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• Are You Gonna Eat That?
• g-Think Survey Results: The Fear…
• In Japan, Fear Morphs into Positive…
• Fear and the Spin Cycle
• I am the Messenger of Fear
• Carbon Footprinting
• The Culture of Fear
• The Fear of China
• The True Colors of Terror

Fear is a classic instant motivator: the fight-or-flight response has been engaged to sell everything from pharmaceuticals to ideologies. In The Prince, his 14th-century treatise on political power and its attainment, Niccolo Machiavelli weighs in on whether it is better for a leader to be loved or feared: he sides with the latter as safer, for men are “ungrateful, fickle, false, cowardly, covetous, and as long as you succeed they are yours entirely.”

Adam Curtis’ The Power of Nightmares, a three-part BBC documentary first broadcast in 2004, examines the political uses of fear that led to the 9/11 attacks and the invasion of Iraq, drawing parallels between the rise of the Neocons in America and of radical Islamists in the Middle East. (Curtis slyly deploys Brian Eno on soundtrack duties as an oh-so-subtle marker of English sobriety and cultural superiority, although Tony Blair gets his share of abuse by the end of the documentary.) The films present a compelling look into the political thinking and acts of men who sided with Machiavelli’s safer route to power.

The best bit of wisdom one can collect from the film is about the side effect that using fear as a communication style can produce: it is a strategy that requires incredible amounts of effort for long-term maintenance. The Neocons, for instance, based much of their political strategy on painting paper tigers like radical Islam into major threats—one problem with this strategy being that radical Islam was only too happy to live up to the standard that had been set. Al Qaeda, for instance, was a scattered and dysfunctional network before the United States attacked Iraq; afterward its recruiting rates went through the roof, with the organizational infrastructure to boot. In Curtis’ estimation, the mythology of an organized, invisible terrorist network was a necessary illusion that served to strengthen the power base of both the Neocons and radical Islam.

Common enemies, even if fictional, can serve to unite large groups of people. The documentary argues that the resort to fear-based politics and the exaggeration of the threat of terrorism mark the failure of the grand visions of the ’60s: the space race, civil rights and the like. Curtis implies that the hope in a bright future created by men like John Kennedy was just as illusory as the myth of a global terror network headed by Osama Bin Laden, and that in time both approaches will be seen as the power strategies they are. It is only in a culture that believes nothing, the film states, that ideologues and extremists can effectively wield terror to hypnotic effect.

Perhaps such men should be neither loved or feared, but rather ignored altogether.