Maybe you can see how the JW religion uses fear on its people. How it is effective. How it works. Happy reading!
This is from the book The Power of Now but ekhartt tolle
The reason why you don't put your hand in the fire is not because of fear, it's because you know that you'll get burned. You don't need fear to avoid unnecessary danger--just a minimum of intelligence and common sense. For such practical matters, it is usefull to apply the lessons learned in the past. Now if someone threatened you with fire or with physical violence, you might experience something like fear. This is an instinctive shrinking back from danger, but no that psychological condition of fear that we are talking about here, They psychological condition of fear is divorced from any concrete and true immediate danger. It comes in many forms: unease, worry, anxiety, nervousness, thension, dread, phobia, and so on. This kind of psycological fear is always of something that might happen, not of something that is happeneing now, while your mind is in the future. And if you are identified with your mind and have lost touch with the power and simplicity of the now, that anxiety gap will be your constant companion. You can always cope with the present moment, but you cannot cope with something that is only a mind projection--you cannot cope with the future.
Moreover, as long as you are identified with your mind, the ego runs your life, as I pointed out earlier. Because of its phantom nature, and despite elaborate defense mechanisms, the ego is very vulnerable and insecure, and it sees itself as constantly under threat. This, by the way, is the case even if the ego is inwordly very confident. Now remember that an emotion is the body's reaction to your mind. What message is the body receiving continuously from the ego, the false, mind-made self? Danger, I am under threat. And what is the emotion generated by this continuous message? Fear, of course.
Fear seems to have many causes. Fear of loss, fear of failure, fear of being hurt, and so on, but ultimately all fear is the ego's fear of death, of annihilation. To the ego, death is always just around the corner. In this mind-identified state, fear of death affects every aspect of your life. For example, evensuch a seemingly trivial and "normal" thing as the compulsive need to beright in an argument and make the other person wrong--defending the mental position with which you have identified--is due to the fear of death. If you identify with a mental position, then if you are wrong your mindbased sense of self is seriously threatened with annihilation. So you as the ego cannot afford to be wrong. To be wrong is to die. Wars have been fought over this, and countless relationships have broken down.
Once you have disidentified from your mind, whether you are right or wrong makes no difference to your sense of self at all, so the forcefully compulsive and deeply unconscious need to be right, which i sa form of violence, will no longer be there. You can see clearly and firmly how you feel or what you think, but there will be no aggressiveness or defensiveness about it. Your sense of self is then derived from a deeper and truer place within yourself, not from the mind. Watch our for any kind of defensiveness within yourself. What are you defending? An illusory identitiy, an image in your mind, a fictitious entity. By making this pattern conscious, by witnessing it, your disidentify from it. In the llight of your consciousness, the unconsceious pattern will then quickly dissolve. This is the end of all arguments and power games, which are so corrosive to relationships. Power over others is weakness disguised as strength. True power is within, and it is available to you now.
So anyone who is identified with their mind and , therefore, disconnected from their true power, their deeper self rooted in Being, will have fear as their constant companion. the number of people, who have gone beyond mind is as your extremely small, so you can assume that virtually everyone you meet or know lives in a state of fear. Only the intensity of it varies. It fluctuates between anxiety and dread at one end of the scale and a vague unease and distant sense of threat at the other. Most people become conscious of it only when it takes on one of its more acute forms.
The Ego's Search for Wholeness
Another aspect of the emotional pain that is an intirinsic part of the egoic mind is a deep-seated sense of lack or incompleteness, of not being whole. In some people, this is conscious, in others unconscious. If it is conscious, it manifests as the unsettling and constant feeling of not being worthy or good enough. If it is unconscious, it will only be felt indirectly as an intense craving, wanting and needing. In either case, people will often enter into a compulsive pursuit of ego-gratification and things to identify with in order to fill this hole they feel within. So they strive after possessions, money, success, power, recognition, or a special relationship, basically, so that they can feel better about themselves, feel more complete. But even when they attain all these things they soon find that the hole is still there, that it is bottomless. Then they are really in trouble, becuase they cannot delude themselves anymore. Well, they can and do, but it gets more difficult.
As long as the egoic mind is running your life, you cannot truely be at ease;you cannot be at peace or fulfilled except for brief intervals when you obtained what you wanted, when a craving has just been fulfilled. Since the ego is a derived sense of self, it needs to identify with external things. It needs to be both defended and fed constantly. The most commen ego identications have to do with possessions, the work you do, social status and recognition, knowledge and education, physical appearance, special abilities, and often also political, nationalistic, racial, religious, and other collecitive identifications. None of these is you.
Do you find this frightening? Or is it a relief to know this? All of these things you will have to relinquish sooner or later. Perhaps you find it as yet hard to believe, and I am certainly not asking you to believe that your identity cannot be found in any of those things. You will know the truth of it for yourself. You will know it at the latest when you feel death approaching. Death is stipping away of all that is not you. The secret of life is to "die before you die"-- and find that there is no death.