Fear Is the Mind-Killer

On the Arsenal fanbase’s glass-half-empty mindset and how it has infected an otherwise healthy season for the Gunners.

Earlier this week my wife was out of town for work for the last few days, so I used the alone time (as well as the fact that I was essentially snowed in) to catch up on movies. She’s not someone who likes to sit on the couch staring at a screen for two to three hours; she’d rather use that time reading or listening to an audiobook. The lone exception appears to be Heated Rivalry, which she voraciously binged after paying for an HBO Max account solely to watch the show. So the more cinematic undertakings have become a solo effort for yours truly.

First I watched One Battle After Another because everyone and their mother has raved to me about it and frankly, it’s a little overrated. To me, it is a film that leans heavily on quirky characters without having enough actual substance to back it up. Rather frequently, the movie skips over a significant plot hole or introduces a development that requires you to suspend a bit too much disbelief in the hope that you’ll just go along with it. And what are these names they’ve given people? Lockjaw? Toejam? The Christmas Adventurers? The code name of a certain French 75 bank robber that I will not dare repeat on this newsletter? I understand the movie is largely satirical — and Bob Ferguson does succeed at driving that point home — but those elements took me out of the experience a bit. Also, Wood Harris making out with one of the Haim sisters was hilariously surreal to bear witness to.

The next night I watched The Rip, and that movie understands what it’s trying to do much more than OBAA does. It’s gritty, it keeps you guessing, and the chemistry between Matt Damon and Ben Affleck is unsurprisingly excellent. Also, I want to look like Kyle Chandler in this film when I’m his age. There are some clunky bits in this movie, but ultimately it’s a solid flick that does not overtly take Netflix’s rather cynical advice about restating the plot three or four times for people watching while on their phones.

On my third night alone, I watched Bugonia (I promise I’m going somewhere with all this). In this one, Emma Stone stars as Michelle Fuller, the young CEO a pharmaceutical company with an unsubtle corporate coldness about her. Fuller is kidnapped by an un-dynamic duo of country bumpkin cousins Teddy and Don. Teddy, the clear ringleader of the operation, has orchestrated this entire plan based on the strongly held hypothesis that Fuller is an alien. After falling down a multitude of internet rabbit holes — “alt-right, alt-lite, leftist, Marxist”, as he puts it —he has found an echo chamber he can truly call home, one that sets him on a path of snatching up people because he thinks they are Andromedans. And as the story unfolds, so do the real-world implications of this one man’s time spent online.

Perhaps “real-world” isn’t the right phrase to use there given I’m referencing a fictional tale. However, one of the salient points Bugonia makes is that what we do on social media, the content we consume, shapes us in nearly existential ways. Where and how long we are on the internet massively shapes our behavior in society. It frequently plays a foundational role in determining our beliefs, our values, and the people with which we align ourselves. It radicalizes us.

This doesn’t just happen in the realms of politics or conspiracy theories, either. Football is another arena in which the line between social media and reality is becoming more and more blurred. The jarring behaviors and conversations once thought to be strictly reserved for a Twitter or Instagram timeline now regularly bleed into the physical world; Spurs fans celebrate losses in the stands of their own stadium if it hurts Arsenal too and signs depicting Mikel Arteta as a bridesmaid show up at Anfield. And yet, people still insist that the two are distinct, separate planes of existence.

But I understand that a single dark comedy does not prove my point, so allow me to provide a couple personal examples. Last summer, my wife and I were having dinner with a couple friends in Adams Morgan. I wore an Arsenal jacket to the restaurant, which earned us a round of complimentary aperitifs from our server, who was a fellow Gooner. But when that same jacket caught on a water carafe as I got up to leave with the others and brought it loudly crashing to the floor, a man at the table next to ours yelled, “Classic Arsenal!” After a brief exchange with him, I learned that the jokester was a Spurs fan (of course), and I got the impression he was attempting to make a reference to Arsenal “bottling” the Premier League title. And while Ben, one half of the couple I dined with, is also a diehard fan of the Gunners, both of our wives — who only really care about football to support us — thought the outburst was quite strange.

And then, just a few weeks ago, I found myself at the gym twelve hours later in the day than I prefer to go due to a hectic week at work. I was wrapping up my workout with some triceps pulls when a very typical gym rat approached me. He had spotted the Arsenal crest on the bag near my feet. “Bro,” he said, “If Arsenal don’t win it this year…”

I stared at him blankly, not sure what I was supposed to say in response. I almost asked, “Or what?” He looked at me disappointedly. “You’re an Arsenal fan, right?” I replied in the affirmative but that it was pretty early in the campaign to clearly set up a postseason conversation about Arsenal bottling again. But he just kept repeating his point: the Gunners have to win this time, or else… It felt like a threat, not against myself, but against Arsenal’s reputation.

And perhaps that’s what it is. Because whether it’s with a local meathead, coworkers, friends, friends of friends, and even relatives, many real-world conversations about Arsenal mimic what countless faceless accounts online spout on a daily basis.

“Arsenal are the masters of dark arts.”

“Arsenal only know how to score from set pieces.”

“Arsenal are so boring to watch.”

“Arsenal will be the worst team ever to win the league.”

And of course, “Arsenal HAVE TO win it from here.”

I say all this to say, it feels like mockery is inescapable in the event of failure (or even anything less than one of the greatest successes in modern history) by Arsenal. Even for the lucky fans who could once turn their phones off and detach completely from that universe, online trolling now seems wont to follow us out onto the streets, into the gym, over to the water cooler, into the calming routines of our everyday lives. Wherever we are, even if we’re off the grid, we can be hounded relentlessly if the Gunners fumble their season away and we leave the house with branded merch on.

That in turn has understandably bred fear within the fanbase. Because now more than ever, Arsenal have something to lose. At the time of writing the Gunners are four points clear at the top of the Premier League, have become the first team ever to achieve a perfect record in the Champions League league phase, take a 3-2 lead to the Emirates for the second leg of the EFL Cup semifinals, and have progressed to the Fourth Round of the FA Cup. All four trophies are still on the table for Mikel Arteta’s team.

Normally, that state of affairs is cause for excitement. Almost any fanbase would be thrilled to be in Arsenal’s current position. But this is year four of a genuine assault on the highest honors, and so far all the Gunners have to show for it are a few moral victories here and there. Despite the promise of the squad and its manager, watching Arsenal challenge for titles these past few seasons has been a tantric exercise. The need for release has become a painful one for many Gooners.

And so, with Gary Neville and the rest of the world telling them that Arsenal must win the Premier League this season, the experience of this title race has been downright miserable at times. Every missed chance in front of goal has been a scandal and every dropped point has been a catastrophe. Arsenal’s inability to establish an unassailable lead at the top of the table has been a constant source of consternation within a fanbase that is terrified of the height from which the Gunners could fall. But as of yet, Arteta and his men have been unable to build up enough of a cushion to soften their landing should they plummet from the summit.

That fear, once confined within the four corners of our phones and computers, has seeped into the matchday. The nerves at the Emirates when Arsenal aren’t playing their best football have become quite palpable, particularly when City have already played that weekend. There is a restlessness, a quiet terror that emanates from the crowd whenever the players’ touches get a little loose or someone blasts one opportunity too many over the crossbar, that you can feel from the other side of a television screen. And by the way, I don’t say this to vilify match-going fans or police how they feel. But the tension you could cut with a knife is certainly there.

With over half the 2025/26 season in the books, that fear has crescendoed and evolved into something else. It is no longer just the worry that we’ll have to endure another summer of humiliation and bad faith should Arsenal end another season empty-handed, but something deeper: the ever-looming threat that the journey we’ve all been on for the last several years has been for a naught, that we have all foolishly dedicated ourselves to a lost cause.

Arsenal have broken records, won the most points in the league for the last few seasons, and now serve as a model for clubs across Europe. But those feats have so far not led to the ultimate proof of concept, trophies. And a reality has been constructed around us which has dictated for months that if Arsenal should again come up short in the Premier League and Champions League, the world has proof of concept of their own, one that demonstrates beyond a doubt that this manager and this group of players we have come to love at least some of are all perennial losers. That is the fear that has eaten at all of us for quite some time now.

Last Sunday at home to a revitalized Manchester United, that fear crept into the players. Soon after taking the lead against the Red Devils, a strange panic seemed to take hold of Arsenal. The players looked desperate to score a second, put the match beyond reach, and ensure that they maintained their seven-point lead above City. They wanted to win almost too badly, precipitating a nosedive in technical quality and attention to detail. Soon after the own goal that bounced in off Lisandro Martínez’s ankle, Bryan Mbeumo ran in behind William Saliba and Gabriel and fired a warning shot. But still Arsenal scrambled hastily to press their advantage without taking care of the ball. In the end Martin Zubimendi handed Mbeumo a goal, and from there a thoroughly rattled home side ultimately lost the game and almost half of their lead atop the table.

In the aftermath, I saw many Arsenal fans take that defeat as a realization of their fears. The collapse had begun. Bottling was inevitable. In real time, you could watch supporters divest emotionally from the season, jumping from a psychic Titanic before it struck the iceberg of failure, admitting defeat while their side were still four points ahead at the top of the league. But the more concerning sight was that of the Arsenal players at the end of the match; six months spent fighting for their lives in the Premier League, running from the clutches of a nemesis risen from the grave in City, had sapped them. They looked mentally exhausted. They looked like a team on the brink of relenting.

Fear had killed their minds.

This is, of course, based on a line from Frank Herbert’s Dune (also a movie, for those counting the number of them I’ve referenced in this piece). It is the most memorable part of the Bene Gesserit’s “Litany of Fear”, a central idea of both the shadowy cabal of women with superhuman abilities and of the story as a whole. Early in the book and the movie Paul Atreides, the trilogy’s main protagonist, recites the Litany as he withstands the intense and excruciating pain of the Bene Gesserit’s Gom Jabbar test:

“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past, I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”

I think at this moment, Mikel Arteta’s Arsenal are facing their own Gom Jabbar. They are all too aware what’s at stake; the players have social media accounts and can see what the general public (including Amad Diallo, for some reason) are saying about them, and they can hear what ex-United players think about them on various Sky Sports segments and podcasts. They know how long it’s been since Arsenal last won a league title, and they know they risk becoming part of a history of frustration. Against a United side playing with freedom, with hope, with nothing on the line but bragging rights, the Gunners let that play on their minds too much.

And so Zubimendi ignored an opportunity to play Declan Rice before playing that ill-fated back pass. Thus Martin Ødegaard let several openings to create overloads against United’s back line pass him by. And accordingly, Piero Hincapié turned back almost every time he found himself in the final third with the ball at his feet. One loose pass, one missed tackle in the resulting counter, one loss against perhaps Arsenal’s greatest archrivals at an inopportune moment and the worldwide content machine will fire up once more — if you listen carefully, you can hear the white noise of it humming away on standby whenever the Gunners kick off a match. The Emirates Stadium is a giant Petri dish, with sixty thousand pairs of eyes locked on the players’ every move in intense observation, and millions more watching through the cameras in the stands.

Of course the pressure is too much, akin to the mauling of your hand’s nervous system by a mysterious box held by a sinister theocrat, galaxies away and tens of millennia from now. Many teams have faced the mental demands of a Premier League title race, but I struggle to think of any tasked with bearing the cerebral burden this Arsenal team have been. The faces of football media declared them champions-elect in September and pundits transparently gaslit us all into thinking any deserving team would smoothly sail to the trophy for the remainder of the season, an obvious setup for a summer of gleeful scolding and vindication. This is more than just the mundane pleasures of schadenfreude; Rainbet sponsorships, blue ticks on Twitter, and digital advertising revenues have created a monetary component to this malicious tempting of fate. The world has been turned against this club because there’s money in it, and a fortune at that. There’s no doubt Arsenal see through it just as we do, even if they’ll never acknowledge it publicly.

And now they are being openly surveilled by a media industry and its too-online viewers who would love to dance on their graves. Knowing that every match is a referendum on your entire legacy is surely a soul-crushing weight. We are asking an international collective of twenty-somethings to perform a Sisyphean feat while on a stage more revealing than that of Big Brother.

But there’s no turning off the current settings. The pressure will continue. And the only thing that would invite more mockery than not winning the requisite trophies those season would be asking the likes of Jamie Carragher to take it easy on poor little Arsenal. The only way out is through. In his presser ahead of Kairat Almaty, Arteta acknowledged as much:

“We took a moment to bring the temperature down, to pause and to reflect and ask two questions. One is: How do we feel? And how do I feel myself? and then how we want to live the next four months?

“And it was so encouraging and beautiful because what came out of that is very simple. We have earned the right to be in a great position in four competitions and in the next four months, we’re going to live and play with enjoyment, with a lot of courage, and with the conviction that we’re going to win it.

“This is going to be the mindset and where we’re going to put the energy and I’m just hoping that everybody that is related to this club, especially our supporters, jump on that boat because this is the way that we’re going to live the next four months because we deserve to live like this.”

And there, Arteta offered an antidote for the toxicity around the club that perhaps the Bene Gesserit wouldn’t be proud of, but would probably solemnly agree with nonetheless: joy. As if he had recited the Litany of Fear himself, the Arsenal manager publicly urged his team this week to let the fear pass over them and through them, and to relish the battles that lay ahead of them. In order to finally overcome their fear, the Gunners must acknowledge the terror in their hearts but not give in to it. They must focus on the glory they could achieve instead of the position they could lose, enjoy standing at the summit even though they can see how high they are above the ground. That is how you render the mind-killing potential of fear ineffective.

Sure, Arsenal could blow it from here. Their title challenge could collapse and they could crash out of all the cups ahead of a summer in which Arteta is hounded out of the club and the club’s best players run off to Real Madrid or Bayern Munich. Maybe then fans could finally rest easy knowing that they aren’t expected to open their hearts up to potential pain by hoping.

But maybe, just maybe, Arsenal could right the ship, fix their attacking issues well enough to start picking up points at a good clip again, and pull off their first Premier League title in 22 years. Maybe they could continue being the outright best team in the Champions League all the way through to a triumphant final appearance. Maybe they could have a successful day out at Wembley or two this season as well. In fact, the betting odds suggest that any of those occurrences are still rather likely. A historic season is still right there for Arsenal if they can shake off the jitters. To me, that’s still worth emotionally investing in.

And to that end, the fans must do their utmost to match this mindset. We cannot claim to be the twelfth man when times are good and then act like we’re not part of the team when the players need to be lifted. We cannot fill stadiums and timelines with anxiety on a weekly basis and expect the team to be unaffected. I’m certainly not advocating for coddling a group of young multi-millionaires, but the atmosphere we have created by allowing ourselves to be influenced by and even at times parrot bad-faith narratives doesn’t help. We must let the fear go and allow our support to remain.

At the end of the day, there is still so much to be excited for, more than there is to fear. Giorge Voutsas said it best on The Cannon Podcast the other day: “We are upset the league is not out of sight in January.” And sure, it could have been. Maybe it should have been. But the fact that being eleven points clear at the top of the Premier League was a remote possibility is something I’m trying to draw encouragement from, not lamentation.

Arsenal are objectively the best team in the Premier League. Players and fans alike should take a moment to remember that, and then act accordingly. Because someone will win if we keep letting fear kill our minds, and it certainly won’t be us.

If you enjoyed this post, please consider following me on Twitter @Shamsdale or on Bluesky @shamsdale.bsky.social.