Igniting a Fear Praxis for Teaching

His first-step guide (above) to learn about the “beauty of fear,” as he would often teach, was not a naive prescription. Gillian well-knew the confusion and conditioning of people’s minds was deep. Their en masse phobia around talking about fear itself is a topic that has greatly interested me for decades as a fearologist. Whether teaching his middle school students, adults in his night classes, or parents that came to his workshops on motivation, he was well aware they would typically struggle to understand what he was saying added to their struggle to understand fear itself. Bottomline, he’d exclaim: “self-examination is terrifying” and people avoid that terror—but “strength, courage, and wisdom” are required for the examined life.⁹ His mission would be a long and difficult one, that he himself did not always see the fruits of his labors in his life time. Yet, he was a devout believer: “We all have the power to change our world right now where we are by simply changing our minds, by simply changing the way we view things.”¹⁰ That’s where you start. He concludes his hopeful pragmatic message in working-class terms: “I don’t need to go away to some quiet [expensive] retreat on a mountaintop in some far away country to make changes in myself.”¹¹

In terms of deeply and widely understanding fear, I knew I met my match (and then some) when I first reached out and corresponded with Samuel Gillian Jr. in spring 2004, some two years after he had written and published his first book The Beauty of Fear. That production was his first priority upon his forced early retirement, after 30+ years living and teaching middle school youth in the Bronx, New York City Board of Education. In 2002–07 he founded his own publishing company and saw before him a string of books to write for children and adults.¹²

What a day job, teaching inner urban mostly black and poor junior high students. He still had energy to boot. At nights, for 15 years, he taught adults in a GED program life and essay skills, in Harlem. His About the Author page in the book it’s noted: “Sam is retiring…to devote his time to writing and lecturing. While he is leaving the classroom, Sam will never leave ‘teaching.’” It is “the best of all possible jobs to have.”¹³ Indeed, a main aim of my biography study is that his ideas and writing never leaves the planet—is accessible—and always provocative, in the spirit in which he meant his life and thinking to be.

A philosopher and astute psychological observer and interpreter,¹⁴ a teacher and self-confessed informal “preacher”¹⁵—at that point of first contact between us he had studied “fear” as his focused subject for 30 years and I had done so for 15 years. Sam was my senior, born in 1939, while I was born in 1952. He was American and seemed mostly proud to be but also was critical. He put his youth life on the line to serve in the US military between 1958 and 1961. I was a Canadian long-haired rock musician embedded in anti-war 1960s–70s love-in peace protests. Our distrust of authorities comes with good reasons, and his more so than mine. However, one bridge of mutual interest is that we both embrace the prime importance of “fear” in shaping human behavior and institutions—and, we are both staunch critics of “love is the answer” rhetorics of idealism gone overboard.¹⁶ We are both critical theorists and hold that knowledge-fear-power (an inseparable trialectic¹⁷) dynamics of society are more potent in determining how a society works than—in his words—“peace and love that we give so much lip service to.”¹⁸

Contrasts between us aside, we both knew what growing up working poor was all about. We both had some family members who were born-again Christians; his were two brothers, mine were my dad’s oldest brother and all his children, my cousins, and his father and mother. My paternal ancestors fled Russia (as Germans) after a repressive regime was actively stamping them out. Sam’s ancestors were stolen from Africa and brought into slavery in the United States. For the most part, history had not been kind to our ancestors. He and I would not forget but we’d learn to forgive.

We also have in common a love of Nature and were keen observers. But Culture is equally fascinating. Gillian tells many stories pointing to the cultural behaviors that spin around the most simple things, that most people do not notice or at least they do not carefully observe and record behaviors and their potential meanings. For one of many examples, I was surprised to read Gillian’s description of a poster pasted on a bus going by in New York City, and from the juxtapositioning of the major words he takes an everyday observation and gives an exegesis on “power” related to danger and fear.¹⁹

Mostly, neither Gillian nor myself felt that people took us seriously, especially, when we spoke our truths in our youth and when we struggled to learn in formal institutions. Being rejected was our daily bread. We naturally rebelled to forced conformity because of an inherent and resilient righteousness but not that alone. We mostly sensed people were not being fully truthful. As we matured, we loved books and became life-long learners, advancing on our own spirited steam and self-generated finances to reach graduate school in the field of Education. He completed his MA in Education from City College New York.

If we imagined sailing a ship, with a big flag flowing, on it would be written: True Freedom and Creativity Are All Children’s Right! We both felt pain, our own, and witnessed many abuses upon others, from gross to sublime, of excess fear/terror wrought upon the children and youth of the world. We may not have always spoke out against it because of our lack of confidence in our youth, but that tragedy we would not let go unnoticed. We became writers and teachers. Philosophically, we ended up around the same time, in 1972, discovering Alan Watts’ Zen philosophy books, which led to us both questioning the taboos in society that eschewed fear, insecurity and nondual no-self conceptualizations, which was for us a taboo that served a malign worldview of cancerous ways of perceiving and thinking, which is dysfunctional evolutionarily and historically—and still dominating to this very day.