[gallopingcomp]

> Awful behavior in general comes from an absence of fear

I assume you meant _specific_ fears about the consequences of one's _specific_ actions (e.g. fear of harming someone else, or fear of receiving backlash for it; or fear of squandering scarce funds for a business).

Fear does not unconditionally bring sanity. I've found widespread, chronic, low-grade background fear to be an equally significant driver of awful behavior (and irrationality), often (but not always) co-occurring with an absence of specific consequences.

(The implication being that trying to "solve" this problem with more general terror, as opposed to specific consequences, would likely backfire.)

[mach1ne]

Fear doesn’t bring sanity, but scale might. Facing hardships and overcoming them generally seems to give people a sense of scale. It gives people a sense of contentment, which subdues greed.

Then again, hardships do also break people, so I don’t know.

[gallopingcomp]

Psychologists might call it controlled exposure to fear, under conditions where you know (or will soon know) that things will more or less be all right / have a safe space to retreat to. (Which is a bit subjective, but most people seem to have a few things in common that they value for their security.)

When it feels like everything is slipping away from you, it’s easier to become desperate. This could be the result of losing your sense of scale, or it could be the result of a genuine, significant threat (or anything in between).

EDIT: also think of people in general as lying along orthogonal spectrums of (1) psychological vulnerability, and (2) material and social precarity. People high on either scale suffer disproportionately; and tougher times means a wider spectrum of people that are likely to break (whether just to survive or letting the stress get to them, or more commonly both).