What happens when you rule with fear?

Leading from fear can create a toxic culture in which people play safe, avoid mistakes and lay low in effect creating an organisation that does not grow due to mediocre performance and unrealised potential. Fear is natural, even in leaders. To be an effective leader, you need to overcome your fears.

How can fear be used to control?

Fear prevents us from thinking. The emotional panic that accompanies fear actually shuts down the prefrontal cortex, or the rational thinking part, of our brains. In other words, when we are consumed by fear, we stop thinking.

What is the relationship between fear and power?

Underlying the quest for power is fear, and the desire for power is to eliminate fear. The more fearful a person is, the more control over their environment they believe they need to feel safe.

How does fear diminish teamwork and team effectiveness?

stating that “fear inhibits learning and cooperation” and fosters an “epidemic of silence.” Psychological safety, on the other hand, leads to “greater learning, performance, and even lower mortality (in a healthcare setting).”

Why do people rule by fear?

Leaders who govern with fear usually do so to mask their own shortcomings. Rather than let the light shine on them and reveal their flaws, they use fear so that they can survive—at the expense of the people they’re supposed to be inspiring to do their best work.

How does fear affect the decisions you make?

Fear can interrupt processes in our brains that allow us to regulate emotions, read non-verbal cues and other information presented to us, reflect before acting, and act ethically. This impacts our thinking and decision-making in negative ways, leaving us susceptible to intense emotions and impulsive reactions.

What power does fear have over humans?

An overwhelmingly disturbing force of the human mind, fear has the power to sway, distort and rupture the conventions of the human psyche. The mind, body and spirit succumb to its ghoulish atrocities as we find ourselves piecing together a distressing puzzle of digressing emotion.

Why are we so afraid of the government?

Our evolved physiological makeup disposes us to fear all sorts of actual and potential threats, even those that exist only in our imagination. The people who have the effrontery to rule us, who call themselves our government, understand this basic fact of human nature. They exploit it, and they cultivate it.

Why do Governments appeal to the public’s fears?

Over the ages, governments refined their appeals to popular fears, fostering an ideology that emphasizes the people’s vulnerability to a variety of internal and external dangers from which the governors—of all people!—are said to be their protectors.

How does the government use popular fear to justify its predations?

Using popular fear to justify its predations, the government lays claim to great expanses of the economy and the society. Government taxation, borrowing, expenditure, and direct controls dilate, while individual rights shrivel into insignificance. Of what importance is one little person when the entire nation is in peril?

How do oppressive governments maintain their grip on a nation?

Oppressive governments often maintain their grip on a nation by continually invoking fear, and then proceeding to claim that only they, the ruling powers, have the means and ability to protect the population from such a threat: