A very old trick of the powerful in keeping people in their place is to divide and conquer. A particular favourite of the incompetent leader who feels under pressure is the invention of an enemy – someone we should all dislike, be suspicious of, be perceived to be some form of threat, and ultimately be afraid of.
It is my belief that the more incompetent the leader, the more enemies there will be at the gate! (I have personal experience of this in my working life – I’d say that most people have).
Sometimes the incompetent leader gets lucky and a convenient enemy emerges, but sometimes an enemy needs to be invented.
I believe that incompetent leaders are often, (as will be described in the Chapter on Trauma and Related Topics in Section Three) grandiose, narcissistic, and neurotic and have little or no empathy for others who might suffer as a result of their decisions.
We can see divide and conquer happening nowadays in Europe as so-called right-wing leaders are blaming poor immigrants for the fact that citizens of their own countries suffer disadvantage. This is, of course, untrue. There was acute poverty in Europe long before there was any immigration of any significance.
But incompetent leaders also seem to have an intuitive knowledge of what buttons to press to make people fearful or angry!
Nowadays, we know how important identity is to people – indeed, how it is fundamental to a healthy sense of self, our existence and our being in the world.
I will propose in the next Section in the Chapter on Universal Theory of Change that it is a root foundation of growth and ultimately emotional well-being.
In the late nineteenth century royal families, what was left of the nobility, and the wealthy and the privileged in Europe used the natural human yearning for a strong identity, dressed up as national pride to stoke prejudice, narrowmindedness and fear of the stranger among the middle and poorer classes to further their own colonial and wealth agenda.
We know from our history that many thinkers, writers, activists and even some politicians in Europe [1] whose ideas were well known, studied and publicised over those decades, felt strongly that humans had a higher destiny than being helpless automatons, and that, in a democracy, we should have a real voice, and be able to change things we don’t like. (Perhaps these were once children who internalised different values within their education – and became the critical thinkers)!
But noble aspirations of international cooperation, equality, comradeship, unity of working people and their common interests/purposes promoted by many left-leaning people was easily shouted down and rendered insignificant, threatening to well-being, dangerous to the world order, and even if desirable, impossible to achieve.
What was promoted instead was deceitful, dishonest, secret, underhand and largely unaccountable behaviour of Kings and Emperors in Europe of that time and their hangers-on – driven by what I described earlier as disingenuous room values. These leaders, (poor leaders [2] all) were cheered on by an increasingly bought and compliant media, and by the wealthy and privileged who benefited from their vacillations and underhandedness.
Thus, the 125 years between the French Revolution and the start of World War One – the Long Nineteenth Century as I called it in a previous post, and particularly the latter half of the 19th Century – saw the rise of vast military industrial complexes and alliances among the Great Powers of Europe, (the Austrian Empire, the British Empire, France, Prussia, and the Russian Empire) preying on a mixture of the fear of the stranger and the need for identity.
Just like nowadays, the stated intention of these alliances was to keep docile, well-behaved middle class populations safe from imagined foreign threats, while the police forces, as described in a previous post, kept the same people (but particularly the wealthy and privileged) safe from internal threats.
The enormity of this myth of safety was truly exposed when World War One broke out in 1914.
[1]. Marx, Nietzsche, Comte, Feuerbach, Dickens to mention but a few.
[2]. I would regard any person in a position of authority who gives in to narrow, insular interests and rates acquisition of power and wealth over people’s human rights as a poor leader.