Text is below the video.
It is for good reason that we humans have an inborn capacity to experience fear. The evolutionary process would not have instilled into our organism the capacity for fear unless having that capacity helped our ancestors survived. (Those who lacked it would fail to take the necessary action to escape danger.)
But the way human civilization has evolved, there have long been powers that have used fear to manipulate people into doing what they wanted them to do, even when it is against the people’s own interests. How a leader/power deals with his people around the issue of fear tells us what kind of leader/power it is.
• You can tell a leader is bad if he cultivates fear in his following that doesn’t help them do what they have to do to meet their own needs.
• You can tell a leader is especially bad if he misdirects people’s fears toward the wrong things—toward things that don’t really pose a danger, and away from things that are really harming them. (And the things that are really harming them are often the leaders using lies to get the people to mobilize against the wrong “enemies.”)
It is a hallmark of fascist leaders that they use fear in these ways.
The kinship between fascism and “Evil” (defined as “a coherent force that consistently makes things worse”) can be seen in the fact that this cultivation and misdirection of fear degrades the quality of life of the people, and strengthens a power that doesn’t care about their well-being. And can be seen in how continually it uses lies to detach people from the realities they need to understand for their own well-being.
When W was President, I contrasted how W dealt with the dangers shown by 9/11 with how FDR dealt with fear when the United States faced much greater dangers in World War II.
W used his “war on terror” to keep people afraid, even though there was nothing the people could do with their fear (except have their human intelligence degraded as one of the known effects of fear). And even though that danger was manageable.
FDR, and Churchill in the UK, called their peoples away from fear and made them brave.
Now America is witnessing a leader who exemplifies what a major tool FEAR is for fascist powers.
Donald Trump has said that power is about fear – he really said that – and he is showing abundantly that this is at the heart of his leadership.
- He cultivates fear in his followers: “American carnage,” they’re sending rapists, the immigrants are eating your pets.
- And he uses fear to control other major actors on the American scene: •
- He has made the Republicans in Congress his slaves, keeping them in line with the threat that he will drive them out of office, or even get those of his followers who are of the “brown-shirt” sort to attack them or their families with physical violence.
- He has intimidated corporate people who fear that Trump will abuse his powers as President to punish them if they don’t bow to him. (Bezos, Zuckerberg, etc.)
- He has intimidated many in the media by – once again – threatening to punish those who are insufficiently subservient. (Like kicking the AP out of the press pool because it wouldn’t adopt Trump’s “Gulf of America” nonsense to rename the Gulf of Mexico. Like saying, in his speech at the Department of Justice, that networks like CNN have acted “illegally,” without naming any law they violated.
- He has intimidated law enforcement by singling out those prosecutors who worked in the cases against Trump for investigation and possible prosecution.
This is how fascist dictators operate. They manipulate those they cannot attack generally (the people) and they intimidate those they can control by coercion.
Eventually, of course, in fascism, the whole people know that they might be disappeared by some equivalent of the Gestapo if they criticize the Great Leader.
(In Russia, the people have learned to keep quiet with their opposition to Putin’s war against Ukraine, because they’ve seen – at the beginning of the conflict – that critics get sentenced to 15 years in jail. And critics of Putin’s whole fascist regime – like Navalny, and before him Boris Nemtsov – get killed one way or another.)