many signals on a large dashboard. Not the most important one. A useful one.
And then, incidentally, one very non-obvious thing opens up. Those who don't live by the formula of fear — they're not fearless. They simply hear fear differently. Fearless people don't exist. There are people whose fear is not behind the wheel.
3.8. Where the Formula Breaks
Good news — the formula is not all-powerful. It has a weak point. It only works while nobody names it.
This is its main condition. All stages, from fear of death to hierarchy, rest on one thing — invisibility. While you live inside the formula, it seems to you like just life. "Everyone lives this way." "This is normal." "How else would it be."
Name the link — you're halfway out of it.
Second, and key: fear strikes at the awareness of the bio-body's death or the loss of position in the hierarchy. In fact you can empirically exit the bio-body quite easily, thereby completely dissolving this fear through empirical knowledge. After that, even if fear gives rise in you to anger and fury as a potential for action, you can direct that potential toward constructive ends, to your own benefit.
It's very important to convert fear into strength, and strength into joy. Strength as a potential for action is capable of a great deal. Born from fear, alchemically smelted rage converts to energy that gives the operator on Earth, in this facet of reality, in the bio-body, a great deal. The only thing he would do well not to forget — is ethics; this is something I remind first and foremost of myself.
3.9. Campbell — The Threshold Guardian and the Language of Fear
Campbell, examining the myths of a thousand cultures, noticed one thing that is usually lost in mass retellings of his theory. The Threshold Guardian that the hero encounters at the start of the journey speaks the language of fear. It's his only language.
Dragon, minotaur, demon at the gate, witch in the forest, creator of spiral galaxies — they all have one function: to check whether you will behave according to the formula. Either you will step outside your fear, convert it into strength — and direct that strength toward your own development and expansion.
3.10. What You Can Do
Three practices. No esoterics, no strain. Something simple.
Practice 1. Background Map
Take one day. Any ordinary working day. Set yourself five phone reminders — every two hours. When a reminder sounds — you stop for thirty seconds and ask your bio-body one question: where am I compressed right now? Not "is everything okay," not "how's the mood" — literally, physically. The chest? The stomach? The jaw? The shoulders? The breathing?
Write one line each time. By evening you'll have five lines.
Look at them together. If there's a repetition — that's your permanent point of background compression. For most people it's one, two at most. This is not "it needs to be treated." It's something to know. When you know your point, you see it. And what you see stops working on you automatically. And make a booking with a masseuse based on reviews. Offload the psyche through the bio-body, remove tension.
Practice 2. Ladder Down
Next time you snap at someone harder than the situation warrants, don't grovel. Don't do corrective work in the spirit of "I won't do this again." Do something different — walk the ladder down.
Ask yourself:
- Was that anger? Yes.
- What's under the anger? Fear. What kind? Name it.
- What's under that fear? Another fear. Name it.
- And lower? And lower?
The ladder usually ends at the third or fourth step at one of two points: "I'm afraid I'm not loved" or "I'm afraid I can't cope." These are your root of the formula. Everyone's is slightly different in wording, but structurally identical — it's always a form of fear of not being.
Getting to the root — you've half-neutralised the flash. Next time anger rises, you'll sooner see where it actually lives.
Practice 3. Exiting the Biobody per Robert Bruce — "Astral Dynamics"
This is your answer to fear of death. Pure empiricism. Find it ⇒ read it ⇒ exit the bio-body, look at it from outside ⇒ with the knowledge that you are not the bio-body, dissolve your fear and rejoice.
Final word on this chapter.
The formula of fear is ancient. The formula of hierarchy is ancient. They work at all levels: from the neighbour through the wall to world wars. All the great catastrophes of humanity are the formula of fear, ramped up to the scale of civilisations. First the background. Then anger. Then hatred for "them." Then hierarchy — who are people, who are subhumans. Then — what comes after.
But dissolving fear through knowledge is the simplest thing there is. Just as alchemically smelting the fury from fear into something luminous.
I don't write this chapter so you'll "conquer your fear." I write it so you'll see the formula — in yourself and around you. Seeing it is already half the work. Everything unfolds from there on its own.
Turn after turn. Without end…
Next chapter: "Mentors Across the Ages" — about the network of wisdom assembled through you across time and cultures, if you assemble it consciously.