Fear, Power, and the Responsibility of Citizens

Rahul Ramya

06th September 2025

Unless we learn to see beyond ourselves, we cannot change politics for the better. No leader is absolutely good or bad in a general sense. It is our surrender to leaders, and our embrace of the politics of hoarding and hatred, that emboldens them to act beyond their mandate.

When citizens surrender their independent judgment and allow leaders to embody their fears or resentments, they create conditions where politics thrives on division rather than inclusion. Donald Trump rose in the United States not only because of his charisma or promises, but because millions of Americans projected their anger at globalization, immigration, and cultural change onto him. His politics of resentment worked because people accepted simple answers over complex realities.

In Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly drawn strength from the insecurities of citizens who fear for their survival. By framing politics as a constant battle of “us versus them,” he has been able to expand his authority beyond what a divided society might otherwise tolerate. The people’s anxieties provide him the mandate, not just his policies.

India under Narendra Modi shows another dimension. Modi’s appeal rests on projecting pride, strength, and cultural identity. While these can be unifying at times, the uncritical surrender of citizens to his persona has also made space for polarizing politics, where dissent can easily be dismissed as disloyalty. In this sense, the leader is less the cause and more the mirror of collective desires and fears.

Vladimir Putin exemplifies this dynamic most starkly. Russian politics thrives not just on his authoritarian grip, but also on the deep yearning among many Russians for stability, power, and national pride after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Their surrender of skepticism and embrace of strongman politics has allowed Putin to consolidate authority beyond democratic limits.

The lesson is clear: leaders rarely act alone. It is our surrender, our willingness to trade freedom for comfort or pride, and our indulgence in hoarding and hating, that enables them to stretch their power beyond the rightful mandate. Changing politics for good reasons demands that we first change ourselves—by resisting easy hatred, by refusing blind surrender, and by reclaiming politics as a space of shared responsibility rather than a battlefield of resentments.

Fear and the Architecture of Power

Fear does not arise from the one who threatens; it arises from our willingness to be afraid. Leaders appear powerful not because they hold power intrinsically, but because we surrender ours. Every time people yield to fear, they drain their own strength and channel it into the figure they fear. The illusion of power is born from this transfer.

The Manufacture of Crises: How Leaders Create the Problems They Claim to Solve

A common critique of analyzing authoritarian appeal suggests that leaders like Trump, Modi, and Putin merely respond to genuine structural challenges—that their rise reflects legitimate grievances about immigration, economic decline, or security threats. This view, while seemingly sophisticated, fundamentally misunderstands how modern authoritarianism operates. These leaders do not inherit crises; they manufacture them.

The Myth of Pre-existing Dilemmas

Consider the evidence behind the "crises" that supposedly drove these leaders to power. In America, multiple economic studies demonstrate that immigration creates net job growth and economic benefits. Before Trump's rise, there was no data showing immigrants were "eating locals' jobs." The American economy had recovered from the 2008 recession, unemployment was declining, and GDP growth was steady. Trump took existing anxieties about automation and deindustrialization—real issues requiring complex solutions—and redirected them toward scapegoats rather than addressing root causes.

Similarly, Modi's appeal was not built on inheriting economic disaster. India had experienced significant growth following the 1991 liberalization, with GDP averaging 7-8% growth in the 2000s under Congress governments. Poverty was declining, the middle class was expanding, and India was integrating into global markets. Modi inherited a growing economy and rebranded existing trends as his personal achievements, while implementing policies like demonetization that actually harmed economic growth.

Putin's Russia offers perhaps the starkest example. Rather than responding to genuine existential threats, Putin systematically manufactures external enemies and internal crises to justify authoritarian consolidation. The "threats" from NATO expansion, Western interference, or domestic "traitors" are largely constructed narratives used to mobilize fear and justify repression.

The Architecture of Manufactured Crisis

These leaders follow a recognizable pattern: they identify existing social tensions or economic anxieties, amplify them through selective narratives, and then position themselves as the only solution to problems they have largely created or exaggerated.

Trump's trade wars, border militarization, and inflammatory rhetoric created many of the "crises" he claimed to solve. His administration's family separation policies manufactured a humanitarian crisis at the border, which was then used to justify further harsh measures. The "American carnage" he described in his inaugural address was largely a fiction designed to create demand for his authoritarian solutions.

Modi's handling of Kashmir, citizenship laws through the CAA-NRC, and escalation of communal tensions has often worsened rather than resolved conflicts. The "love jihad" campaigns, demolitions in minority neighborhoods, and inflammatory rhetoric about "infiltrators" create the very divisions and insecurities that justify his strongman politics. Economic policies presented as necessary reforms—from demonetization to hasty GST implementation—created disruptions that were then blamed on previous governments or external factors.

The Psychology of Manufactured Crisis

This manufacturing of crises succeeds because it exploits a fundamental aspect of human psychology: our tendency to seek simple explanations for complex problems and to trust leaders who appear decisive in the face of uncertainty. When citizens are presented with a crisis narrative—regardless of its factual basis—they often respond by surrendering critical judgment in exchange for the promise of strong leadership.

The genius of manufactured crisis politics lies in its self-reinforcing nature. Once citizens accept the leader's framing of problems, they become invested in defending that narrative. Admitting that the crisis was manufactured would require acknowledging that their surrender of agency was unnecessary—a psychologically difficult admission. This creates a feedback loop where citizens actively participate in maintaining the very illusions that limit their freedom.

Beyond False Dilemmas

Understanding that these crises are largely manufactured does not mean dismissing all concerns as illegitimate. Real challenges—technological displacement, climate change, inequality, cultural change—do exist and require serious policy responses. However, the authoritarian approach is to exploit these challenges rather than address them, to use them as raw material for manufactured crises rather than opportunities for democratic problem-solving.

The distinction is crucial: democratic leaders acknowledge complexity and work toward inclusive solutions, while authoritarian figures simplify problems, identify scapegoats, and present themselves as indispensable. When citizens recognize this pattern, they can begin to reclaim agency by refusing to accept manufactured crisis narratives and demanding evidence-based approaches to genuine challenges.

This recognition transforms the entire political dynamic. Instead of citizens surrendering judgment to leaders who claim to solve crises, they can evaluate whether proposed solutions address real problems or merely serve to concentrate power. The question shifts from "How can this strong leader save us?" to "What evidence supports the claim that this problem exists as described, and do the proposed solutions actually address root causes?"

When citizens maintain this critical distance, the manufacture of crisis becomes much more difficult, and leaders are forced back toward genuine governance rather than theatrical politics of fear and division.

Hobbes: Fear as the Foundation of Political Order

The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes argued in Leviathan that fear is at the root of political authority. In his view, humans, driven by fear of violent death, willingly surrender freedoms to a sovereign who promises protection. This “fear contract” makes the ruler powerful. But Hobbes’s insight also explains how rulers can exploit fear. By magnifying threats—real or imagined—leaders make citizens cling more tightly to authority, often giving away more freedom than they realize. Hitler’s rise in Germany illustrates this: fear of economic ruin, national humiliation, and communism made people embrace authoritarianism in the hope of stability.

Foucault: Fear as a Technology of Power

Michel Foucault shifted the lens. For him, power was not just concentrated in rulers but diffused through institutions, surveillance, and knowledge. Fear operates here as a technology of control—discipline in schools, prisons, or even media narratives. Stalin’s Soviet Union offers a striking example: beyond secret police, it was the culture of suspicion and constant surveillance that turned fear into a daily ritual. People internalized fear, policing themselves and each other, thus sustaining Stalin’s authority without his direct presence.

In modern contexts, Vladimir Putin’s Russia uses fear of “foreign enemies” and “internal traitors” to justify surveillance, censorship, and military adventurism. Here power flows not from brute force alone but from systems that cultivate fear as a habit of thought.

Arendt: Power versus Violence

Hannah Arendt made a crucial distinction: power arises from people acting together, while violence and fear are signs of its decay. A ruler who must rely on fear is not truly powerful but compensating for the loss of collective legitimacy. Gandhi understood this deeply. By mobilizing Indians to resist fear through nonviolence, he revealed the British Empire’s violence as weakness, not strength. Power shifted the moment people reclaimed courage and unity.

Contemporary Echoes: Trump and Modi

Donald Trump’s politics thrives on fear of immigration, cultural change, and economic decline. His rallies channel collective anxiety into a spectacle of strength. Yet, as Arendt would suggest, this strength is brittle; it lasts only as long as people continue surrendering reason to fear.

Narendra Modi in India embodies a similar paradox. His popularity draws energy from citizens’ fears of losing cultural identity or security. These fears expand his mandate but also erode inclusive politics. His strength reflects the surrender of critical thinking to emotional anxieties—fear disguised as loyalty.

Reclaiming Power: Real-Life Methods of Resisting Fear

If fear is the scaffolding of authoritarian power, resistance is the art of dismantling it. Across time, ordinary people have found extraordinary ways to confront fear, often without weapons. Their methods—nonviolent protest, media exposure, courtroom recourse, digital tools, and class-based struggles—expose the fragility of rulers who depend on fear.

Nonviolent Mass Protest: The Gandhi Model

Mahatma Gandhi’s satyagraha remains history’s most vivid example of courage breaking fear. Indians, once terrified of colonial repression, began refusing cooperation with British rule—boycotting goods, staging salt marches, and filling jails voluntarily. Fear was inverted: instead of citizens fearing the empire, the empire began fearing mass noncooperation. The U.S. Civil Rights Movement, led by Martin Luther King Jr., echoed this playbook, turning marches and sit-ins into moral weapons that cracked segregation’s grip.

Mass Protests and “People Power”

In 1986, the People Power Revolution in the Philippines toppled Ferdinand Marcos. Millions filled the streets of Manila, armed not with guns but with prayers and flowers. Their refusal to be cowed by tanks shattered Marcos’s illusion of invincibility. More recently, the Arab Spring (2011) showed how fear collapses under the weight of numbers, with Egyptians in Tahrir Square forcing Hosni Mubarak’s resignation after decades of rule. Sri Lanka’s Aragalaya protests in 2022 followed the same rhythm, where ordinary citizens brought down a president through the sheer weight of collective defiance. In South Korea, the Candlelight Revolution (2016–17) mobilized millions in peaceful vigils, ending the presidency of Park Geun-hye.

Mass Media Protests: From Print to Broadcast

The anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa showed how media can break fear. International campaigns—through newspapers, music, and television—broadcast the brutality of the apartheid regime worldwide. The exposure delegitimized the system and emboldened South Africans internally. Fear loses its grip when injustice is made visible on a global stage.

Courtroom Recourse: Law as a Site of Resistance

Legal challenges often transform fear into institutional reform. In the United States, landmark cases like Brown v. Board of Education (1954) dismantled school segregation, proving that courts can undercut politics of exclusion. In India, public interest litigation has been a powerful tool—tribal communities and farmers have used the courts to resist forced land acquisition for extractive projects. In Bangladesh, garment workers have appealed to labor courts to confront exploitative industries. In South Africa, the Constitutional Court has repeatedly struck down laws that infringe on equality and dignity.

Class and Identity Protests Against Extraction

When politics turns extractive—siphoning resources upward while marginalizing the vulnerable—class and identity protests emerge as powerful counters. Latin America offers many examples: Bolivia’s Water War (2000) saw workers, peasants, and indigenous groups uniting against the privatization of water in Cochabamba, defeating corporate giants. In Chile (2019), mass protests against rising transport fares and inequality exposed how neoliberal policies extract from the poor to feed the wealthy.

In India, farmers’ protests (2020–21) revealed how rural communities resist policies perceived as favoring corporations over cultivators. Likewise, Dalit movements have challenged caste-based exploitation, demanding dignity against centuries of extraction masked as social hierarchy. In Indonesia, student protests against weakening anti-corruption laws mobilized tens of thousands in defiance of entrenched elites.

Digital Tools and Social Media: Fear in the Age of Connectivity

Today, social media enables the bypassing of censorship. During the Arab Spring, Facebook and Twitter organized protests and broke state propaganda. In Hong Kong (2019), encrypted apps, laser pointers, and “airdrop” messaging enabled decentralized resistance. In Belarus (2020), Telegram channels instantly exposed police violence, transforming private terror into public outrage.

Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Tools

AI, while used by states for surveillance, is being repurposed for resistance. Activists deploy AI to detect disinformation, anonymize protestors, and visualize hidden injustices. Myanmar’s activists after the 2021 coup used deepfake tools to protect protestors’ identities while exposing atrocities. Climate activists worldwide use AI-driven mapping to reveal corporate extraction and environmental damage, giving voice to vulnerable communities. In India, RTI digital platforms and fact-checking initiatives powered by AI counter disinformation and reclaim citizens’ right to know.

AI and Digital Tools – The Double-Edged Sword of Power and Resistance

Digital technologies and artificial intelligence represent the newest battleground where fear and power are manufactured, but also where resistance can take shape. Unlike earlier tools—print, broadcast, or street protests—AI has the unique capacity to both scale authoritarianism and democratize resistance simultaneously.

1. How AI Entrenches Authoritarianism

Deepfakes and Disinformation

Authoritarian leaders and political actors now deploy AI-generated deepfakes and synthetic media to discredit opponents, sow confusion, and manipulate public perception. In India, deepfake videos have already been used in elections to push divisive narratives. In authoritarian regimes like Russia or China, state-controlled media weaponizes disinformation campaigns, amplified by AI algorithms that target citizens with customized propaganda. The effect is to manufacture fear, mistrust, and polarization at scale.
Predictive Policing and Mass Surveillance

Governments increasingly deploy AI for predictive policing, biometric monitoring, and real-time facial recognition. China’s surveillance of Uyghur Muslims is a chilling example—where AI systems track daily movements, flag “suspicious” behavior, and suppress dissent before it even materializes. Similar systems are being piloted in democracies too, from predictive policing in U.S. cities to drone surveillance in South Asia. Fear here is not only external but internalized: citizens alter their behavior, knowing they are constantly watched.
Algorithmic Manipulation of Information

Authoritarian governments exploit AI-driven algorithms on platforms like Facebook, X (Twitter), and TikTok to amplify loyalist voices and suppress dissent. State-backed troll armies in Russia or coordinated WhatsApp misinformation campaigns in India illustrate how AI-driven targeting can distort democratic discourse. The danger lies in what Foucault would call “disciplinary fear”—citizens no longer trust what they see or hear, yet feel trapped in the echo chambers created by AI-powered propaganda.

2. How AI Empowers Resistance

Fact-checking and Counter-Disinformation

Civil society organizations are now using AI-powered tools to detect fake news, verify images, and expose deepfakes. In India, groups like Alt News deploy AI-assisted forensic analysis to debunk false claims circulated by political parties. In Africa and Latin America, AI-supported fact-checking platforms are equipping citizens with knowledge to resist manipulation. By reclaiming truth, citizens weaken the grip of manufactured crises.
Anonymization and Digital Protection

Activists worldwide use AI to anonymize protestors’ identities, scramble metadata, and shield communications from surveillance. After the Myanmar coup (2021), protestors used AI-based blurring and deepfake overlays to protect the identities of those captured on video while still exposing military brutality. In Hong Kong, machine-learning-based VPN tools and encryption systems allowed decentralized mobilization that confused state censors.
Data for Justice

AI-driven mapping and data visualization expose hidden injustices. For example, Latin American activists use satellite and AI analysis to track illegal mining and deforestation, directly challenging corporate and government narratives. Climate justice movements globally now rely on AI to model environmental destruction, equipping vulnerable communities with evidence that empowers their struggle.
Amplifying Marginalized Voices

AI-enabled translation, captioning, and accessibility tools allow historically silenced voices to enter global discourse. African youth movements, women’s rights activists in South Asia, and indigenous groups in the Amazon now bypass state-controlled media through multilingual AI-assisted platforms that make their struggles visible worldwide.

Why This Matters

This discussion deepens my argument in two key ways:

It shows that fear is no longer just psychological or manufactured by rhetoric, but is technologically engineered through AI surveillance and manipulation.
It demonstrates that courage is technologically augmented, as ordinary citizens now wield AI not only to resist but to expose, connect, and reclaim politics as a shared space.

In short, AI becomes both a tool of authoritarian fear and a weapon of democratic resistance—a perfect fit that power is never intrinsic to rulers but arises from how citizens choose to respond.

Electoral Politics and Negotiations: Tools of Responsible Resistance

Protests, courts, and digital activism shake the foundations of fear, but they are not the only tools available. In democratic and semi-democratic contexts, electoral politics and negotiations provide structured avenues for reclaiming power. Yet these tools work only when citizens refuse to remain passive. Without self-realization, knowledge of one’s state, and a conscious rejection of submission, elections and negotiations become rituals that reinforce fear rather than dismantle it.

Electoral Politics as a Weapon Against Fear

Ballots, when used responsibly, can be more powerful than bullets. South Africa’s transition from apartheid demonstrates this. The oppressed majority, once paralyzed by fear, transformed their struggle into electoral strength. Nelson Mandela’s election in 1994 was not just a political event but the symbolic burial of centuries of submission.

In Latin America, Lula da Silva’s rise in Brazil reflected a similar rejection of fear. Workers and the poor, long marginalized, asserted their class identity through democratic politics, challenging decades of elitist rule. Electoral participation became a form of resistance against extractive neoliberal policies.

India offers another angle. Despite the dominance of strong leaders, elections remain a site where citizens periodically reclaim agency. The 1977 general election after the Emergency showed how Indians shed fear of Indira Gandhi’s authoritarianism and voted her out. The act of voting became an act of courage—a refusal to normalize submission. In South Korea, the Candlelight Revolution combined peaceful vigils with electoral action, culminating in the impeachment of Park Geun-hye.

Negotiations: From Street to Table

Negotiation is another path where fear is contested. The Good Friday Agreement (1998) in Northern Ireland was possible only after decades of sectarian violence gave way to negotiations where both Catholic and Protestant communities recognized that continued fear and hatred served no one. Similarly, Colombia’s peace process with FARC rebels (2016) demonstrated that negotiations can transform fear-driven conflict into fragile but meaningful coexistence. In Tunisia, civil society coalitions negotiated democratic reforms after the Arab Spring, winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 2015.

Conclusion: Ordinary Courage Against Fear

Fear is not born from leaders but from within us, and power is not the possession of rulers but the product of our submission. From Hitler to Stalin, from Trump to Modi and Putin, history shows that leaders thrive when citizens surrender judgment and responsibility. Yet history also shows that courage—whether in Gandhi’s salt march, Mandela’s ballot, the Philippines’ People Power, Sri Lanka’s Aragalaya, South Korea’s Candlelight Revolution, or today’s digital protests—can dismantle even the mightiest structures of fear.

But the greater fighter was never Mahatma Gandhi—it was Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, the frail man who first shed his own fear of empire. The greater fighter was not Washington with his armies—it was Rosa Parks, who quietly refused to move to the back of a bus, sparking a revolution in civil rights. The greater fighters today are not the icons on stages or statues in city squares, but the farmers in India who camped on highways, the women in Bangladesh who demanded justice against garment industry exploitation, the students in Indonesia who resisted authoritarianism, the mothers in Argentina’s Plaza de Mayo, and the young Africans who use hashtags and encrypted apps to challenge surveillance states.

These acts reveal a deeper truth: courage is not extraordinary—it is ordinary people refusing submission. Digital media and AI tools now magnify this courage, transforming isolated resistance into collective force. WhatsApp groups in Indian villages expose corruption, social media in Sri Lanka toppled a president, AI-driven mapping in Latin America tracks environmental destruction, and platforms in Africa amplify voices long silenced by state propaganda. Fear loses its grip when ordinary citizens, armed with knowledge and connectivity, reclaim their voice.

The path forward is clear. Unless we learn to see beyond ourselves, shed our submission, and embrace the responsibility of self-realization, politics will remain a theater of hoarding and hatred. But when citizens—through protest, courts, media, elections, negotiations, and digital tools—reclaim their agency, leaders are forced back within their mandate, and democracy breathes again. The question is not whether power corrupts, but whether we will continue to empower it by being afraid. And the answer lies not in the hands of great leaders, but in the everyday courage of ordinary people who choose, at last, to stop surrendering.

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