Just like horror films, propaganda influences operate on the same principles. The button that needs to be pressed at a crucial moment is anxiety. How is this utilized?
Sometimes things become clearer only when we look at them from a completely different perspective than we are used to. This made me think about examining the current social situation from perhaps an unexpectedly different angle – that of horror films. Both of these things have more in common than it may seem at first glance. Let’s start with film. What horror films primarily focus on is, of course, fear. Along with aggression, it is the oldest and strongest emotion. This is the equipment our evolutionarily ancient brain possesses, known as the limbic system. It is responsible for instinctive and emotional reactions. It is that part of our consciousness that serves as both autopilot and bodyguard, drawn to immediate pleasure, highly variable, passionate, and besides many useful properties, prone to various impulses and addictions.
And it is precisely this part of our minds that horror films appeal to, where we love to be frightened. But have you ever asked yourself the fundamental question of what we are really afraid of? “The strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown,” declared the classic of the horror genre, Lovecraft. And he was right. What was he talking about?
In horror films, the threat is either specific and visible – aided by some terrifying monster, such as a vampire, werewolf, unknown organism from outer space, ghost, and so on – or it takes a more refined approach, building fear simply by awakening the sense that something is wrong with the world, that something is brewing, something is happening, even without us necessarily knowing what it is…
It is simply nice to know that a good horror builds tension and escalates fear without the threat needing to be visible at all. According to Lovecraft, “a certain atmosphere of incredible and unexplainable horror from external, unknown forces is enough; and there must be a hint of the most terrifying idea that could come to a human mind.”
And now to the crux of the matter. Propaganda influence in politics operates on the same principles. The button that needs to be pressed at a crucial moment is anxiety. As my beloved Koukolík writes, it doesn’t matter whether it has a direct relationship to the given problem: it’s simply about “raising the level of anxiety of those who decide at the right moment.”
This happened, for instance, during the presidential elections when the decision was between Zeman and Drahoš, remember? The campaign utilized latent fear, a persistent, uncertain threat that has been stirring through Czech society since the migration crisis. A dark threat that relentlessly feeds itself, nestled in the corners of the mind, propelled into the spotlight by the ongoing media interest in terrorism and violence…
That “something” to be afraid of, that “something” that threatens us, that breathes down our necks, are the “others,” who we must constantly fear. The strangers, the non-humans, the flood, the invasion. But where does the image of this fear come from?
Social psychologists confirmed back in the 1980s that people who spend many hours watching television (at least four hours a day) see the world as a dangerous place (Peterson and Zill, 1981). Such individuals tend to fear more that they will become victims of violence, trust others less, and are more likely to perceive the world as scary, dangerous, and hostile than those who watch less television (Gerbner & Gross, 1976, 1981). A similar but stronger relationship was observed between watching news broadcasts and fear of crime (Romer, Jamieson, & Aday, 2003).
The connection between this declining trust and medialization is hidden in the natural tendency of the media to focus primarily on negative phenomena, explains Philip Zimbardo in his book Man Disconnected. The media mainstream constantly seeks out and emphasizes “corruption, fraud, and lies in the realm of politics, presents unreliable eyewitness testimony, amplifies the opinions of the lower class as social divides gradually widen, brings celebrity scandals, and attacks the reputation of otherwise public figures.” Of course, this does not apply to all media; Zimbardo mainly refers to sensationalist or tabloid-like media. Under this influence, we are largely subjected to a negative media barrage. Our minds are filled with images of despair, fraud, lies, and corruption. And we don’t escape this unscathed.
Let’s reiterate the basic principle of working with fear: What is frightening is primarily what we do not understand. This holds true whether you are looking to exploit fear in a film or a political campaign.
Horror films, just like political campaigns that work with fear, require consumers to believe in what they are shown enough to be scared or disgusted. And so even though we practically have no migrants and they actually don’t want to come to us, they have become the main topic of the elections, the bogeymen we must primarily and a priori fear…
But we forget that the image of the refugee reflects who we are, what we fear, who the right devils are that scare us enough…
Depth psychology tells us that we are often “possessed by our shadows.” And as priest Tomáš Halík writes, “the shadow is the part of our being that we are unwilling to integrate – it includes everything we cannot or are unwilling to learn about ourselves, what we refuse to acknowledge about ourselves. It is often associated with guilt – but we do not necessarily have to think of committing something evil or sinful; the second meaning of the German and Latin words for guilt (Schuld, debitum) is “debt.” It encompasses everything we owe to life, what we have neglected, what we have not developed, including “buried talents” – and what we have repressed, where we have remained one-sided. It is our shadowy, dark, uncharted, unaccepted side… We often project this side of our being onto others: there we can wrestle with it, criticize it, and condemn it! Jung, the father of depth psychology, advises us: When someone incredibly annoys us, and we often don’t even know why, we should ask ourselves: isn’t he actually similar to us? Are we not condemning him for what we are unwilling and unable to acknowledge about ourselves? Has he not held up a mirror in which we can see our shadow? Shadows can thus appear both in relationships between individuals and in group prejudices, stereotypes of perception through which different nations, races, churches, etc., see each other…”
And so we could begin by getting to know ourselves. Try to answer each for yourself: What have we as a nation, society, repressed and suppressed? What do we forget, what do we ignore, and what do we fear? What do we actually wrestle with in ourselves in the image of others, those devils, those non-humans?**
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