Arab Spring has taught us a few lessons. They are political and psychological insights, especially about the closing phase of any dictatorship. Very opulent and robust looking dictators fall suddenly and unbelievably. They fall like skittles in a bowling alley. It is as ironical as comical the dictators finally go into rat holes and drain pipes before begging for mercy. ‘No mercy for the merciless’, cries the mob, before it goes for the overkill. I recollect how Mussolini was hung upside down from a meat hook, and Gadaffi shot like a rabid dog on the street. The sardonic joke was that Egypt displayed its only living mummy when it laid Hosny Mubarak in a stretcher inside a cage for public gaze, during his trial. The overkill and ballyhoo, many claim, would allow collective catharsis for a long battered people under dictatorship.
As they rise and fall, dictatorial regimes do not exhibit the same character from the beginning till the end. So do dictators. Closer looks at the phenomenon suggest four distinct phases in which dictators and dictatorships rise and fall. There is an ‘arrival phase’ followed by a ‘benevolent phase’ and an ‘active phase’ before it ends up in a ‘mystique phase’.
As mushrooms grow on decaying matter, dictators sprout often in conditions of failed states, disintegrated societies and worn out institutions. A few public men of civil or military or religious persuasion rally around in such conditions, promising the desperate people either revolution or reform, or at least an interim solution.
On arrival, no would-be dictator, is seen as a dictator by the desperate population but only as a deliverer, reformer, and revolutionary or at least as a problem-solver. True to their political mandate, these would-be-dictators even carry out extraordinary reforms and acquire great charisma. Napolean Bonaparte, Joseph Stalin and Muammar Gaddafi are some good examples. This is the benevolent phase.
At the peak of any benevolent phase comes, most of the temptations of the ordinary and low. The initial public commitment if any was lost sight of and the satanic quest to remain in power for ever, begins. This is the actual beginning of the dictatorship. The charisma generated in good faith is now capitalized and converted into a personality cult by the emerging dictator. People begin to cry for change. But naked violence and intimidation, draconian laws and oppression, propaganda and misinformation and promotion of family and croneydom are given as responses to people. All institutional checks and balances of power become the ire and are systematically removed. The apparatus of the state and the personality cult of the dictator fuse into one, to become the office of the Dictator, be it a Presidency, Consulate or Premiership. This is what I call as the ‘active phase’ of dictatorship. This is an actively cruel phase too.
More decisive and successful the ‘active phase’ for a dictator, more it makes people lose hope and turn fatalistic. In turn, the dictator himself goes through an aberrant change of personality. The single most important aspect of this change is that through a process of inversion, the earlier insecurities of the dictator convert into a delusion of grandiose. The dictator from now on chooses to adapt all irrational means to become superhuman, even a mystery unto him. He loses touch with the reality.
Intimidation, violence, political oppression, propaganda and misinformation are not exclusive to dictatorships. They are contingent upon democracies too, and cause certain fears and anxieties in people. But the difference is, the way they are handled. The freedom of speech and action ensured under a healthy democracy allows fears and anxieties to be channelized into the public sphere as criticisms, proposal for action and alternates. The polity depending upon its health responds to the reasons of the public sphere. Immediacy of solutions to problems and promise of change, constantly instill optimism in people. But under dictatorship, oppression and lack of freedom allow fear to ferment and multiply. Fear breeds fear and infect everyone as a contagion. It finally swamps the collective consciousness of the people and breaks the individual and collective will. People become helpless and cynical.
Self-deception and delusion of grandiose on the part of the dictator and cynicism on the part of the people are coeval. They provide the basic psychological material for shaping the final and mystique phase of dictatorship. Scornfully, this is the phase during which the gashes and wounds of the battered society are sealed rather than healed. Or, this is the phase during which people volitionally normalize the dictatorship through several myths they make. What begins as a politico-military and police system, now acquires its cultural effervescence.
Why do people make myths under dictatorship? And what type of myths? Once people become cynical, they come to the foregone conclusion that they could never ever fight the dictator. As it is certainly an act of cowardice, it hurts both the individual and collective egos. People then search for rationalizing their failures. The old saying now comes to our mind. “We make a monster of an enemy whom we are afraid of waging war against.” All dictators walk away as monsters and people do not pursue them as it is indiscreet.
When a monster manages to be around for sometime, people’s fear however sublime tells that any monster is bloodthirsty and he may soon go on a prowl and without notice. Then the project of propitiating the monster begins. People invent newer myths and weave them into a system of meaning. They start celebrating and worshiping the dictator. The dictator no more needs to introspect into or cause doubt on his delusions. People have already deified him. The system acquires the shroud of a mystique.
As we see in history, the mystique phase can prolong. But it is a system that works on a peculiar consensus arrived through psychological default. In contrast to the democratic consensus which is constantly reviewed and energized through freedom of thought and action, the negative consensus arrived at in any dictatorship uses up its own energy. It becomes fragile. But it needs to wait for the first trigger to be pulled. The maverick arrives, then the groundswell. No wonder the Arab Spring started with a tweet.
No one denies that India is a democracy. But we have several niches within India – organizations and institutions, which are ruled dictatorially by petty individuals. We wait fatalistically and in exasperation for these individuals to exit on their own, or die. What we do not realize is that it is enough that it requires only one person to pull the trigger. Rest follows.
[I wish Bishop Asir reads this article with the help of an interpreter].
SCORPIUS
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