In a world whose greatest fantasy is domination, symbols of every kind are used to instil fear in the mind and subdue the weak. You have to be gullible to think that an inanimate symbol can possess any kind of power. That something dead to begin with could affect life at all.
The only things that can affect you are your fears and your own beliefs. And yes, many make a pastime of instilling fear, because that fear allows them to control and subjugate you.
Fear only has power over you if you decide to give it that power. Those who can look fear in the face without wavering eventually undo it, and they succeed because it was never real to begin with. Those who use symbols to intimidate play at instilling fear in their own minds and in the minds of others. They play at enslaving the mind.
They sink into their own fear and eventually ask to be saved from it. They want to climb to an illusory summit and sink into an equally illusory pit. They seem very intelligent, but they are puppets of the ego’s depraved games and its relentless determinism.
They want to escape life’s suffering and emptiness, and they dig much deeper pits. They try to get someone to see them because they cannot see themselves. They look in the mirror and see no reflection. Or, if they do, what they see is the fear they have been cultivating in their own minds, and they end up fleeing from themselves in terror.
Where do they expect to go by running away from themselves? That is the face of madness, the face of the afflicted. But if you, who can still choose, give them wings, then you are madder than they are.
Do not fear what has never been anything at all. Do not give fear wings.