Fear, that feeling of anguish and despair at the presence of real or imagined danger and threat. Possibly the most recurrent tool of the politicians in the history of humanity has been the fear that they inoculate in the population, the articulation of this tool is a powerful resource of power that allows legitimizing and creating a society with irrational conditions of passivity, submerged in a deep terror. In recent years, emotional aspects of the sciences, such as sociology, history, and economics, have been taken into account, emotions such as joy, frustration and fear have been studied in order to explain different phenomena present in their areas.
Perhaps the most destructive and dangerous feeling that human beings have to deal with, a feeling that has generated catastrophes throughout human history. Individually all human beings suffer and have to deal with our own fears, fear of loneliness, death, spiders, darkness, among other endless fears that are common to any individual. On a macro level, I am referring to society and communities, all of these individual fears are part of a list, which, while small, is broader in the collective sense. Unemployment, insecurity and constant wars are the root cause of the fear of any population in the world on a global scale.
Fear is not a term of mass psychology, but rather of politics. Fear, like hope, has the power to change the attitudes and actions of any citizen in the face of danger, whether real or fictitious. In politics, it is used as an instrument of social control and is well known to those who use it. This instrument leads to the domination of a society as a whole, it is an instrument that legitimizes anyone who has come to power through democratic means and ends up showing his darker side as an autocrat whether he is a dictator or a tyrant. The premise of fear in politics is that in instilling itself in society people must obey every single rule and otherwise they will have to face the consequences.
Fear is not exclusive to tyrannies, in fact, it is part of any power relationship. And that is why it is the politician's best resource because any power relationship in politics requires or involves fear for domination. Hobbes raises this relationship between fear and politics. He stated that:
The intelligence and cunning of the politician consisted in instrumentalizing the fear of the external threat in order to end or exterminate the internal enemy.A clear example of this has always been the Latin American governments that, in order to make use of population control in their nation, create fictitious threats from abroad. Bolivia, Cuba, and Venezuela are a prime example of this. This was also explained by Machiavelli who recommended to the prince to be more feared than loved because fear according to him was inherent in power. And without a doubt Machiavelli was not mistaken, there is no political authority without fear.
If in the past fear was used directly - state vs. rebel - against anyone who did not follow what the system had already established, no matter how unjust it might be, in today's society, soft power prevails over domination through different tools that help spread false and incoherent ideas that inoculate fear in the population. A clear example of this is the fake news, a resource used by many mass media to spread lies and create social repercussions that benefit the interests of that particular media outlet. At present, the aggressor state continues to be an aggressor state, but from a more passive point of view, in which it indirectly attacks anyone who is a threat to its regime, kidnappings, disappearances, extortions, among others resources that are used to inoculate fear and to keep the population in a state of passivity to rebel against to any kind of injustices.
Fear is of vital importance if it is used as a resource for ideological control of a society. The most paradigmatic examples are those represented by any religious institution, more or less dogmatic, that always has in mind the evil par excellence, the future and eternal sufferings that haunt anyone who dares to deviate from the dogmatic practice of the faith. Today, another type of ideological control is more recurrent, with nationalists turning the other into a secular enemy in order to awaken the homicidal anxieties of a nation's people.
The 19th and 20th centuries in Europe saw a multitude of these cases in which the allied country suddenly ceased to be an allied country and became a secular enemy that had to be wiped out in the midst of the most terrible sufferings. What happened in the communist Soviet Union or in Nazi Germany are clear examples where leaders use external sources to create fear and carry out any attempt to redesign ideologies among the population. Even if today's fear techniques are not the same as those of the past, this instrument is very present today and is used by both sectors of the political spectrum, both left and right.
At present, the most obvious case is that of the United States authorities, who have been so obsessed with internal and external security that is always vigilant in the face of the slightest terrorist threat, they use this same argument as an excuse to orchestrate and create wars such as those in Iraq or Afghanistan. The use of terrorist violence against any nation or state that could cause harm to its population is a strategy of the powers, visible and hidden, to maintain a high degree of social control over the population.
In the face of this timeless tool, all that remains is to confront it and fight it through truth and information. This is why movements such as Wikileaks are so far-reaching in exposing all the instruments of fear used by the aggressor state to control our society.
The only way to combat this type of tool is by spreading the truth and creating awareness of what is happening even when we are labeled as truth-fighters, radicals, and illusory, crazy, or conspiratorial. Fear can only be confronted directly, we ourselves must question and corroborate in the streets that what is really happening is so, always taking the trial as the main weapon for this war of information inoculation of fear.
Critical thinking is the most powerful weapon that we citizens have to face the lies of politicians, it is therefore so feared by them that it is not taught in schools by their main indoctrination institutions. The moment when we are all aware of the true intentions of politicians through fear and the false threats they foment, the government will go through a reform where those parasites that feed on the wealth of the state through taxes are eliminated and the fear of their true intentions is inoculated.
Notes:
- Fear: The Foundation of Every Government’s Power
- The Leviathan - Thomas Hobbes
- The Prince - Machiavelli
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