I turn to classics to decode the present. Daniel Defoe’s novel Robinson Crusoe (1719) is one such. It recounts the experiences of a shipwrecked sailor, Robinson. Stranded on an island where he is its lone inhabitant, he feels safe and at home, until he chances upon a human footprint on the shore. Insecurity overwhelms him at once. The ‘threat perception’ colours and controls his awareness and actions. He goes to irrational extremes to ‘defend’ himself against unknown dangers; and dismantles some of the facilities he had created for his welfare. He fortifies himself against he knows not what, and, ironically, makes his house difficult to access even for himself.
A strategic use of fear holds immense scope for manipulating public sentiments and directing individual choices. It is nearly infinite in democratic politics, where it yields astronomical dividends. All the more so when ‘ease’ becomes the operative consideration at all levels of life: from copying in examinations to excluding optimum VVPAT verification of EVM data on the alibi that it is time-consuming. The influence of fear will be less decisive in a way of life inured to hardships.
It has become second nature to opposition parties in India to bark up the wrong tree. The BJP does not need the charity of EVMs or election commissioners to be an invincible election-winning, opposition-crushing juggernaut. The opposition parties do no help their cause by harbouring this notion. Their second self-paralysing misconception is that the BJP is beating them down with the sledge-hammer of hyper-nationalism.
This is facetious. Historically, nationalism, which sustained our struggle for freedom from the British yoke, is the patrimony of the Indian National Congress. The trump card the BJP is playing is not nationalism per se, but the psychology of insecurity-breeding otherness for which nationalism is used as the catalyst. This is poignantly ironic. A century ago, the Congress used nationalism to render India British-mukt. Today the BJP is using a different brand of nationalism to make India Congress-mukt! The Congress, on its part, refuses to read what is bludgeoning it!
So, we return to Robinson Crusoe.
Defoe’s insight is that the tribal instinct lurks below the surface of civilized psyche. Civilization, as Will Durant documents, involves a transcendence of the tribal way of life in which tribe-against-tribe was the norm. This is reflected in Hobbes’ idea of life in nature as ‘every man against his neighbour’. The state emerges as the guarantor of individual and collective security. The tribal element lurks in our psyche below the level of consciousness. It stays there like subterranean ‘black gold’, waiting to be extracted by those who have the means and the enterprise. Two strategies are used for this purpose.
The first involves manipulation of the external environment — especially public opinion — using ideologically charged triggers in the form of wounded historical memories. It is quite easy, for example, to pit against each other two communities living in peace and amity for decades by sowing seeds of mutual suspicion. Suspicion activates alienation; and alienation breeds fear. In this, the role of the media can be vital or fatal to democracy. Principled journalism is predicated on truth. Truth is to fear what light is to darkness. Truth fortifies citizens; untruth weakens and nudges them towards collective paranoia. Obsession with security is a sign of collective disarray; not of courage or social health.
The second strategy is subtler; and it is directed towards the psychic environment — the domain of feelings, prejudices and responses of individuals. Once a prejudice is infused, it remains in the subconscious as a control-box of reality. Everything is thereafter dictated and distorted by it. Instances are reported, for example, from the US of white parents, who have blacks in the neighbourhood, beginning to feel insecure when baby girls are born to them. “When a daughter was born to me,” writes a contemporary American psychologist, “I began to feel that the local community is dangerous and that we needed to shift to a safer area.” There was no change in the crime graph. Only an inner stereotype got activated.
What makes this dangerous is that most individuals are unaware of these psychic forces at play. They mistake subjective anxieties for objective realities; all the more so when a threat to security is hyped up by the media and state agencies. Freedom of will, writes Nietzsche in Human, All Too Human, is a figment of human vanity. The idea that we examine, process and interpret external information correctly and act according to rational principles is, insists Nietzsche, a naive myth. Our conscious, intentional control over our responses is alarmingly limited. We are vulnerable! This is nothing new. Behaviourist psychology from the time of Skinner and Watson has maintained that behaviour is, for the most part, outside ‘conscious’ individual control.
We carry ‘fear centres’ in our brain. Research studies have proved that conservatives have comparatively larger fear centres. They are apt to be more obsessed with security than liberals. Fear makes us flee. The direction of its pull is diametrically opposite to that of development. So, it is either fear or development. The two can never go together. Fear is regressive. It is implanted in public consciousness best by playing up ‘security’. Hyping up security aggravates insecurity and activates fear. Once fear infects the public sphere, citizens become habituated to inventing dangers that do not exist. No choice made under the influence of fear can be free or fair. Such choices are not ‘personal’. An insecurity-obsessed individual doesn’t choose for himself; he endorses predetermined choices. His freedom of choice is illusory.
This reality is smoke-screened with popular passions, with hero-worship as its nucleus, aided and abetted by partisan media, which, in turn, is fed with event-triggers as grist to the mill. The resultant potent mix readily anaesthetizes citizens to their predicament. It is an exciting prospect for ruling elites all over the world as it deflects attention from good governance. This is the open secret of the ease of doing democracy; and it is not unique to the BJP.