Seats and forms of power

Seats and forms of power

Hello. Today I’m going to talk about the notion “Seats and forms of power”. I’m going to start off by defining the terms of this notion. “Seats” means places, alluding in this context to relevant buildings, or meaningful spaces, as might be schools, or enterprises. “Forms” means ways to do something, the different ressources one could use. Finally, “power” is the ability to do something or the capacity to influence the behavior of others. We are going to study this notion in the context of American fears. Fears can truly be a form of power, a power that is very strong and that manifests itself everywhere, almost as a natural way of human interaction. Fear can manipulate people’s minds and being feared is often being powerful. We can wonder how the fear of the other is an omnipresent feeling in American history, and how this fear manifests itself as a form of power. To answer this question I will firstly present Americans fears throughout history, to then analyse how this fear is nowadays a big form of power.

On the one hand, American history has been scarred by many fears throughout the years, fears that have come to define the country’s identity. First, it was the Indians, then it was the slaves, then communism, and nowadays these fear evolute year by year, in the context of a fluctuating and uncertain world. Americans now fear economical instability, world’s pollution, and global warming, according to a study done by Chapman University in 2017.

It’s important to point out that this figure we define as “other” has at the same time drastically changed, and stayed essentially the same. It has evolved so much since the colonizing times, changes from fear to Europeans, to fear of communism, to fear of nuclear weapons. However, this fear seemed always to be a fear of your peers, a fear of the other, and even if this “other” changes, the fear stays pretty much the same. We fear things that seem out of control, things we don’t know, things that are new.

As I mentioned before, we can take many examples of the evolution of this fear, as says Noam Chomsky in his essay “Why Americans are paranoid about everything (including zombies)”, in which he exposes different fears of something that seems unlikely. He attributes this fear culture, to the stress caused by the little gun control in the United states. It can be explained by many factors and interpreted in thousands of possible ways, but no one can deny that the fear of the other is an American story.

On the other hand, this fear culture makes it very easy for people to take advantage of it, manipulating the frightened masses.This fear sets an atmosphere that is a breeding ground for hateful ways and policies, and gives power to anyone willing to present an easy solution.

This can be seen many times through human history, for example during the time of the cold war, there was something called the red scare, that was the fear of communists. Alarm was in the air, and even your neighbor for 20 years seemed suspicious. Lists with suspected communists were made, accused actors and individuals from many other professions were fired, and accusing fingers pointed everywhere. This fear gave power to anti-communists, who could manipulate this feeling and propose radical solutions (murder, prison)

...