The Legend of Fear and Cowardice (The Great Safety Switch)
We are taught to be ashamed of fear. "Don't be a coward!" they tell us in school. This is anti-scientific nonsense. Fear is not weakness; it is intelligence . It is the work of a powerful GPU in your brain that calculates 1,000 future scenarios in a millisecond and delivers the result: "Don't go in there, idiot, you’ll get killed". Cowardice is simply following this wise advice. Chapter I: The Evolution of Cowards Look at your ancestors. You exist only because your great-great-great-grandfather was a coward. When a saber-toothed tiger appeared on the horizon, the "brave" one took a stick and went to fight. He was eaten. His genes disappeared. The "coward" ran away, hid in a tree, and there, trembling with fear, had sex with a "cowardly" woman. We are the descendants of those who ran away. Planet Earth is populated by the descendants of cautious paranoiacs. Bravery is an evolutionary dead end, like the dodo bird that wa...