85 years ago, a message about the state of Franklin D. Roosevelt of January 6, 1941, included “four freedoms” to the U.S. Congress, which were to be available to all inhabitants of the planet in the fresh postwar order: freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from poorness and freedom from fear. These glorious demands were included in the Atlantic Charter and, after the war, in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
The focus on freedom from fear was undoubtedly connected with the cruel experiences of the 2 totalitarianisms of the 3rd Reich and the Stalinist russian Union. It was in them that fear was utilized for maximum social control, which was not known on specified a scale in erstwhile history. Of course, no 1 at the time expected that the second half of the 20th century would bring further experiments in the form of the insane “cultural revolution” in Maoist China or the genocidal practices of the Red Khmers in Cambodia.
In all totalitarian regimes, the extended physical compulsion and propaganda machines have subjected the population to specified suffering and torment that life in fear has become worse than the failure of all another freedoms. Opposition to the government was virtually eliminated either by public panic or by ubiquitous fear of possible repression (concentration camps, gulags, messengers, katorgi). The opponents were branded as enemies of the state and the people, and the surveillance strategy and the network of informants imposed the utmost caution against the tipping. The sadistic cruelty of the apparatus of coercion became a symbol of the “age of evil”.
Although the age of criminal totalitarian regimes has ended (beyond North Korea, Eritrea or Turkmenistan), there are inactive many authoritarian regimes, starting with China, in which fear combined with the usage of various method means is the basis of effective governments. In fresh decades, however, uncertainty and the hazard of wellness and life failure has increased greatly due to various forms of force and non-state violence, “ creeping” conflicts, terrorist acts, cyber attacks, pandemics, infodemics, discrimination, natural and ecological disasters. This causes people to fear for themselves and their loved ones. Social anxiety in addition is heated by inept and cowardly governments, which the ability to rationally manage crises has replaced with cynical manipulation of fear.
Notabene, Roosevelt is credited with saying that “the only thing we should be afraid of is fear.” The paradoxical phenomenon of "feariness" (fear of fear) has reached unprecedented sizes. It may be real or imaginary. It is simply a intellectual reaction (individual and group) and an emotional form of escape from harm, pain, enslavement, annihilation, defeat, cruelty, torture, and most importantly, death itself. People feel fear not so much due to his past experience, but due to the anticipation and anticipation of negative feelings in the future. Referring to the past gives emergence to vigilance for uncertain futures.
Fear and accompanying emotions are a mechanics of endurance that protects people from danger. The proximity of something dangerous, unexpected, and unknown, lurking behind the wall creates individual and social emotions that are inherent in human experience. This means a psychophysical consequence to a perceived threat, whose physiological effects are expressed in the acceleration of heart rate and increased vigilance. In history, this has been crucial to the endurance of the species. Human past is full of metaphysical fears, frequently expressed in expectations at the end of the world, hell or apocalypse. spiritual beliefs have played a crucial function in this regard, referring to God’s wrath or divine punishment.
The ancient Greeks personified fear as 2 distinct forces – Deimos (fear) and Fobos (panic). They gave complexity to the phenomenon, treated as weapons, but besides an crucial motivation to deter opponents. Fear served as regulatory and hierarchical. Above all, fear of the gods bound the community through worship, ritual sacrifices, and rites. due to the universality of wars, he was a mobilizing man. Physical fear of dying on the battlefield was accompanied by encouragement to courage in honor and victory.
Fear is simply a political phenomenon
Politicians usage him to influence public opinion and to gain power. The discovery of the 17th century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes is inactive up to date that people, fleeing the permanent state of war – chaos, destruction, death – are ready to obey the all-powerful sovereign, giving their rights for the price of peace and order. Sovereign power in the state uses fear as a condition for consenting to it itself. Fear of coercion by the state, both in democratic and authoritarian systems, ensures obedience and submission. So it is simply a kind of currency: for the price of safety you must pay obedience.
The treatment of fear as “management technology” is reflected in various strategical concepts relating to both war and peace. During the war, citizens require loyalty, resilience, courage and readiness to sacrifice, including the sacrifice of the highest, i.e. life. Thanks to these qualities, defenders are appreciated and worshipped due to the fact that they defy fear of defeat or annihilation by the enemy. In peacetime, citizens are required to be vigilant and industrious in order to safe the material possible of the state and to keep social order as a warrant of the state of possession.
Known in the techniques of political manipulation, fear plays a destructive role, as well as organizing social order. It may be a means of control on the 1 hand, and on the another hand a means of maintaining or questioning power. knowing all kinds of fear, fear, panic, fear, anxiety, despair, despair, trauma, hysteria, horror, or macabre helps in the search for a certain antidote to increase people's resilience and ability to counteract.
Using these observations, the state authorities are constantly utilizing various means of intimidation, informing citizens about the impending war, about the next wave of immigrants, about the saboteurs of known origin, about the increasing utmost right, populists, fascists, etc. We are witnessing the increasing insolence of state authorities, granting themselves the right to authoritative, yet subjective and frequently erroneous definition of existential threats, in order to trigger certain social consequences. Mobilization during the coronavirus pandemic has mercilessly exposed these mechanisms.
Demonisation of Russia
For at least a fewer years now, the demonization of Russia and its president has been taking place, as the main perpetrators of evil, helping to terrorize public awareness. No 1 should uncertainty the “esthetic spectrum of fear” associated with aggressiveness, imperialism, horror or brutality. People are told to approach the states associated with the top disasters of force and repression. This is served by appropriate rhetoric about the "hybrid wars" or "pre-war" already in progress. Those who keep common sense and call for restraint are condemned by the majority.
In this context, everyone can ask themselves whether the rulers truly have in head the protection of citizens, or whether they can usage social unrest and fears to seize as much power as possible to avoid any work for their mistakes and abuses now and in the future. How, then, can we respond to the situation erstwhile fear becomes omnipresent and begins to violate human and civilian rights and freedoms? What if there is increasing distrust, uncertainty, and the hazard of existential threats, including through legal authorities, in a period of peace? In specified situations, do people have the right to declare obedience to “the all-powerful sovereign”? How can they do so if the “publishing hand of justice” allows power to function even erstwhile it is alienated and detached from the interests of society and the state?
The realistic conceptualisation of the strategy of global relations is based on the inevitable and widespread occurrence of a "security dilemma". In anarchical, or devoid of a central centre of power and at the same time a polyarchical, multi-powerful global environment, fear of any is simply a constant, immanent feature of this sphere of reality. Any state, seeking to increase its safety through reinforcement, necessarily gives emergence to fear in another states which are incapable to identify whether the reinforcements are offensive or defensive.
Under these circumstances, a ‘wrong wheel’ is produced. On the another hand, a organization that increases its defence defence defences responds in the form of escalation of its own arms. As a result, everyone works in accordance with rational defence logic, but with the other effect, i.e. reducing common security. In another words, the efforts of countries to strengthen their safety are causing concern in another countries, leading to expanding uncertainty, expanding competition and escalation of the hazard of war.
Misreading Reality
A safety dilemma would only be a simple interpretational construct of the behaviour of states, if it were not for its paradoxical dimension, related to misreading motives, intentions, interests and capabilities of another states. This paradox has late emerged seemingly in the case of Russian aggression in Ukraine. Western countries, supporting Ukraine for many years and preparing it for a direct confrontation with Russia, could not have foreseen a dangerous Russian reaction. According to the above-mentioned concept of a safety dilemma, it was very likely, and even certain countermeasures, of Moscow, including the usage of force.
The impossibility of escaping from the safety dilemma is besides revealed in the ongoing shift of liberal reasoning to war tracks. In the face of rivalry with Russia and China, the European Union, alternatively of mitigating its ideals of conflict in global relations, focuses on the escalation of armaments, greatly contributing to expanding uncertainty and fueling fear. Against the background of the Ukrainian conflict, all pseudotheories about the peaceful intentions of democratic states are devalued, and politicians, with their incitement to war, uncover the actual face of the selfish interests of states and large arms companies.
A fresh dimension of fear is given by modern “liquid modernity” (Zygmunt Bauman). The origin of fear is no longer just specific, identified threats, but scattered, unspecified uncertainty. Fear has become a means of political calculation, methodical and cynical usage of various opportunities for introducing emergency safety measures. With this approach, in a sense, Michel Foucault's thought that modern states, alternatively of utilizing open physical coercion, scope for subtle and sophisticated mechanisms for shaping collective behavior, through education, values, standards, statistic and others.
The September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on facilities in fresh York City and Washington became an excuse for the alleged war on terrorism, for the attack on Afghanistan and Iraq. utmost safety measures were introduced in the US (insulation of suspects in Guantanamo, secret torture program, mass surveillance, abandonment of trial rights for suspects, discrimination against Muslims in immigration and others) which, at social consent, caused by panic, became the norm. Fear was turned into population management technology.
The concept of "securitisation" developed in Copenhagen School in the 1990s (Barry Buzan, Ole Waever, Jaap de Wilde) is known in global relations. According to this approach, safety threats are not nonsubjective fact, but are socially constructed by acts of speech in the process of public discourse. The top political actors, especially the ruling, have mastered the art of defining existential threats to society as a whole. By building a demonic enemy (as external as internal), attention is directed not so much to the existence of danger as to fuel the panic moods of fear. They let rulers to adopt extraordinary measures frequently without the regulation of law and democratic political culture.
Fear Manipulation
According to the concept of “securitisation”, the rulers in Poland have successfully mastered the art of manipulating fear. They convince the public that fear is typical of authoritarian systems, in which a repressive state and autocratic (dictator) power uses force (terror) to subjugate citizens. But democracy in their knowing protects people from all evil. In fact, modern democracies are oligarchised and they are mistrusting their legitimacy, based on the participation of citizens in creating authorities and influencing political decisions. Elections to typical bodies became a fiction due to the fact that they do not supply a real free play of political forces or the alternation of power. By means of various techniques of public manipulation, it is possible to control their conduct so that the election consequence corresponds to the interests of oligarchy, centered around 2 poles, demonstrably fighting each other, but in fact guarding the same arrangement.
The oligarchic power manipulates fear toward the subordinates, but itself ceases to fear its work from the electorate. Even erstwhile there are any adjustments to the political representation of society as a consequence of subsequent elections, there is mostly no chance of a democratic exchange of ruling elites. They are petrified and reproduced in a closed circle. In the event of an outbreak of any form of opposition, rebellion or civilian disobedience, the authorities in modern democracies have a strong and efficient apparatus of coercion that they can effectively pacify them.
Fear has become a useful political resource. It allows power to take offensive action, without asking voters for approval or acceptance, for example in matters of spending on the reinforcement and militarization of public life. The peculiarity became the "reflexion of muscles" of European political leaders in defence of Ukraine, whose political government is full of various ideological and corruptive pathologies. How it happens that the liberal institutionalism of the European Union has made its leaders immune to the fear of Russia's aggression, and does not let them to see the dangers of Ukraine itself, entangled in racist and nationalistic pulpit. due to specified conditions, it is worth considering whether the state should besides be regarded artificially as “friendly” and “friendly” whose future is uncertain and the cost of surviving is unbearable.
Governance
Western organization states have learned to fight all those who do not agree with the hegemonic order imposed by the Euro-Atlantic Agreement. Stigmatising anyone who opposes Western hegemony allows to exclude unruly participants, endowed with epithets of "slaughter", "pariahs" or "eights of evil" from the global community. In this way, the artificially created fear by Iran, Iraq, Libya or Syria gave emergence to direct coercion in the form of armed intervention. In the U.S. strategy, nothing changes in this respect, as evidenced by the attacks against Venezuela.
An opponent of legal authorities in Western countries is alleged identity fear, created by opposition groups, referring to the sources of sovereignty, traditionalism and the defence of well-being threatened by strangers. We are dealing with a conflict of values that threatens democracy itself. Each organization to the confrontation is resorting to seeking a “scapegoat”, i.e. indicating a peculiar institution (also a abroad state), an event, an ethnic, racial or political group, as the first origin of the increasing problems. The search for a “scapegoat” fuels anger, fear and discrimination, giving the accusers the comfort of superiority or dominance. all epoch has its “scapegoats”, upon which work is laid for all the calamities whose primary perpetrators are the rulers.
Clearly, fear makes people more susceptible to persuasion, manipulation, agitation, and propaganda. Emotionally motivated messages stimulate people and give energy to the masses. The politicians of all ideological orientations know this, so they usage fear as a means of processing information, shaping attitudes and behaviour, and influencing election decisions. Enthusiasm caused by social mobilization, however, can have disastrous consequences in perpetuating various fanaticisms, dogmatizing attitudes or promoting "uncritical citizenship".
For all these reasons, fear is not an anomaly, but a permanent and inherent part of social life. This is not just an emotion that can be overcome with rational reasoning. It is simply a combination of complex intellectual and physiological experiences that find the mechanisms of endurance of people in situations of danger. The paradox is that the more assured a man feels, the more afraid he is. He realizes that there is no "absolute security, but different degrees of uncertainty" (Salman Rushdie).
Prof. Stanisław Bielen
Think Poland, No. 1-2 (4-11.12.2025)
