Fear for Average Mortals

 Whenever a woman or peasant says something is scary, a whole scene flashes through my mind.

 P.S. Understanding does not cause compassion.

 

 A peasant waking up. This terrifies them.
 When they open their eyes, they are burdened with the responsibility for seeing. What if they see something wrong? What if there's an illusion?
 Next they have to get up. What if they trip over the side of the bed, or on something on the ground they can't see, and break their neck? Petrifying.
 Next they have to eat breakfast. What if they burn themselves? What if they burn themselves so bad they can't work, and get fired because they had to take time off? Bloodcurdling.
 They have to eat. They're terrified of stabbing themselves with the fork, getting an infected wound, and dying. They're scared of the food. So poisonous. Pesticides. Phytotoxins. Possibly, even, socially unacceptable. What if they eat something they shouldn't, get thrown out of the tribe, and starve to death? Terrifying. Eating is terrifying. They might also choke and die.
 What if microplastics. What if pseudoestrogens. Oh no! Oh my!
 What if they put their elbows on the table, and their wife hates them, and they get a divorce, never see their kids again, and kill themselves? Terrifying. Gotta be polite.

 (Or the opposite: they have to put their elbows on the table rudely, because respek, if nubuddy respek dem dey gunna get shot.) 

 They see a kitty kat. They love kitties.
 It's so small. They could kill it by accident. They could break the kitty's neck with a quick twist. Nobody was ever hurt by a kitty. Pet soft kitty fur.
 (The peasant dramatically overestimates their grip strength. They have nowhere near the aggression they need to kill a kitten quickly. They would have to strangle, and get scratched to hell by the dirty needle-claws.) 

 Then they have to go to work. Spine-chilling. What if car crash? What if late? What if their will falters and they skip? 

 What if someone at work bullies them?

 TV man promises to make the scary things go away. TV man good. 

 Hilariously, the peasant is never scared of TV man lying to him. Especially not masculinized, butch TV woman. Too terrified to consider the possibility. The possibility of hope is overwhelming, consuming every spare neuron.  

 

 Driven mad by fear. Phobos worship. 

 What they don't understand is that it's too late. It's not as bad as they think, it's worse. Their whole genetic line is doomed. There's nothing to be afraid of, because they're already proper fucked. 

 They're so scared because there's a real threat, but they can't consciously identify it because their ego is too weak to handle the identification. They can't deny the threat, but they also can't identify it, so they attempt to identify everything with the threat, to see what sticks. Nothing sticks, because they never consider the real threat, but it never goes away, because they never identify the real threat.
 The soft ego is, itself, the fatal disorder under consideration. 

 The question is merely how many decent folk their family disturbs and nauseates between now and then.