Fear

Fear is anticipation of loss, which places it opposite excitement on the same axis, one anticipating arrival and the other anticipating attack. The second and third sentences are the useful part, because they say that what a person fears identifies what they are. An exosocial person fears damage to a conduit or a source, which means fear for a relationship, a place, a practice or a body of work. An endosocial person fears damage to an endogroup or an endo-ideal, which means fear for a group's standing or for a figure, and can coexist with indifference to any particular relationship. The same emotion therefore functions as a diagnostic. Somebody whose disproportionate reaction is to a slight against a company their spouse works for or a university their daughter attends has a refracted endo-ideal and is defending it, and a reflector can be perfectly accepting of insults to themselves while intolerant of insults to their endo-ideal. Fear is also the primary catalyst for endogroup formation, which is why the existential threat is such an important piece of endoreality and why producing fear is worth doing for anyone building a group. Its use as an extraction mechanism is separate and equally systematic. Fear releases energy, so dominant anger is used to create fear in others, and predatory anger obtains secondary anima through another's stress response, which is why the most vulnerable are chronically abused, being most likely to produce a high stress response and relinquish the most energy.

Fear is among the most studied emotions in psychology and neuroscience, with LeDoux's work on amygdala circuitry and the standard appraisal accounts treating it as a response to perceived threat to the self or to what the self values. Terror management theory studies what mortality salience does to group attachment, which converges with Marsh's point about endogroup formation. Political science on the politics of fear documents the deliberate cultivation of threat. What Marsh adds is the diagnostic use. Standard accounts note that people fear for what they value and stop there, whereas she treats the object of the fear as evidence about a person's structure, which turns a description of an emotion into a way of reading someone's attachments.