Political power and fear: dialectics of interpenetration
This article is dedicated to the problem of fear as a phenomenon of political power and dominance-subordination relations. The theoretical-methodological framework for the analysis of correlation between fear and political power is comprised of the works of Russian and foreign philosophers and sociologists (O. Comte, H. Spencer, T. Parsons, N. Luhmann, E. Shils, A. S. Panarin, and other.). The author examines such phenomenon as the fear of punishment, the peculiarities of occurrence of fear in the conditions of total control over citizens under despotic and democratic political regime, in the situation of destruction of the government. Characteristic is given to the fears of politicians (personal fears, fear of losing power, fear of democracy). Based on the theoretical models along with attracted historical and statistical material, it is demonstrated that fear is an inevitable side effect of any power that tends to conservation of the existing model of relations between the government and society. The article provides a new interpretation of the idea of the supporters of psychoanalysis on channeling the fears of politicians onto the population. It is underlined that in the current conditions, it is not so much the fears of the political elite, as on converting them into a governing technique. The latter conceals the true concerns of the political elite, as well as displaces the moods of discontent and social tension, turning them into fear towards the objects developed in the information field.