Abuse of power

Power rarely begins with a master plan. It begins with a mood.

A simmering one. A quiet irritation that lives in kitchens and pubs and comment sections. A sense that things are slipping, that someone somewhere is getting away with something, that the future looks suspiciously different from the past and nobody asked permission.

If you want power, you don’t start with policy. You start with that feeling.

Hope and fear are the oldest levers ever installed in the human brain. Hope says tomorrow could be better. Fear says tomorrow could be worse. Between the two lies a sweet spot where logic quietly packs its bags and leaves the room. That’s where power grows best.

The trick is to feed both emotions at once.

First, you give people something to applaud. Encourage public gratitude, public rituals, public unity. Get them banging pots on balconies and doorways, waving flags in windows, clapping in unison. People love to feel like participants in something noble. It costs nothing and feels priceless. Meanwhile, the systems beneath the applause quietly erode. Budgets shrink. Services creak. Contracts change hands. But the applause is loud enough to drown out the sound of dismantling.

Ceremony is the perfect camouflage for subtraction.

Then you give them something to fear. Fear must be simple. Tangible. Preferably human-shaped. Statistics don’t frighten people; strangers do. You whisper about outsiders, about threats, about change happening too fast and too unfairly. You don’t shout it outright. You imply. You hint. You ask questions you never answer.

“Is anyone else worried?”

They always are.

Soon fear becomes a habit. A daily vitamin. People begin to seek it out like caffeine. They scroll for it, share it, argue about it. It gives them energy, direction, purpose. Fear is intoxicating because it makes people feel alert and alive. It sharpens the world into heroes and villains, friends and enemies, us and them.

Binary thinking is wonderfully efficient. It saves people the trouble of nuance.

Once fear takes hold, hope becomes the product you sell as the cure. You position yourself as the solution to the danger you carefully inflated. The only steady hand. The only voice brave enough to say what others won’t. The only one willing to protect what people love from what they’ve been taught to hate.

It doesn’t matter if the solution exists. It matters that the promise does.

The crowd begins to form. At first it’s a gathering. Then a movement. Eventually it becomes a mob with Wi-Fi. They defend you before you ask. They attack your critics before you notice them. They transform disagreement into betrayal and criticism into treason.

You no longer need arguments. You have loyalty.

A loyal crowd is the most renewable resource on Earth. It generates outrage on demand. It produces enemies faster than you can name them. It thrives on the idea that the world is under siege and only you can fortify the walls.

Walls are excellent symbols. Simple. Photogenic. Reassuringly permanent.

Opposition becomes a gift. Every critic is proof of persecution. Every protest is evidence of conspiracy. Every scandal is a distraction engineered by your enemies. Truth becomes flexible. Facts become negotiable. Reality becomes a matter of team spirit.

And the most beautiful part? You never need to admit wrongdoing. You simply accuse louder.

Eventually laws become obstacles rather than guardrails. But laws, like narratives, are editable. Break them first. Rewrite them later. Explain that extraordinary times require extraordinary measures. People will nod because they’ve been trained to believe the times are always extraordinary.

Meanwhile the money flows quietly offshore, like a tide that never returns. Lives are disrupted, livelihoods rearranged, futures trimmed to fit the new shape of necessity. The cost is enormous, but it is paid in small instalments by millions of people, which makes it almost invisible.

Collective loss feels like weather. Personal loss feels like injustice.

By the time anyone notices the difference, the machinery of power is humming too loudly to interrupt. The crowds still wave their flags. The headlines still shout your slogans. The fear still pulses, steady as a heartbeat.

You stand at the centre of it all, buoyed by the hopes you sold and the fears you fed, wondering how it ever felt difficult.

Power, after all, was never about leading people.

It was about convincing them they were running toward you.