Patricia Mukhim
Machiavelli once said, “If you cannot rule through love – do so with fear.” Indeed, fear is an old and brilliant tactic to get people to bend to your will. But there are many different types of fear you can instil in people to help you strike fear in others. Some people strike fear with their physical build and their muscles. They are easier to tackle than the ones that use psychological methods to manipulate our minds and our ability to think and judge coherently. Politicians across all parties and persuasions have understood the power of fear-mongering. First they create doubts and uncertainties. They profess to care for the people they wish to manipulate. They will even shed tears to convince people that they are genuinely concerned. Politicians have studied the situation so well they know exactly what our insecurities are. In Meghalaya a sure-shot winner is to paint the picture of the enemy as someone who is an outsider (meaning a non-Khasi but more specifically a non-tribal). This “outsider” is waiting to pounce on our land, our women, our businesses, our minerals, our forests, our markets, and is also spreading HIV-AIDS, even while we watch in shock and horror at this act of avaricious exploitation. And yes, we are so simple that there is nothing we can do to protect ourselves and our economic resources. Hence we need leaders to protect us! They are the subconscious anchors we think we need and without whom we are doomed.
A politician (self-appointed leader) who uses fear as a tactic of control usually turns the majority against one person or persons who challenge his authority. So whoever he dislikes and cannot control also becomes the enemy/enemies of those whose minds the politician cleverly manipulates. Indirectly or passive aggressively such a leader tells the people whose emotions he controls that they should side with him more often or risk facing social alienation and isolation. This is a tool to bend others to his will. And people in general are so afraid of social isolation that they have to simply agree with the leader. That’s actually how popularity is gained.
While some of these imagined fears are of our own making such as the fear of losing out if we have to compete with the non-tribal for he/she is ingenious (which means we have already given up competing with this person because we have painted the image of failure in our minds). There are many such narratives created by those in positions of power. Individuals looking to take advantage of, and manipulate others, have long realized the power of fear. When one is gripped by fear of a threat, real or imagined, their rational and higher cognitive capacities shut down, making them easier to manipulate, particularly if that saviour promises safety from the threat.
It was Edmund Burke who said, “No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear does.” Oppressive governments often maintain their grip on a nation by continually invoking fear, and then proceeding to claim that only they, the ruling powers, have the means and ability to protect the population from such a threat: HL Mencken once wrote, “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.” Let me also quote John Adams, one of the founding fathers of America to buttress my arguments. Adams said, “Fear is the foundation of most governments”.
While there are numerous tactics and strategies that have developed over the centuries to effectively exploit the public through fear, two of the more powerful and efficient ones are the use of false flags, – such as putting up black flags as the Display Picture (DP) on social media (Facebook, WhatsApp etc) and the invention of and implementation of propaganda via repetition. The flag is such a copycat action that you only have to have some imagined crises to see such flags as DPs on the Facebook accounts of those who are brainwashed to do so and who are unlikely to question the reason/s why they do what they do. This is actually a covert operation started by one agent provocateur (generally a person with a huge political appetite) which is designed to deceive in such a way that the operations appear as though they are being carried out by entities and groups that think alike and not by those who actually planned and executed them. In his book, ‘Feardom,’ Conor Boyack provides a nice explanation on the effectiveness of false flags for those looking to institute social, political and psychological control.
The more I read and analyse the events of recent times the more I am convinced that hard core politicians who are now unsure of returning to power and wannabe politicians who wish to catapult to power both use these fear-mongering tactics. They detest people who question and conveniently term them as ‘enemies.’ In our own case anyone who dissents, questions, seeks explanations is termed as, “nongshet kylla” (traitor). The traitor then becomes a soft target of abuse on social media and in public meetings where people are never allowed to raise questions. To the rational mind it’s difficult to comprehend how people are so easily misled by such propaganda but research on human cognition and the psychology of risk perception offers several explanations for why these campaigns work.
Research in human cognition has established that most of what the brain does that turns into our judgments and behaviours happens subconsciously and is based as much as or more on emotion and instinct than on cold hard logic. And the primary instinct is that of survival. The brain’s chief purpose, from the moment we get out of bed in the morning, is to get us safely to bed at night, not to get good grades or win Nobel prizes, say David Ropeik in BigThink.
Hence we humans are hardwired to constantly be on the lookout for signs of danger. And cognition research has found that we are quick to judge those signs. We don’t take the time to get all the facts and think things through. We use a number of mental shortcuts to rapidly turn a few initial hints into snap judgments about whether something feels risky. One of those shortcuts is called “the availability heuristic.” The more available something is to our consciousness – the more aware of it we are – the more emotional weight it is likely to carry.
Going to social media sites created by different groups all driven by paranoia and jingoism one sees one and only one fear – that the Khasi race would soon be obliterated from this land and be taken over by the “outsider” or by those who collude with that outsider. It’s almost as if there is a deliberate design to paint women as the betrayer; but then not all women are put in that category. Some who are considered ‘pure Khasi’ in their genealogy because their parents are seemingly Khasi and they have married Khasi men, are embraced and enlisted to fight the good fight for that cause which is the FEAR that we would be reduced to a dangerous minority in Meghalaya – our only hearth and home. If a reputed social anthropologist were to be asked to research on why some races become endangered they might give us completely different reasons for why that happens. But then why rely on research and empirical evidence? Once research challenges assumptions, the ability to create fear will dissipate, then where will our fear-mongering politicians hide?
While it is a fact that a large majority of Khasi people today are becoming poorer (Socio-economic caste census 2011) a few have also become affluent; that this majority finds it increasingly difficult to pay their bills and to find a decent livelihood is a stark reality. It becomes even starker when someone in the family falls ill. That’s when families can go bankrupt, insurance notwithstanding. There is amongst many a sense of powerlessness. One comes to grips with that that feeling especially when talking to people in the slums of Shillong and in some of the poorer villages. And one of the responses to that threatening sense of powerlessness is to turn to the tribe. Humans are social animals. We instinctively depend on each other for safety and protection. The more threatened we feel as individuals, the more we look to our tribe to provide a sense of power and control that we have in a group but lack as individuals. And one of the ways we turn to our tribe for protection is by adopting and espousing the tribe’s beliefs, so the others in the tribe consider us as members in good standing.
That’s why many don’t wish to take a stand and be isolated. Right or wrong they stand with the current ‘tribal’ viewpoint even if in their solitary moments they feel that the ideals espoused by the tribe leader might have adverse consequences in the long run. Indeed, we are caught in a trap of fear. And knee-jerk reaction to this fear is taking away our potential to move towards the path of positive progress because politicians don’t want us to be an empowered citizenry. Period!