A very important and vivid lesson from the events we are living through lies in demonstrating how the state works—and the conclusions we can draw from this understanding.
The main task that officials constantly address is creating and maintaining “demand” for their beloved selves. This “demand” exists as long as people believe that only officials can and should “save” them from life’s uncertainties. This is why peace and prosperity are fatal for states, and why states are always busy finding or creating problems, which they then gladly undertake to solve.
This is, in general, a fairly well-known circumstance, and it is perfectly illustrated by historical facts from the Roman Empire to modern states. States strengthen and expand through crises that are either created by them directly or are long-term consequences of policies they previously pursued. From the “threat of terrorism,” which allows the USA to remain in a de facto state of war (meaning government powers can grow with less resistance), to the regular panics in Ukraine (the almost-annual “sugar” and “gasoline” crises now somewhat forgotten, “bird flu,” and so on)—the list of these temporary or permanent crises is truly endless.
In all this, there is one important point I want to dwell on. Obviously, when we’re talking about creating demand for the state, the simplest way to attract attention to oneself is fear. The state frightens you with something and then rushes to “protect” you from the threat. The scare tactics used to frighten Ukrainians have become more and more terrifying with each passing year. There are many reasons for this; I won’t go into them, but obviously, they are being perceived more and more poorly and are increasingly difficult to sell.
Here it should be noted that, of course, not everything is invented by the state—in most cases, we are dealing with facts of the surrounding world. For the state, what matters is not whether bird flu actually exists; what matters is public approval of specific measures that are allegedly intended to combat it. Among these are, for example, price regulation and other controls over the circulation, production, and import of medicines—that is, the growth of state powers. The success of a scare tactic does not lie in the public’s recognition of a problem’s existence, but rather in approval of what the state intends to do to “solve” it. Right now, a scare tactic by the name of Putin has worked wonderfully well in many senses—from the rhetoric of “tighten your belts and don’t criticize the government,” with which the state has again seriously expanded its power, to the package of “anti-crisis laws” that cement this expansion.
And the point here is not that Putin doesn’t exist and was invented in Kyiv, nor that he is “actually” kind and good and poses no threat of war. The point is what is being proposed as the answer to this entirely real threat. If, instead of arming the population and teaching it the basics of self-defense, the state, using Putin as a pretext, takes away weapons from it; if, instead of increasing economic freedom—which ultimately increases both state revenue and people’s motivation to defend their country—this freedom is being rolled back instead, then the scare tactic has done its job. The power of the state has expanded.
And now, the moment I want to address. Unlike the advertising of goods and services, which is organized and planned consciously with a predetermined goal, the process I’m talking about is more intuitive, like profit-seeking in the market. Moreover, unlike an enterprise that is unified in its goals, within the framework of this process, different divisions of the state and groupings of para-state parasites struggle for the public’s attention, and this is further complicated by the active participation of progressive society. Of course, there are certainly people “in power” who understand this mechanism and use it, but they are very few and far between; the entire “work” is done through a coincidence of interests, through an unconscious search for what might “fly” with the public as the next scare tactic, and who and how might use it.
This means one thing: the uncontrollability of this process, which is largely similar to the market. A simple analogy is the media, which always sells you bad news. Good news usually consists of reports of curiosities and cute moments of life, presented as “relax, not everything is as bad as it could be.” The media acts this way because fear is the simplest and most effective way to attract attention. Admittedly, the media can be suspected of conscious manipulation (although, from experience, intuition and instincts still predominate there, though people who haven’t worked in media don’t believe this). However, it’s impossible to suspect a Facebook feed of this. In critical moments, the Facebook feed turns into a real ministry of panic, and—importantly for our topic—it is organized spontaneously by the people themselves. People carry in their little beaks into the feed whatever frightens them most, demand for Facebook grows, and Zuckerberg monetizes this demand.
The state acts in exactly the same spontaneous way. It picks up on moods and fears and converts them into growth of its powers. Although, here there is no single Zuckerberg who benefits from it—some groupings may even lose locally—but “the state as a whole,” like a casino, is always winning.
However, given the factor we discussed: that Ukrainians are becoming increasingly difficult to frighten, and that ever more terrifying scare tactics are needed to do so—it is not difficult to suppose that sooner or later, a scare tactic may end in a quite real catastrophe. The moment may come that always surprises historians in descriptions of revolutions and the fall of empires, when it seems clear what needs to be done to save the situation, but for some reason nobody does it, and the inertia of events carries everyone toward inevitable collapse.
The most important thing is that one can fight this if one remembers that the goal of scare tactics is always to sell you another expansion of state power. A simple way to evaluate a scare tactic is to translate the “general benefit,” in whose name the state allegedly acts, into personal benefit. For example, if you are offered, due to a flu epidemic, to “lock in” low prices for medicines, and you have enough sense to realize that under conditions of increased demand this will lead to shortages, or even to such medicine disappearing from sale, then your response to the scare tactic should be extremely negative. After all, it doesn’t matter how much medicine costs if it’s not available.
It also doesn’t hurt to remember that those who “rev up the flywheel,” sow panic, arrange provocations, and so on, do not control and cannot control processes that may begin at their initiative. The arsonist cannot always stop the fire he started.
And, finally, a third point. It is extremely dangerous to think that peace, calm, and prosperity are “in the interests of the state.” The interest of the state consists in the existence of the state—that is, a system allowing some people to appropriate other people’s property on “legal grounds.” And this interest not only does not negate but, on the contrary, assumes conflicts, wars, and social upheavals.