Even 10 years ago, no more than 300 phobias were known to science, and today their number has exceeded 1000. Sputnik Armenia conducted a survey among men and women aged 20 to 40 from different countries to compile the top 10 most common phobias.

1. Aerophobia or aerophobia

In the first place is the fear of flying. Many people are perfectly fine with flying. However, there are those who panic before or during the flight. Agree, this is not a very pleasant picture: you, with a vial of Corvalol or validol, all pale and with trembling hands, board the plane.

Of course, this condition will affect other passengers as well. Dilated pupils, fear of stepping into an airport, and hysteria at the sight of an airplane already indicate that you have aerophobia.

If you just feel uncomfortable, then this is just a self-preservation instinct. Even the most experienced pilots can get a little nervous while flying.

2. Claustrophobia - fear of closed spaces

Another common phobia. To a person in a confined space, it begins to seem that he is about to suffocate and die. He unbuttons his shirt, tie, tugs at his jacket to make it easier to breathe.

This can happen in an elevator, in a small room, and even in a crowded room. public transport. Claustrophobia is one of the spatial phobias, which include the fear of heights, depths, darkness and open spaces.

3. Acrophobia - fear of heights

The survey revealed that many people are afraid of heights. For example, a person who is at the height of the tenth floor of a residential building understands that he feels bad: his head is spinning, there is a feeling of fear, as well as a desire to grab onto something so as not to fall.

Experts say that acrophobia is a mild degree of neurosis.

4. Thanatophobia - fear of death

It's really global problem. Everyone thinks about it, but for many, the fear of death is too intrusive. According to the results of some studies, about 10% of the population of each country is terribly afraid of death.

First of all, a person is afraid of the very fact of non-existence and the absence of reality - non-existence.

5. Carcinophobia - fear of cancer

About oncological diseases they say every day, at every turn. An ordinary report about this disease can provoke a phobia even in a normal person. Doctors say that this fear belongs to the category of psychological diseases.

There is an opinion that cancerophobes can get themselves so worked up that they will be "chased" by the symptoms of cancer patients: nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, and so on.

6. Ahluophobia (nyctophobia, scotophobia, ekluophobia) - fear of darkness, night

There are people who are so afraid of the dark that they sleep with the lights on, and when the lights are off, they see different figures at all.

Young girls and ladies of age are afraid to walk in the dark alone in the evenings and at night. But in this case it could be the fear of persecution.

7. Cynophobia - fear of dogs

Not every dog ​​is a man's best friend. The fear of these animals is manifested especially in those who have been attacked by a dog at least once in childhood. At the same time, it is not necessary that she bite you.

According to WHO, cynophobia is a fairly common disorder, observed in 1.5 to 3.5% of the total population. Fear of dogs is predominantly seen in humans. young age(up to 30 years). Cases requiring medical supervision and treatment account for 10% of the total.

8. Arachnophobia - the fear of spiders and Musophobia - the fear of mice

This is the most common fear that is part of zoophobia. Most often, girls and women are afraid of spiders and mice. For some arachnophobes, not even mice or spiders themselves can cause much greater fear, but the image of mammals and insects.

However, some psychologists believe that to a greater extent, all these "creatures" do not frighten, but cause disgust, against which a person panics, wrinkles his face and even starts screaming.

9. Fear of water and fear of swimming (ablutophobia)

Not every person, at the sight of the sea, ocean or any other body of water, will exclaim "water!" and plunge headlong into the underwater world.

Most often, people are afraid of water, because they cannot swim, or they are afraid of an impression from childhood or a horror movie.

10. Autophobia - fear of being alone

Closes the top ten phobias - the fear of being alone. Shopping, going to the cinema, cafes, breakfast, lunch, swimming, cooking: many people cannot do it all alone, they definitely need company.

First of all, psychologists associate this feeling with spiritual emptiness. However, being alone is sometimes helpful.

Today, there is also such a thing as a phobia of a phobia, when a person is haunted by an obsession, supposedly he will soon become its victim of fear.

Several centuries ago, many people did not know what a phobia was. They lived quietly and tried not to even tell anyone about some of their fears. But in recent times so often they talk about the glamorous term "phobia" that many simply inspire and wind up fears for themselves.

According to WHO, about 7% of the world's population suffer from phobic depression. Meanwhile, it is difficult to find a person who would not be afraid of anything.

To write the best plot for a scary story, you need to choose one or more fears and think about how they can come true. But what is fear?

Fear is the awareness of potential danger. If we notice its signs, the body, against our will, reacts to this (hair on end, goosebumps, everything shrinks inside, etc.). Plus, we are trying to somehow prevent the impending disaster.

If we want to write a scary story or a scary episode in a novel, we need to understand the nature of human fears.

Rational and irrational fears

Fears are rational and irrational (the latter are called phobias). The difference lies in the realism of the threat here and now. For example, the fear of the dark in bed under the covers is irrational, but the fear of the dark in the jungle is a completely different matter (provided that you are really in the jungle, and not in the Bolshoi Theater, for example).

Irrational fear can be contagious. Cases are widely known when “everyone ran - and I ran”, “everyone is afraid nuclear war“And so will I.” By the way, the fear of “being like everyone else” is a very curious phobia in itself.

Some of the fears that are now considered irrational can be explained logically. For example, the fear of mice and insects was carried out by mankind from ancient times, when both of them were carriers of dangerous diseases.

Human fears and the plot of a horror movie

The most common fear is the fear of the unknown. If you do not have all the data about the situation, you cannot make an adequate decision. It is the uncertainty and unpredictability of the result that generates stress, paralysis of the will, as well as laziness and procrastination. So we collect data, i.e. learn, and your fears will pass by themselves.

Basic fears modern society- this is a terrorist threat, war, poverty, crime, loneliness, old age, mutilation and death as such. Also, fears of mistakes, “loss of face”, failure and fear for loved ones play a big role.

Fear of being in a certain situation

The most common fears are the fear of a situation that seems dangerous to us and from which we cannot quickly get out. For example, a person may be afraid to ride public transport or be in a crowd. This also includes panic attacks when someone close to you leaves, dies or leaves the family.

Examples of fears associated with a particular situation:

• Fear of the unknown
• Forgotten, lost, abandoned
• Claustrophobia, fear of being in an enclosed space
• Fear of being in open space
• Captivity, prison, kidnapping
• Unemployment and poverty
• Harassment, surveillance, espionage, conspiracy
• Loneliness and isolation
• Helplessness
• Fear of change
• War
• Natural disasters

An example of the use of situational fear is Stephen King's novel Misery, which plays up the fear of captivity and helplessness.

Once in a car accident, a famous writer gets seriously injured. The admirer brings him to her house and begins to heal, but soon the hero realizes that he is a prisoner who cannot escape from his jailer.

Savor phobias!

When developing the plot, one should bet on both widespread fears and phobias that are interesting from the point of view of psychology and psychiatry. With the right approach, this combination gives the best results.

A detailed list of phobias can be found on Wikipedia, and below we will analyze the most interesting cases.

Specific phobias

Specific phobias are when a person is afraid of a specific object or phenomenon.

• Animals, birds, insects, spiders, fish. This is especially true for dogs, sharks, mice, rats, cockroaches, snakes, spiders, bees and wasps.
• Natural phenomena: water, height, thunderstorm, earthquake, fire, etc. This also includes the fear of drowning or burning out during a fire.
• Darkness
• Height
• Progress and technology
• Bridges, planes, ships, cars
• Car driving
• health damage and appearance: blood, torture, aging, mutilation, blindness, suffocation, etc.
• Microbes and diseases
• Madness
• Nightmares or inability to sleep
• Doctors, dentists, injections, operations
• Type of people: women, priests, old people, soldiers, doctors, etc.
• Sharp objects: claws, bones, blades, thorns, knives, etc.
• Superstitions: corruption, evil eye, hell, demonic possession
• Cannibalism, fear of being eaten
• Clowns, mummers
• Statues, images
• Death: the dead, cemeteries, morgues, coffins, hearses, etc.
• Foreigners or representatives of other peoples or religions

An example of the use of specific phobias is the novel "Dracula" by Bram Stoker: it intertwines superstitious fears, the fear of death, as well as the fear of blood and sharp objects - vampire fangs.

social phobia

Social phobia is when a person is afraid that other people will judge or ignore him. In this regard, people are most afraid of the following:

• Public performance
• Criticism
• Judicial system
• Fear of being rejected
• Fear of stupid situations
• Fear of appearing ridiculous or defenseless
• Fear of being left without work and without money, and thereby cause condemnation and ridicule
• Fear of Success
• Responsibility, fear of not coping, fear of making a decision
• Conflict
• Crowd
• parties
• superiors

In literature, social phobias are usually used not in order to catch chilling horror, but in order to complicate the life of a character. An example is Stephen King's novel Carrie, in which the protagonist's personal social phobias lead to tragic consequences.

Reaction to fear

There are three types of reactions to fear:

• We fight
• We run away
• We freeze

This is what the heroes of your terrible story will do.

TOP 10 most important human fears

As a psychologist and specialist in fears and phobias, I have to work daily with this amazing feeling that each of us has. About 80% of all my clients turn to me due to the fact that obsessive fears become their constant companions, which completely suppress their will and spoil their lives.

10. Fear of Old Age closes the top ten

D A very rare fear in young people, and often occurs in middle-aged women, as well as in bankrupt men who are already over 50.

H Some of my clients told me that every year their fear of getting old and losing their femininity and beauty only grows. Moreover, the basis of fear was not just the loss of the main female attributes of power, but the fact that this would follow, that is, there would be fewer gifts, less care, less attention not only from men, but also from society as a whole.

At men's fear of old age turned out to be mirrored. Many told me that they were afraid of being unrealized, like a man and not being able, as they say, to reproduce offspring. In other words, the fear of impotence.

And this fear is quite understandable, because at the biological level, the task of a woman is the birth and upbringing of children, and the task of a man is to reproduce offspring and provide the family with food and security.

9. Fear of being poisoned

E that fear is independent and often does not correlate with other phobias at all. And all because they suffer, as a rule, people with an intuitive type of thinking. And such, according to various estimates, no more than 5% of the total population of the globe.

H for example, such a fear was Stalin. This is confirmed by various sources. There are rumors in the psychological lobby that Vladimir Pozner, Minister of Finance Kudrin and famous American financier Alan Greenspan also suffer from this phobia.

One way or another, this fear is often unconscious and, according to these observations, it manifests itself only in people with a high level of intuitive type of thinking.

8. Fear of being a coward

H a purely masculine fear, which is sometimes experienced by young people who, oddly enough, have some kind of innate sense of responsibility for other people. It was these boys and men with whom I had to communicate that carried the real core of the manager and possessed innate charisma. A lot of girls and women also experience it. Therefore, such fear even helped both men and women to be on horseback at certain moments, and at the same time did not allow them to relax when it was necessary.

7. Verminophobia (fear of bacteria and microorganisms)

H Surely you have met or heard in your life about people who wash their hands 68 times a day, wash floors 20-30 times, cannot touch many harmless objects and all because they are afraid of contracting some “dangerous” virus .

At it is also surprising that, as a rule, people with high logical intelligence suffer from such fear. Often these are talented engineers, economists, lawyers. For example, the famous American inventor, director and millionaire Howard Hughes(who was played by DiCaprio in the film "The Aviator") was the most verminophobic. In the future, such a phobia turns into an obsessive-compulsive disorder, which further makes a person a recluse of his own fears and obsessions.

6. Fear of going crazy

D a very specific fear and persistent, but only those who think abstract concepts. Often these are people who are trying to learn spiritual world, to know the Universe, study religions, philosophy, physics. These are people who can give birth. brilliant idea even if she seems a little crazy.

M Many poets, classical and rock musicians have experienced the fear of going crazy, but at the same time they have tried to explore themselves and the Universe through various drugs and psychedelics, like LSD, sage, etc. In general, this fear is peculiar only to people with an abstract intellect.

5. Fear of intimacy

FROM a fuck that occurs not only in 16-year-old teenagers, but also in quite adult 40-year-old men, and sometimes women.

At surprisingly, people who have an increased libido compared to everyone else have this fear. However, despite this, there is also a complex sexuality due to an unsuccessful first experience or deep childhood resentment and repressed emotions.

L People with this fear quite often have developed systems thinking. These are people for whom home comfort, favorite book and cuisine are constant companions of life. But when it comes to intimacy, they feel awkward, tight and afraid of something new. Men often experience fear of failure or fear of being ridiculed. Women are also afraid that they can be hurt or betrayed, offended.

4. Fear of spiders, rats, cockroaches, snakes, planes, monsters, demons, mirrors, turned off computer monitors, high heels, psychologists, etc.

AT You may ask, why did I combine, it would seem, those fears that have nothing in common with each other? After all, where is the connection between the fear of spiders and the fear of flying on an airplane?

H and at first glance, these fears really have no connection with each other. However, the root of these fears is the same - the underdevelopment of the figurative type of thinking among those who have innate figurative intelligence.

What does it mean?

D The point is that it is precisely people with innate imaginative thinking who have such fears and phobias. These are the so-called sensual natures: actors, artists, nurses, models, etc. In general, all those who think in images and emotions.

At such people, fear appears as a result of not filling themselves with vivid emotions and experiences. Nervous system like telling them:

– If you don’t fill others or yourself with empathy and don’t experience any emotions, then you will experience fear .. .

And since fear is the strongest emotion, it is this emotion that arises with all kinds of fantasies and even bodily sensations. Here the rich imagination of people with figurative intellect does its job.

3. Social phobia (fear public speaking, agoraphobia (open spaces))

AT In general, this fear is known to most people on the planet. One way or another, we are all afraid to varying degrees to show our feelings and emotions in front of others.

O However, for some, this fear becomes obsessive and turns into a phobia. And suffer from these fears, mostly people with figurative and systemic types of thinking.

E If the former are born creative natures for whom to be in the spotlight - necessary thing, but only as a result of certain features of perception does this fear of the stage or open spaces appear, then for the latter, it is rather a fear of being incompetent, funny, stupid, etc.

T one way or another, this fear manifests itself in those who, in their potential, are able to get real pleasure from public speaking and the open manifestation of their feelings and emotions.

2. Fear of death (claustrophobia, acrophobia, hematophobia, etc.)

P about the idea, this fear should take first place in our rating, but in fact, the fear of death, although it is partly a basic fear, is still not a leader, but only a companion of the leader.

And So, who is more likely than others to experience the fear of death in an obsessive form?

E If you thought that these are anxious and suspicious people with a figurative type of thinking, then you thought right. It is these comrades who are the main carriers of the fear of death and other phobias with it: fear of closed spaces, fear of blood, fear of heights, fear of the dead, fear of pain, fear of rape and others.

1. Fear…

H well, we have come to the leader of our rating of fears, which one way or another each of us has and which always tells us what we need to do to avoid it.

And this is…

Fear of Loneliness

Yes Yes, it is he who haunts the vast majority of people on Earth. The most surprising thing is that even people suffering from autism, which is characterized by complete isolation and antisocial behavior, can, deep down, experience a fear of complete loneliness.

AT The basis of this fear lies in the fact that every person strives to be happy. But since we are originally "social animals", we can feel happy only by being and being realized in society.

B to be misunderstood, unrecognized, abandoned, rejected - such a reality frightens rather than allows you to get pleasure. Therefore, the unconscious desire of a person to establish positive relationships between other people is the path to the very happiness that each of us dreams of receiving.

E There is another fact that amazes me and which I never tire of being surprised at. It lies in the fact that if we fully realize ourselves in society, by giving, not receiving, that is, by creating something not only for ourselves, but also for others, then we are able not only to get rid of most of our acquired fears, but also really enjoy the fact that each of us is part of a single whole, where there is no place for fears and phobias, but there is a complete understanding of ourselves and others.

And remember that if you suddenly have an inexplicable fear, then do not try to fight it. Just think about what this fear is telling you. The secret of fears lies in the fact that they always tell us where and what we lack and what needs to be done to get rid of them once and for all.

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Can fears and doubts be hidden behind a muscular male body, a determined look and spiky bristles? "What nonsense!" - many beautiful ladies will exclaim in unison. However, this is another misconception imposed on us by society.

We are in website against ingrained stereotypes. Therefore, today we will talk about 10 things that actually worry most men.

1. What their body looks like

Women with young years impose the opinion that their body should be in an eternal pursuit of the ideal, forcing them to exhaust themselves with diets and training. There is no such stereotype for men, but this does not mean that they do not worry about physical form and do not compare their body with a picture of a relief jock on the cover of a magazine. Otherwise, why don't men get out of the gym? Criticism of the “beer belly” is perceived most painfully.

2. Finance

Finance is one of the main causes of male anxiety. After all, from childhood they are brought up as future defenders who ensure the well-being of the family. The representatives of the stronger sex may not even have a girlfriend, but they will still worry about their financial situation, in vain believing that money is needed for relationships in the first place. However, for girls, care and attention are much more important. And if you still have money, then most likely you are not on the way.

3. Growth

Well, how can you not worry if one of the first qualities of an “ideal man” on a woman’s list is “tall”? If beautiful ladies cared less about the height of their partner, then guys of relatively small stature would have much more chances. After all, the size, as you know, is not the main thing, unless it is the size of his heart. And no vulgarity!

4. Threat from other men

Male jealousy may sometimes be less obvious than female jealousy, but it does just as much damage to pride and self-esteem. Even if your partner doesn’t raise an eyebrow when you talk about how witty your work colleague is, he will undoubtedly worry and compare himself with a potential adversary. To dispel this fear, talk frankly with your loved one, making sure that there is no threat.

5. Poor experience with girls

The image of a macho haunts men in terrible dreams. After all, because of him, they have to build themselves from experienced lovers and lie about the number of their exes. In fact, they are no less than women afraid of doing something wrong and ruining everything. Support and frankness in any matters relating to your relationship will help them feel more confident.

6. Hair

Hair on the body or head is an eternal problem for men. Too little body hair - what if that's not masculine enough? Too much - animal repulsive, sloppy? And the problem of baldness, which is typical mainly for the stronger sex, makes men suffer at all. And if you really value your partner, then you will not aggravate all these worries with your comments.

7. Diet

"I'm on a diet" - how often men hear these words from women's lips! But mention the diet of a man - the ladies will look at him with suspicion. However, the representatives of the stronger sex also take care of their bodies and what they eat. Everyone wants to be healthy and fit, it's just that men talk MUCH less about it.

8. Relationship with a loved one

How many articles on how to save a relationship have appeared in women's magazines? But if men start talking about this topic, then beautiful ladies will find it at least strange. And again the stereotype to which society has doomed us. A man is a brutal creature who should not worry about all sorts of trifles, such as relationships that women usually puzzle over. But men also want the two of you to be fine.

We are afraid of loneliness, unemployment and "blacks". We are not afraid of God As a child, I was afraid of spiders, dead beauties and cows. In youth - snakes, syphilis and death in the water. To maturity, having mastered the science of lies, I began to explain my ...

We are afraid of loneliness, unemployment and "blacks". We are not afraid of God

As a child, I was afraid of spiders, dead beauties and cows. In youth - snakes, syphilis and death in the water. By maturity, having mastered the science of lying, with an elegiac sigh, I began to explain my pathological laziness by chronic ergophobia - this elegant term doctors call the fear of work. However, an incurable disease does not prevent me from collecting observations, articles and sociological studies - I love tricky tables! - about various kinds of phobias, of which doctors number about 250. Among them, along with well-known claustrophobia and xenophobia, are exotic dextrophobia (fear of objects located to the right of the patient) and phronemophobia (fear of thinking is familiar to many who have not yet forgotten the abbreviations USSR, CPSU and KGB)...

H obsessive states, and phobias from their womb, are of interest not only to psychiatrists and pharmacists - in many cases they make it possible to judge the state and dynamics of social psychology and create a clinical and sociological portrait of a Russian and what he calls his soul with paranoid persistence and sober masochism. But let's not talk about obvious schizophrenia - this is from another area. Russians are uncomfortable in a troubled country: they believe that the future is in the future, but it turned out to be the present. We are experiencing a "future shock" described in detail by Alvin Toffler thirty years ago.
According to VTsIOM, the Russian top ten phobias as of this year looks like this (in descending order): illnesses of loved ones; unemployment, poverty; their illnesses; arbitrariness of the authorities; criminals (the last position in 1989, but already in 1994 - the second); World War(second position in 1989); ethnic violence; natural disasters; public humiliation; return to mass repression sample thirty terrible years.
My personal feelings, based on my own observations and media reports, generally do not diverge from the data of sociologists, although in my “scale of fears” I would focus on new for Russia - or well-forgotten old ones - phobias: people have become more afraid of loneliness, poverty and strangers.
And the content of traditional phobias, among which the fear of diseases of relatives and children has been leading with sad constancy for ten years, has changed. Along with life itself, of course. After all, even 10-15 years ago, at the very least, individual and collective mechanisms of salvation or resistance to fears operated. The intelligentsia, especially the creative ones, successfully used cynicism and hypocrisy. And how many escapist routes there were: they fled “into bards”, into science fiction, into Japanese literature, or at least “beyond the fog” or “only mountains”. Today Vysotsky is sung with tears by shaven-headed Nazis, immature teenagers read fantasy, to follow the fog to the lands where the parents of former romantics were driven under escort, today it is more convenient for specialists in the history of political repressions, and “only mountains”, thanks to the unforgettable first film lady of Nazism Leni Riefenstahl, of any normal person are associated with the initial period of accumulation of Nazi ideology and aesthetics. Climbing away from the philistine pig swamp to the Hegelian peaks of the Absolute Spirit, the future Siegfrieds of the SS honed their most terrible weapon - contempt for the ordinary, denial of the norm, which in practice led Kierkegaard's free man-one to the Buchenwald zero.
Gone is the unrealistic reliable support of party, trade union and other organizations and institutions, the main goal of which in the end was to plunge a person even deeper into the relationship of unfreedom. And the love for the sick leave evaporated, and not at all thanks to the Soviet authorities and the Ministry of Health, which adopted tough secret decrees to limit the issuance of documents on temporary disability to people of working age and reduce the possibility of hospitalization for pensioners. Sick leave is dying because health today is money. And although left-wing sociologists assure the public that alcohol consumption is growing like an avalanche and is leading to the destruction of the Russian gene pool, the demand of the gene pool for exercise equipment and sports and fitness services, despite financial problems, is growing at an even faster rate.
The fear of diseases of relatives and children is constant, like a Russian fence. But the content of this phobia in last years acquired a new character: people began to fear loneliness. A very curious phenomenon. I know hundreds of people who simply dream of being alone, and this typically Russian dream causes nothing but surprise among my friends - Europeans and Americans. However, there is nothing mysterious here: for a thousand years the Russians lived in communism, "glued" into one whole (when the Minister of Finance, and later Prime Minister Bunge, proposed replacing the poll tax with income tax, the State Council of the empire realized that we are talking about the destruction of rural mutual responsibility, i.e., the responsibility of irresponsible community members, and refused to Nikolai Khristianovich, whose work Witte and Stolypin tried to complete), crowded into apartments where it was impossible to be left alone. Isn't that why the wandering hermits were so respected? Respected and envied. Today, the fear of loneliness has many facets: people want to finally break out of the herd and show themselves in all their glory, since there are no hopes for help from above; but it is also fearful to lose a warm niche among the poor group existence, especially when the group has narrowed down to a kindred circle, above which the slogan trembles in the fog: "Jeder fur sich und gegen alle" - "Each for himself and against all."
Fear of loneliness is directly related to the fear of losing a job (which rose from sixth position in 1994 to second in the “post-default” 1999). 1,500-5,000 rubles of per capita monthly income, reduced by 10 million after the default of the “middle class”, is not so much a goal as an irritant, forcing people to look for and turn on new adaptation mechanisms, including the art of tax evasion, hidden earnings, rent, etc. When I was a teacher of the queen of sciences - scientific communism - I asked students how to change the quality of the cow herd. "Well, replace bad animals with good ones." And what about the human community? "Well, change bad ministers to good ones." Oh, this faith in a good king ... Then the evil teacher asked differently: how does a person differ from an animal? There are a plethora of answers (a sense of humor, faith in God...), but for me - in this case - the one that is formulated, excuse me, by the classics of Marxism is closer to me and, for all its simplification, is certainly relevant for today's Russia: a person differs from an animal in his ability to the manufacture of tools. Consequently, in order to change the quality of the human community, it is necessary to legally normalize relations in the area where Russian tools of labor and their creators are often in a stupor, that is, in the economy, business and finance. Cows - cow, people - human. It doesn't take much to successfully treat most phobias.
According to various sources, the number of those who are afraid of attacks by criminals has doubled over the past eight to ten years. But there is another way to look at the problem: the increased level of fear of crime indicates that people are no longer afraid of the truth. We are not only ready to admit the existence of crime on a serious scale and complain about the impunity of corrupt officials, killers and schemers of all stripes - our electoral hand is increasingly itching: to put pressure on politicians and officials responsible for the security of society.
The fear of a return to the repressions of the 1937 model has consistently ranked the lowest among phobias over the past five years. Even during the events of August 1991 and October 1993, this specific phobia did not overwhelm our society, giving way to a more amorphous, but no less annoying fear of the arbitrariness of the authorities, which boils down to the Kafkaesque formula: if something happens, you have no one will not help.
Old people - alas, this is natural - are afraid of death, which in today's Russia can ruin their loved ones. Intellectuals are afraid of public humiliation, while people of low social status most often do not care about him. Villagers, due to their special way of life, tremble before certain “ unknown forces”, who control the weather, crops and fate (they, by the way, remain the only category of respondents who are seriously afraid of war). A significant part of the city dwellers are recent immigrants from the countryside, and it is they who are the bearers of irrational fears, as well as the most active visitors to churches and mosques, where they paganly seek protection from the vicissitudes of city life.
Xenophobia has always existed in Russia reverse side real admiration for the West. The fear of strangers, of strangers, has undergone curious transformations in the last five or seven years. The fear of Islam, recorded for the first time in 1996, does not weaken, after Chechnya it immediately pushed the fear of sectarianism to the periphery. At least five out of a hundred Muscovites surveyed consider Islam a hostile religion. The intensity of national intolerance exceeds religious intolerance twice, and anti-Muslim - six times (according to sociologists of Moscow State University). For some time, the image of a Muslim forced out of the mass consciousness such familiar images of the enemy as an American and a Jew. In anonymous essays, high school students from a number of Moscow schools explain their xenophobia by the fact that “blacks”, “strangers” force their parents out of work (!).
For many years now, political technology experts have been actively using phobophobia - fear of fear, recently, especially on the eve of major political fights, developing into deimophobia - fear of horror: vote - or it will be worse. That is even worse. What could be worse than the horror that paralyzes the will at the edge of the abyss? Only phronemophobia, that is, fear of thinking. If you think about it, is Franklin Delano Roosevelt really wrong when he once said: you need to stop being afraid of everything but fear.
For some reason, among hundreds of phobias, myophobia is the most sympathetic to me - the fear of mice. How beautiful is the squealing woman who, at the sight of a harmless mouse, gracefully flies up on the table and at the same time - oh, of course, involuntarily! - showing off well-baked thighs and some goddamn italian panties!..
Well, of course, I'm not talking about mice. I'm just saying that I'm not a cow. I am another social animal (zoon politikon, as Aristotle said). Therefore, I can afford and even have to be afraid of fear in the interests of strengthening self-discipline, while not forgetting that Phobos and Deimos are stars only on the maps of astrologers from politics, but only satellites of Mars indifferent to me on the maps of astronomers. And I don’t play cards not out of fear - it’s boring ...