The instrumentalization of social fear as a practice of state power

When fear or collective panic takes hold of a community, restoring calm and reconnecting with the basics of the social contract becomes a perilous exercise for the power, which can then move forward along several operational implementations. Crisis management is rooted in the mores of the inhabitants, their culture, their ability to support the remedy put in place by the authority. Through the study of some famous historical examples, let us try to understand how the supernatural and fear are treated in this way but also sometimes instrumentalized by struggling powers in search of restoration. 

"Sketchbook Project: Fears 12" by Jen Garcia, licensed under CC BY 2.0

Plague, witchcraft, epidemics, famine ..., throughout history the plagues were numerous and each episode enlightens us on what was the society that crossed them but also on the power in charge of maintaining the social order. Sometimes, historical sources show that more than trying to appease, the exercise of the state has consisted in instrumentalizing the fear of the governed populations. Hobbesian [1] thought goes even further, theorizing government through fear as the natural foundation of law and the state, a state strong enough to extinguish the violence inherent in the state of nature. Hobessian philosophy is more broadly part of a broader philosophy in which emerge the notions of free will, meritocracy, and punishment, in a society where in 1274, the notion of purgatory was endorsed by the Council of Lyon. 

It is the Leviathan on which man must project his cursed part to humanize himself. Mythical figure, monstrously human, he serves as a projection to man. Governing is then partly synonymous with terrorizing those who administer violent death to their fellow human beings and thus even terrorizing them, an idea that can be found in the statements of the French Minister of the Interior in March 1986 [2], after a wave of terrorist violence in Paris. It is through this absolute obedience of all, to the monster, that social peace is maintained. It is the emanation of a current of political philosophy in which fear is often masked behind positive concepts such as social cohesion, cooperation.

Fear then becomes a tool for the use of politics constituting authority, by designating a common enemy in order to put in place security measures for prevention and risk management. Often theorized, authority can also be represented iconographically [3] as in Siena, with the fresco by Lorenzetti [4]. 

As with Montesquieu, Tocqueville or Arendt, we identify a political infrastructure of fear, a bureaucratic apparatus and dedicated institutions [5]. At that time the concepts of good and compliance overlap and merge, the notion of compliance replacing that of good. As a result, the exercise of fear has lasting consequences on the structural organization but also on interpersonal relations. Designating the enemy presupposes two types of use of the phenomenon, according to the practice of power. If the external enemy echoes the horizontality of fear, its verticality keeps the hierarchy of orders in a situation of forced interdependence. In other words, the top of the social pyramid is worried about popular revolts that could deprive him of his powers, while the bottom of the pyramid is worried about the potential punishments put in place from the top of the pyramid. This social tension invites us to raise the question of private property, as needed to initiatives and many incentive schemes in societies,  and public good, as a necessary soil without which private property is immediately meaningless, although yet the tensions from the top to propose scarcity narratives to invite the bottom to privatise out of fear and thus justify their iniquitous richness. 

If the simplified reading of class relations may seem basically Marxist, it is no less true that this hierarchical character permeates socio-economic issues. The balance between the different fears likely to cross society and its populations makes it possible to keep power.  However, when the weaknesses of power are too felt or revolts rumble, the instrumentalization of fear allows the establishment of security mechanisms, violent or not, according to the culture and practices specific to the governed territory. The exercise of power then becomes the search for a balance between silencing the revolt and preventing its spread and maintaining social peace. Popular movements require special treatment consisting in graduating the level of state violence acceptable to society as a whole. The example of the French yellow vests made blind by flashballs has been widely debated within the European authorities and the response of the French authorities sometimes widely contested by EU member countries, horrified by the state violence employed in France [6]. 

Whatever the virulence of the government's response, whatever its nature, the mechanism is the same : identification of an object of which the public must be afraid, interpretation of the nature of the causes and explanation of its dangerousness in order to face it. To prevent fear is to fight against a protean enemy. 

Competition, innovation, survival, these are all concepts fundamental to most social contracts, ans prone to « fear mongering, from the very beginning. Interestingly despite cooperation (as cohesion among people of common or compatible interests), is often logically attributed to situation of scarcity, it is in reality more common in abundance, because durinf scarcity fear divides ans turn people to egoistic shortcuts...

The government is gradually sinking into society of the risk it claims to be fighting. Is there then a good use of fear ? If it is a question of designing a real danger, yes, the use of fear, at the political level as well as at the physiological level, is useful. Fear is useful if one understand fear and strategise coherently with context. If one instrumentalise fear and react whit quick shortcuts avoiding second and third reasoning, it is blinding and bad. The exercise of power through fear becomes a problematic issue is when it is used to maintain a system of structural domination in which a very small part of the population enjoy the pleasures of existence at the expense of the crowd. Fascist and neoconservative regimes have in common the fact that they consider that peace leads to decadence while danger would lead to heroic behavior and therefore to collective euphoria. As a result, one may wonder to what extent fear is chosen or suffered by rulers and to what extent democracy can renounce freedom in favor of security expectations without sacrificing its very essence. Through several case studies, we will see that there are as many possible uses of fear as there are ways to appease it in order to maintain a coherent and governable of the power in place. The necessary hindsight imposed on us by our choice to study past cases allows a serene, non-partisan reading of the cases studied.  

In 1090, an epidemic developed in Dauphiné, in the south of France. Patients develop hallucinatory, convulsive symptoms, and acute burning sensations in the limbs. Soon, all French regions were affected by the sacred fire (ignis sacer). Sick populations are taken care of by the commanderies of Antonines, 200 preceptories and 400 hospitals specialize in the fight against the "fire of the ardent", "the evil of Saint-Antoine". True precursors of public assistance, the Antonines specialize in the management of this disease. From the twelfth century, ergotism caused the death of entire populations. The medieval chronicles, most often written by religious (Flodoard [7], Raoul Glaber [8], Adhémar de Chabannes, Aymar Falco), give concordant descriptions of this evil that gnaws the bodies and detaches the gangrenous limbs.

Once again, iconography plays a preponderant role in the collective imagination, whether it is H.Bosch's famous triptych [9] or Hans von Gersdorff's anatomy textbook [10]. In addition to the disease itself, there was then the hunt for the possessed in order to appease the psychosis and popular anger unleashed by invisible diseases. 

At the turn of the year Mil, the plagues follow one another, (invasions, wars, poor harvests, epidemics), and there is no doubt that the convulsions of the sick sometimes assimilated to cases of diabolical possessions participate in the deleterious latent climate of the end of the world. Sick peoples were seen as sinners suffering God's fire as punishment for previous evil deeds. The "witches" were accused of poisoning the wells, the herds, of casting spells on the crops...  In Europe a whole series of witchcraft trials follow, leading to the stake or the torment of the ordalies by water, fire, bread and cheese... men and women singled out by popular vindictiveness. 

In 1777 Abbé Teissier and Jussieu identified the culprit by studying the cases of gangrene of the Solognots. Beyond the care provided to the sick, soil drainage campaigns are launched that prevent the development of the fungus on cereals and other fodder grasses. Yet these trials did not take place everywhere or on the same scale in all European countries.  The case of Italy and the crisis management of the Benandanti affair is exemplary from this point of view. This agrarian custom, highlighted by C.Ginzburg [11], places the prosperity of the harvests at the center of his concerns. In Friuli, the Benandanti were not condemned to the stake or the ordalies. The local inquisition, unlike the German, Spanish and French authorities, opted instead for sentences of "exile in time", not definitive. The archives of the repression show that the Italian Holy Office did not use torture during interrogations, hence no doubt the voluntary denunciations. However, in France, the Inquisition did not always choose the path of violence to suppress strange phenomena. Thus, on July 14, 1518, a strange affair began in Strasbourg. A woman begins a frantic dance in the streets of the city and does not seem to be able to stop it. If for some the epidemic is the expression of a collective despair [12], a collective psychosis due to the material conditions and the anxieties that the people of Strasbourg then know, others evoke the disease as a cause. The symptoms described by the sources seem to indicate an epidemic of Sydenham's chorea, (better known as the St. Vitus dance). An infectious epidemic spreads in the city, a crazy dance of convulsionaries who are taken care of by the inhabitants of the city but also by the authorities who, after consultation with the doctors of the City Council, chooses to place them out of the city, sending them on pilgrimage to Saverne, from August 1518, considering them, more, and rightly so, as sick than as possessed.  If for the inhabitants it is a case of possessions, for the doctors it is a disease related to the astral conjunction and heat. It was later discovered that in reality the cause is a contagious bacterial infection hence the increase in the number of cases after the city tried to "cure evil with evil" by allowing residents to dance in the market [13] square to "ward off fate". (It was following the exponential spread of the number of cases that the patients were sent to Saverne). At the same time, similar phenomena were witnessed in the Rhine and Meuse valleys, and later, in March 1863, in Madagascar, even if the Ramanenjana study was part of a strong political crisis where the disease could be instrumentalized and used by opponents of the regime in place, to bring it down [14],  the disease ending following the assassination of the prince. From the seventeenth century witchcraft trials stopped in France and witchcraft could no longer be invoked as a cause in court, after the edict of the Parliament of Paris of July 1682. 

The time of the thaumaturge kings then opens, as well in France [15] as in England [16], in Spain [17], in Hungary [18], a way to reaffirm the sacredness of the person of the monarch. Each king chooses his "speciality". The touch of the sick became an institution often accompanied by alms from the monarch to the sick subjects, and whose "slogan" of the king of France was "The king touches you, God heals you", then from 1722, the formula prosaically put in the subjunctive, which considerably diminishes the sacred power of the King. Temporal power and spiritual power found in these manifestations of supernatural qualities, a common cement to combine temporal and spiritual powers. With the Renaissances, the monarchical power gradually became autonomous from the control of the Church. This struggle highlights the place of medicine in societies. A medicine that, much more than being an individual relationship between the caregiver and his patient is above all an expression of power and a sovereign domain reserved for the prince through the public health policies put in place.

In contemporary times, thanks to scientific advances, the rhetoric of "divine punishment" is relegated to the background and preferred by the term "natural calamity". The « divine punishment », for a long time used by the power to maintain its control over the crowd, gradually becomes in the regal rhetoric an argument to be fought, the expression of a part of the population lacking education. The poorest still mentioning this cause as an explanation for the evils are increasingly stigmatized, becoming the echo of an irrationality. The promises of post-Pasteurian microbiology and the implementation of large-scale hygienist policies gave hope until the 1980s that man could control the appearance of new epidemics and/or pandemics... Nevertheless, punctual and very localized epidemics revived the specter of demonic possession over time and gave rise to the wildest hypotheses as in Pont-Esprit in 1951, where a mysterious epidemic began in May. At the end of the war, the heated minds and the material conditions being made difficult, the population blames the baker, then the water of the fountains, then the modern machines to beat, the foreign powers, the bacteriological war, the devil, the pope, the SNCF, the Church and the nationalizations, before the hypothesis of an epidemic of ergotism is suspected. This episode, in the middle of the Cold War, gives rise to rumors and an American journalist, (H. Albarelli) then puts forward the hypothesis that the village of Pont Saint Esprit was sprayed with LSD, (whose hallucinogenic alkaloids are derived from the ergot of rye), by the CIA [19]. All this must be seen in the context of the time when the bacteriological and chemical arms race was an integral part of a deterrent propaganda policy aimed at frightening the enemy, both on the one hand and the other.

The development of scientism gave man hope that he could take control of his environment and ensure his safety in the face of natural disasters through proven measures. The discourse presenting science as a positivism to solve all evils, is now reaching its own limits in the face of threats to humanity. This hope was disappointed, yesterday and still today, with the appearance of HIV, Ebola, SARS-CoV-1, MERS-CoV...  and of course SARS-CoV-2 at the turn of the year 2019-2020. So many epidemics much more linked to our way of life than to any punitive divine intervention, a fight against Nature which pushes us to absurd hypotheses in terms of causality and which should rather force us to rethink our relationship to Nature and to the savage world in order to discard the hypothesis of a vengeful god and return to our own responsibility in climate and environmental issues and the survival of humanity as a link in the chain and no longer as an omnipotent superpower, at the above the rules of the game, because, in the game of Nature, it may well be that our excesses lead us to our own loss and this may be at a shorter date than desired and envisaged. Although individual consciences are awakened and citizens' goodwill is mobilized, this should not make us forget that the discourse concerning individual everyday actions masks a greater responsibility, that of powerful interests causing much more harm to the planet than the daily actions of ordinary citizens. We must face the facts in conscience and understand that given the advanced deterioration of living conditions at the global level, we will no longer save the world by sorting recyclable waste in dedicated bins. As long as, in the name of short-term employment policies, artificial financial stability, the public authorities will not courageously take up the question of the responsibility of the great economic interests, citizen action, however devoted it, unfortunately, can only be a drop of cold water in a saucepan constantly brought to the boil. Much more than thinking of sobriety in the short term, in order to spend the winter warm, it seems that it is a whole model inherited from the glorious Thirty that needs to be rethought quickly. To preserve the great balances, we will have to, as difficult as it may seem, resolve to lower the gas under the pressure cooker before it explodes and sets the whole house on fire. 

Authored by Deborah Liebart, and Marco Manca. Citeable by DOI:10.5281/zenodo.7153119
Licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

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