safetypee,
This may be slight thread drift but if I may continue with your theme.
I grew up in an era when the phrase 'risk assessment' was not used. We talked about and implemented 'safety'. 'Process' was what was applied to some cheese and meat. We used judgement, common sense, experience. We had a sense of self preservation. We developed 'Airmanship'. Now, we blindly follow process and regulation. The format of a risk assessment and the process of its generation is often more important than its content, and if the overall assessment is 'low' then everyone is happy because nothing will go wrong. I cannot in my heart of hearts operate like that. I still have hairs on the back of my neck which, from time to time, stand up when I am confronted with a situation that is 'legal'; perhaps that is the fearfulness to which you refer. Without it, I may not still be here. I sometimes face difficulties when I refuse to do something that is 'within the regulations' because I consider it to be the wrong thing to do and potentially unsafe. Recently I have been asked to consider undertaking two different flying activities, both of which my judgement told me had risks that I was not prepared to take; I had a fear of those tasks but I am certainly not scared of flying. I convinced the sponsors of these tasks that they were not sensible. In a recent anonymous flight safety survey there was a question asking what I thought would be the cause of our next accident. I said not applying judgement and just blindly following regulations and process; could that be better phrased as a lack of fear? It is an interesting and valuable interpretation of this word that safetypee has given us.