Insecurity:- uncertainty or anxiety about oneself; lack of confidence.
A seemingly easy-to-understand concept yet having psychological roots that are extremely easy to overlook. In this article, we will try to understand how individual insecurities are capitalized upon by fascist ideologies and developed to group insecurities for personal gain. However, there is much we need to understand before we directly address this issue. First thing of which will be the origin of insecurity.
What exactly is insecurity to begin with and why has the use of this term increased efficiently amongst our youth. Insecurity so to speak, is the feeling of seeing one's own self as not good enough. It could be one's own self entirely or a physical feature, a personality trait and/or a physical trait.
Some people say they're insecure about the way they look, while some say they are insecure about the way their nose is. Some are insecure about their personality and while these are things that need attention or deserve to be taken care of such small insecurities almost never lead anybody to downright immorality. We have learned that every insecure person finds a way to hide their insecurities. It is not a solution but it helps them temporarily, if one is insecure about the way they look they use makeup or wear masks, if one is insecure about their personality they become more like people they see as perfect (hence extreme celebrity worship is also an indicator of personal level insecurities)
However, the deeper these insecurities get the closer a person pushes himself towards immorality. This is also a psychologically established fact. Look at it this way, a person gets insecure only when they see themselves or a feature of themselves as inferior to something. If a person is insecure about having a fat nose then he wouldn't be insecure about it if every person on earth had a fat nose. Like nobody on earth is insecure about having two hands. This helps us arrive to a conclusion that personal insecurities root from comparison. Since people with personal insecurities may also not see themselves as worthy of respect they start becoming like whatever they compared themselves with. This is not completely immoral although I'd personally prefer otherwise, however, let's take this experiment to the next level.
Imagine you have low esteem and perhaps a childish voice despite being a grown-up. Now imagine people around you have proper deep voices. How would you deal with this insecurity? You would maybe speak lesser, take therapies for a deeper voice, and so forth. Much like how white people being the beauty standard helps the sales of fairness creams in countries with a mixed population. However, now I want the reader to imagine that rather than a personal thing like their voice something else is challenged now. Something like their nation or maybe religion. The first question that arises now is that if the root of insecurity is comparison then by what has my nation or religion been compared to?
Notice the difference? When it is something personal one works towards hiding it or improving it as per the standards of whatever it is being compared to, as soon as it is directed to something that is
a. Beyond our personal capability to be changed
b. Something that we have been conditioned to believe is infallible
Our minds quickly get to a defensive state, and a defensive state is only achieved when the brain things it is being attacked. This hostility is something that can be capitalized upon, if I were to tell you that your nation is bad, stupid, or anything in that variation in comparison to the USA or any nation for that matter then you would automatically start looking for criticisms of the USA or points where your nation is better than the USA. How can I capitalize on this further? I say that the people of the USA firmly believe they are superior to you, they believe they can do your jobs better than you do. They believe their morality is better than yours, they believe they are far more educated than you are. Now you are slowly starting to get bothered by the people of USA, not just that you would almost instantly love to debate one. You might also start flaunting your English or things your country is good at when you see a random US citizen or when you come across an Instagram post from the US. How do I make you more hostile? I tell you that as great as the USA is right now you used to be equally great, however, they invaded you and stole all your resources about hundreds of years ago.
For you now the average US citizen has become somebody who thinks he is superior to you, who will potentially steal your job, and whose ancestors have stolen your land and butchered your ancestors. By the time I am telling you about their ancestors stealing from your ancestors years ago I will make sure that I have capitalized and made your insecurity hostile enough for you to lose the rational grip of asking for proofs. As a matter of fact, you fully well want to believe it to be true as it validates your insecurity. Whenever your country fails you can blame the US. Imagine I have done this on a macro level, I have capitalized this insecurity in the majority of people. While the average US citizen quite literally does not know you exist as you base your entire life on proving yourself superior to them by a criteria you never chose. Discrimination has seeped through psychology simply because of some insecurity. Simply because of comparison. The reader must have noticed during the experiment I have claimed to put these ideas in your head. Who is this "I" in reality, think about it what entity can find it most convenient to be able to control the masses by capitalizing on their personal insecurity? The answer is simple, the system. The government couldn't provide enough jobs? "Simple,
the minority is hogging all the jobs, the minority claims they deserve it more, they think their faith and morals are better than the majority!". The already existing defensive hostility conquers the rationality to ask for proof as it finds a way to validate the hatred of the majority towards the minority. A win-win fascism situation, the majority get to validate their hatred of the minority and the government gets to have its inefficiencies ignored!
The transition from individual insecurity to group insecurity can only be triggered if the concept being compared has ancestral roots and connects multiple people. A great example is nazi Germany, Hitler completely capitalised upon the bond of common nationality or ethnicity. His entire period of oppression was based upon ethnic Germans being the true Aryans and in order to turn them against the minorities (Jews) he injected this exact insecurity amongst the masses. The state even sponsored pseudo-scientific experiments proving that the Aryans were the superior race.
The transformation process from personal to group insecurity isn’t instant but it isn’t as gradual either. We need to keep in mind that the human brain would love to hear that anything wrong with it is somebody else’s fault. For example, if somebody draws a sketch that isn’t appealing the brain before seeking accountability and questioning his own skills would love to check if the pencil used was proper or the canvas used was of good quality. He would see if somebody else has made anything better than it and in the end, the most self-satisfactory response would be that the pencil was of cheap quality or the canvas was improper. The idea here is that if the artist isn’t looking for efficiency but rather for self-satisfaction he will always find something external to blame his incompetencies around. On a group level, a great example of this was presented when India overtook China in the race of the most populated country on earth, and ironically enough the majority blamed the minority for having too many children. It was falsely circulated and is still held as an idea amongst many Indian Hindus that Muslims are responsible for the surge in population as they have more kids. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Economic Advisory Council (EAC) published a report that claimed that in the period studied, the share of the Muslim population in India increased by 43.15 percent, from 9.84 percent to 14.09 percent. By contrast, it says, the share of the majority Hindu population decreased by 7.82 percent between 1950 and 2015, from 84.68 percent to 78.06 percent. The report also used population increase as a criteria to decide that minorities have no issues whatsoever and are completely thriving {A similar statement was made by Winston Churchill when he was asked about close to 3.8 million people dying in the Bengal Famine}. However, later critics exposed this data of being manipulative and survey-based rather than census-based. “The paper serves the purpose of the regime and not of ‘research’,” said Santosh Mehrotra, a development economist and visiting professor at the University of Bath in the United Kingdom. The paper, its critics say, overlooks the actual rise in the Hindu population in this period – and how that compares to the Muslim population increase in this period. Between 1951 and 2011, the Muslim population rose from 35.4 million to 172 million. The Hindu population rose from 303 million to 966 million in the same period – a five times greater increase. (Al Jazeera).
The insecurity here was the population of the country and the self-satisfaction was achieved by blaming the minority for it. The people were convinced that any criticism of India is a personal attack on them. The entire nation was given a personal value, an individualistic value and the minority was dehumanized so that they aren’t even seen as persons or individuals.
Conclusion:- The university of Cambridge already has enough well-researched articles that prove that discrimination is well-rooted in insecurity and low self-esteem. This article was an attempt to provide a better understanding of how such insecurities can be capitalised. On a final note, while considering that the root of insecurity is comparison, I will end the article with a piece of advice from the greatest man to step on this planet.
All mankind is from Adam and Eve, an Arab has no superiority over a non-Arab nor a non-Arab has any superiority over an Arab; also a White has no superiority over a Black nor a Black has any superiority over a White except by piety and good action