The Fawn Response

Political ontology for submissives: a freak-out.

The above was recorded on my phone this morning and - fair warning - has not been edited. The pauses are part of it, I think. The below is a transcript of it by the Whisper AI (installed on my laptop by the way, not an online version), which has been only minimally edited for clarity in sentence structure. As a result it’s rather strange text because I spoke it first. It still looks more sure of itself than the audio sounds, I think.

This is not what I was intending to write. Actually I didn’t write it, I recorded it on my phone in the dark. I am afraid it is a response to the news, something which I do not normally do. I hope it’s clear in a general way what current events prompted this, but it is not an analysis or an essay. Rather it is a look at my own response, which I am not proud of but want to be honest about. I really don’t know, as I post this, if this is a common response or not but it relates to the other things I have written about here and which people I listen to have written about. This text in italics is written in daytime and it shows.

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This is just my windowsill. As far as I know it doesn’t have anything to do with what I’ve written here.

It's half past four in the morning, I've been awake for about three hours. I'm here in front of my fire which is embers now, I've finished the pot of tea, I've sat for a bit on my old green cushion that I bought so long ago for sitting meditation. I do not, these days, practice regular sitting meditation. In a lot of ways, I have given up.

It's the second night in a row where I woke up suddenly, remembering what I've been reading in the news and, God help me, it's fear that the news prompts, not compassion; it's fear that keeps me awake. I think: "will we be part of Oceania or Eurasia?" I wake up, it seems, because I can bear that more easily than the dreams this would engender. I have not been listening to my dreams in some time, it is another thing I have given up at, but I may start again. I've been writing, I've been trying to write a book on it...

Well - my wife predicted it - that isn't fast. The last two weeks were writing weeks for me and I thought I could write a new prologue, rework the first section and maybe, if I was lucky, finish the chapter summary. I did at least complete a draft of the new prologue.

In that prologue I am writing about snow leopards. It's a reworking of something I wrote back in 2022 and, at the time I was also very afraid with the invasion of Ukraine. In general, with this book draft, I am mostly trying to give more context to what I wrote at the time so, in this case, I was trying to get back a little bit into that feeling.

<mirthless laugh> That's funny.

I wrote to a friend at the time that I was leaving for Vietnam and it seemed more likely that my home would be destroyed in a nuclear war before I came back than that I would succeed in finding what I was after. That is not a verifiable statement because neither of those things happened. I am not at the moment fearful of nuclear war. I'm fearful of domination and not destruction, as I told my wife last night. I've been managing to avoid telling her for a while what I was upset about.

I said "we have to think what we must do. People in other terrible times in history have had to think. All the citizens of the nations affected."

She said: "Well what do you think the options are?"

And I didn't want to be asked that. I said: "fight, flight, freeze or fawn."

And we got to talking; I said I didn't see how we could stand up to them, and she said there was nowhere to run. Freezing and fawning are shameful and we did not discuss them.

But I have been watching Wolf Hall and in a way it is reassuring, because Henry VIII and Donald Trump seem so similar. In particular, that they lived at a time of great turmoil in the souls of their people - to put it in a dramatic way - Let’s say rather ‘a time when people's beliefs about - well - everything were deeply shaken,’ and they themselves rode on the tides of this turmoil, but their own belief in themselves is not shaken, because they believe only in themselves. Or so it seems. That's my little story anyway. It's reassuring, simply because history continued after that. That would not have seemed like much consolation ten years ago. Or not twenty years ago anyway.

I digress.

I've been watching Wolf Hall and I've been noticing how I have these thoughts about history, but I also see how I would like to be there and say something to Henry. I would like to say the right thing to appease him when the other characters fail to do so; although they succeed far often than I would actually do. I don't know how common this is as a response to a work of fiction; it is a common response for me. In my bed, sweating, I think of some of the people I have been reading over the last few years who have turned to the right (it might as well be said), and to an overlapping but not in any way identical category of people who have turned to God.

And the previous night, when I woke I prayed in my bed: the Lord's Prayer, as I had done back in 2014 when I was caught out on the landslide in the forest and prayed over and over in the words I'd been taught, as I've said already, to get home. And, again as I have said already, I had no great religious experience. I had no vision of what was true, rather it seemed to me in that time that it didn't matter what was true, it only mattered that I get home to my family. Later, it seemed otherwise, as I knew at the time it would.

Is that the fawn response?

Because the night before last I went in the morning, as I knew I would have to, Iknelt at the foot of my bed; once I could persuade my 'weak flesh' - as the phrase goes - to get out of it. I knelt at the foot of my bed and for some reason put my head under the covers and tried to speak to God - but not that God.

Not that... 'unconsidered' God as I wanted to put it - who is, I suppose, authority and might, who has said everything that already needs to be said, and you only have to follow his rule - the sacrifice has been made once and for all time and no other sacrifice matters. Crazy stuff. I try to find something beyond that image because that is an image only. I do not say to myself: "that is not what God is, I will find a different God." But I say to myself: "that is a limited image and I will feel in a direction around, away and behind it."

Oh but that would not have got me off the landslide.

And this night, again, I cannot get out of bed. This time I am not alone because my wife has come back (she was away the previous night), so I must stay still or she will wake. I do not think I am very good at it.

I think: "What if they are right, and God is on their side?"

I have thought before of God in the Old Testament, punishing his people with emperors for their disobedience, but this is even worse: what if God is really on their side because He is a king and a father and we must be brought into line? Not that they are monsters whom He uses but they actually are, to some extent, people He approves of. This thought was not as clear as I am making it sound. It was - is - a sweating fearful thing and I am in bed with it, naked, and I think about what I have been saying.

I think about the last thing that I wrote, early in the morning also, and the piece I am slowly assembling about mass extinction and I know that this is the other side of that story. Because the other part to the story about the landslide is that, when I was on it, I wished to come home to my family and not to go on and find and save the saola. And the worry - put entirely to the side on that day but felt in the distance and coming back later - was this: 'What if the whole thing - my whole supposed caring about 'nature' about animals, about extinction and about the saola in particular - was just something that I did to make myself feel special? I could feel special because I had something that I cared about that other people did not care about and I had something special to do in the world. Maybe I made myself feel this but, actually, what really matters and what has always mattered is only human beings, who are made in God's image etc. etc. - and I know that is true, really, in my heart...?"

And then I think: "But one thing I do know - and I have said this - one thing I know is that Creationism is wrong. It is so patently ridiculous and wrong. That's what I have been holding on to, as a rock, in a way; I'm not going to go into it now.

I try and hold onto this rock but I think: "But of course there are other kinds of Creationism, and it is possible that God has created the world as an author creates a work of fiction - for example - outside of the work's own timeline. In which case, there can be a sequence of things and a hierarchy of things that He has put in place that have nothing to do with how those things appeared over the course of time. Now there are people - I've seen them in the comment sections- who can believe that some kind of practice that they do not like - always a sexual practice, as far as I've seen - is wrong because it is "against the natural order of things." When I see that, I laugh and I feel a little jealous of them, and sad for them. How can they believe that there is a "natural order of things" that matches their values? It's like they live in a world where Darwin never lived; it seems so ridiculous." That is my normal thought. But I'm there in my bed and my mind is trying to - and trying not to - make those people make sense. Because... is there a way that, through... <pause> ….that there is a signal, there in nature, which can be interpreted?… If you are willing, still, to receive it - or if you have been primed to receive it… a signal that shows what the natural order of things is? Think about that with your rational brain and that argument falls apart completely. But what if thinking about it with your rational brain is exactly what you should not be doing? What if you should be opening yourself to a right hemisphere intuitive view and, if you could do that - without trying to use your rational brain to push out the truth that you know to be there - you would see that homosexuality, for example, is against the natural order of things?

I think of George Orwell's "Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two equals four," and I think of Bertrand Russell's infamous 31-page proof of the same thing, or rather that one and one is two. I don’t really know anything about this proof. I wonder how many people in the small hours of the night, who sound so confident on the internet, are so... ontologically open… when they are afraid.

So...

how long would I last, in Room 101?

Because sometimes it seems like I could last forever in there, that I would just die, that I could not possibly change my mind about what was obviously true.And now it seems like they wouldn't even have to close the door!

I have been working on - on and not for - some being - or beings... I think it is 'beings'… - who are powerless.

And this is what powerless means:

It means that I take a piece of wire. It is wire that makes the brake cable of a bike. I take this wire and I loop the end. I tie the end around the strand. I have made a noose, and I ask for your arm. I ask you to put the hand in the noose, and I pull it tight and hold the other end, or tie it onto some fixture. And then I say: "Get out of that."

And you, who are human, put your finger in the noose, loosen it, and extract your hand in all of two seconds; most of which was spent wondering why I was even asking you such an obvious question.

Oh and the serow - that they tell me about - the black goat antelope: she pulls, she kicks and she bucks, and she makes for the path she was on. All of her force is in it, against that cable around her wrist. If she is lucky the wire will cut through her skin, through her flesh through her sinew, and sever her foot. And, if she is very lucky, she will limp away and the wound will not fester. She is lucky, at least at all the predators other than humans, that might catch her now, are already dead.

And there is the saola that - they say - long though her horns are and kept sharp, and wild though she is - they say, some men who have knowledge - that she will just lie down, and wait for them to come with their machetes. And they have known this a long time.

That is what powerless is.

I have known also what may be going on - may be going on - inside her body, all the time she is captured, how extreme the responses are, in these animals, to stress of predation. As I've said before, it may be a case of the fear literally engendering an acid that literally eats away her heart.

We are so used to our power, used to being able to get out of any snare like that. To us, the fight and flight responses make sense, and the fawn response makes sense too, although it is shameful. Meanwhile the freeze response seems to make no sense, but there is a reason it exists. Or it would not. Exist, I mean.

But I'm retreating away from that place where everything is so uncertain in the acid of my own fear. I hear people saying... I heard, for example, Dougald Hine saying in his recent very interesting post about AI and his reaction to it …. that perhaps we can "let go of the need to decide what is real," or words to that effect. He is talking about things like the ability of an Aboriginal elder to stop the power in an airport with his words. He does not say: "Abandon your materialist paradigm! Step outside and admit the power of the spiritual world that is beyond it!" He just says "If we could let go of our need to define what is real."

What I want to say about that is that I do not want to let go of the idea that Donald Trump did not actually have the biggest crowd ever for a presidential inauguration in 2016. I do not want to let go of two plus two equals four. And if there is a God, He may demand that I do this. Because He is beyond my idea of the truth. I do not mean that He may demand that I do this because in fact I am wrong and the truth is otherwise than I had imagined, but because it is more important that I do as he demands than that I believe what is true. That idea terrifies me.

This piece is a counterpoint, I suppose, to what I recorded and wrote a while back: "A civilisation is not what is ending." I wrote there about the view of Deep Time, and how things look from that view. Here is just how things look to me as a man, a human, a father, a white, middle-class Englishman, who was raised to believe it was a good and powerful thing to be a white middle class Englishman. We had things to feel guilty about but we were still important to to the world in some way, for good or ill.

I am not completely hopeless, in fact. I often give that impression. I do think there is another option, a "fifth F" that I can think of, after fight, flight, freeze or fawn. I am not going to say what it is. I am not going to place the candle of that hope on a windy internet plateau.

I may already have said far too much of my own weaknesses for it to be sensible to share this but I think that, by trying to be to appear perfect, whether like angels or machines, we have opened ourselves to anything that looks like a human being being able to dominate us - because of the brotherhood of human beings. I still believe human beings are monsters, along with all else that we are. Though not always, necessarily, very impressive monsters.

So that is enough. That is what I had to say.

My toes are cold.

The fire still has a thread of a smile in it, and it is crackling to itself. And I am shaking a little.

And I will stop.

God, the phone screen is bright!

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That last was just because I picked up the phone to stop the recording. There; that is what it is. I’m not going to edit it with daytime thoughts. I was pleased to get Caro Ross’s most recent in my inbox after I’d edited the transcription, so maybe go there if this was too gloomy?