Love, hate, anger and sadness. All of these are very powerful emotions, they can make you do things before you can even wrap your mind about what it even is you are doing. The most powerful emotion, however, is fear. Fear, by definition, is a very unpleasant or disturbing feeling caused by the presence or imminence of danger. Some might even say that fear is the enemy of reason. All throughout history, we can see many situations in which fear was actually used as a tool to get one’s way. For example, this form of manipulation was used abundantly during World War II, mainly in the shape of propaganda.
Culture of fear is the concept that people may incite fear in general public to achieve political goals through emotional bias. Therefore it is not strange that this culture of fear is often related to extremism. Through political ads, news, social media (and the internet in general), we are continuously being bombed with warnings. ‘Watch out for global warming!’ ‘Immigrants will take over our jobs if we don’t do something now!’. Television and film are filmed with extreme violence and tons of fictional threats. This constant fear may cause people to do things without thinking them through. Simply because the image of having to watch out every second of the day has been implanted in the back of their minds. We often fear the wrong things, and most of the time incredibly out of proportion. Statistics show we have a much higher chance of being killed by lightning than by terrorism.
Fear is one of the most powerful tools in politics. Through fear, the leaders of a country can keep an entire population under their thumbs. A perfect example of a regime that uses this tool is the one in Iran during the Iran/Iraq war a couple decades ago. The Islamic regime that gained power took countless men and women into captivity, where they were tortured and killed, the minute they did something that wasn’t entirely in line with the rules of the regime. In the graphic novel ‘Persepolis’ by Marjane Satrapi, we get an in-depth view of Satrapi’s youth in Iran during the war. The novel shows perfectly how the Iranians were so scared of being arrested by the police that they did many things that were completely the opposite of their morales. Women were forced to wear scarves and if they refused they would be horribly punished. The regime scared the Iranians so much to the point where women were too busy worrying about the length of their skirts, the amount of makeup they were wearing and if they wore their scarves correctly, to question the leaders of the regime. Marji was also very scared, even as a little girl she says: ‘I thought my father was dead. That they had shot him.’ Living under the regime, Marji gets scared simply when her father is late coming home from work. In Iran, he might not be late because of the amount of work he had to finish, or because of a traffic jam’he might be late because he's dead, shot in the streets by soldiers of the regime. You can imagine the kind of effect that must have had on an 8-year old.
After the 11th of september 2001 in the United States of America, fear for terrorism has been forthcoming tremendously. Fear for terrorism automatically brought a great fear of immigrants with it. The most obvious example I could give would be the Republican candidate for the presidential elections of 2016, mr. Donald Trump. One might say that Donald Trump is the king of fear, using it to get his way in pretty much every single situation. After all, immigrants are the scum of the nation, are all ‘possible terrorists’ and should be banned to ‘Make America Great Again’, at least, according to Trump. Like I mentioned before, the chances of being killed by lightning are way bigger than those of being killed by terrorists. Then why are the Americans so scared of these ‘possible terrorists’? Is it because everything that they are not familiar with is scary? Is it because they might take their jobs? Or is it just this culture of fear used in politics to scare people into voting for their ‘saviours’?
At first face, the situations in Iran and the USA might not seem to have so much in common. The reality, however, is that fear plays a major part in both countries. Both Iranians and Americans live in a constant fear that something might happen. Of course, there are differences in the kind of ‘something’ that might happen (because frankly, most Americans do not have to fear for a bomb dropping on their houses in everyday situations), but that doesn’t really diminish the influence the fear has. After all, fear is a universally acknowledged emotion and it can majorly influence human behaviour.
In conclusion, we must not underestimate the effect fear can have in politics. By creating an atmosphere in which fear is constantly present, political leaders can manipulate people into worrying about things that they shouldn’t even be worrying about. This fear is often disproportional, and not representative for the actual threat. Iranians under the Islamic regime did have something concrete to be afraid of, and this fear ultimately led to them not questioning the actual regime. Therefore, fear is the most powerful tool in politics.