When I was young and studying at the Lyceum, I had a Spanish teacher who didn't like to teach and always, at the end of the term, tried to finish the subject with any kind of work or simple task, which often had nothing to do with the subject. On one occasion, I complained to him about his lack of ethics, vocation and professionalism, to which he replied that if I demanded or told him how to teach his class again, he would surely fail the subject. I remember that I was 13 years old and I never complained to that teacher again, even though I knew that as a professional he was a mediocre and a coward.

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Fear is one of the most powerful weapons a human being has to control others. Many dictators, warlords, common people have used fear to govern, to achieve their goals or to corner other people. Aware of the power of fear, perhaps the power they wield, and especially the vulnerability of some people, some use fear to achieve their goals. It must be said that some people use it with caution and a certain amount of shame; however, there are others who do so relentlessly, obscenely and ruthlessly. An example of this is my former Spanish teacher, who not only used his position as a teacher but also resorted to threats to silence me. In other words, fear can be effective and can be used by anyone: parents use it to educate their children, teachers use it to teach, husbands use it to control their wives, politicians use it to keep a whole society submissive.

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Many of us can boast of being brave and never having felt fear, but fear has one characteristic that many know, even if they do not admit it, and that is that fear is contagious. We are social beings, which means that a part of our being is due to others. As an example of this, I can remember the time that a person, in a shopping mall, started running and screaming; in response to this action: most people started running and screaming. And it turns out that the woman screamed and ran because she thought she saw a cockroach (individual fear), but all the other people ran away and screamed in terror, thinking it was something worse. This is how fear can be made collective, without wanting to and without realizing it. Not to mention family or social fears, the kind we almost get injected with bottles.

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Fears caused by contagious diseases are human fears, since life and death are at stake. False alarms, rumors, and states of emergency create an almost animal-like state of alert in human beings. These days, for example, I have seen, with regard to the coronavirus, how people have taken refuge in their homes, have not even gone out to see the sun and have discarded any human contact. Beyond the fact that we know that the masses are influential, that all feelings are contagious and that in this case, we are talking about a lethal virus, it is also true that there are worse behaviors in the face of innocuous symptoms, if you do not ask the hypochondriacs.

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In short, it must be said that we Venezuelans are experts in fears; we do not only suffer from them, we also provoke them. The Venezuelan of the 21st century is a citizen who lives daily in anguish and panic, so he may already be used to living in that state of sinking that makes us stagger with every step. Perhaps that is why the events that have recently occurred in Steemit are not new to us. To live under a government that wants, in an arbitrary way, to manipulate everything, that imposes its laws and its rulers, that sanctions the dissidents and very especially that silences or tries to "make invisible" anyone who differs from them, is a reality that we know because it is our everyday reality. What we also know, is that when the ruler uses these tricks to have control over the other, two things can happen: that a whole people stands up and says enough or that little by little the fear spreads and everyone who can give an opinion, keeps silent. It would be good to remember in these days what Dante Alighieri said in the famous Divine Comedy: "The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis".

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