phobocracy

English

Etymology

phobo- (“fear”) +‎ -cracy (“rule”).

Pronunciation

• (UK) IPA^(key): /fɪˈbɒk.ɹə.si/
• (US, Canada) IPA^(key): /fɪˈbɑ.kɹə.si/
• (General Australian) IPA^(key): /fɪˈbɔk.ɹə.si/

Noun

phobocracy (usually uncountable, plural phobocracies)

1. A system under which society is governed by fear; or a society of this kind.
   • 2006 June 20, Joshua, “The End of Sunshine?”, in Free Korea‎^[1]:

     Has international pressure has finally forced South Korea to abandon years of official apathy about the phobocracy that is North Korea?

   • 2008 February 4, Michael Chabon, “Obama vs. the Phobocracy”, in Washington Post‎^[2]:

     The point of Obama's candidacy is that the damaged state of American democracy is not the fault of George W. Bush and his minions, the corporate-controlled media, the insurance industry, the oil industry, lobbyists, terrorists, illegal immigrants or Satan. The point is that this mess is our fault. We let in the serpents and liars, we exchanged shining ideals for a handful of nails and some two-by-fours, and we did it by resorting to the simplest, deepest-seated and readiest method we possess as human beings for trying to make sense of the world: through our fear. America has become a phobocracy. […] But the most pitiable fear of all is the fear of disappointment, of having our hearts broken and our hopes dashed by this radiant, humane politician who seems not just with his words but with every step he takes, simply by the fact of his running at all, to promise so much for our country, for our future and for the eventual state of our national soul. I say "pitiable" because this fear of disappointment, which I hear underlying so many of the doubts that people express to me, is ultimately a fear of finding out the truth about ourselves and the extent of the mess that we have gotten ourselves into. If we do fight for Obama, work for him, believe in him, vote for him, and the man goes down to defeat by the big-money machines and the merchants of fear, then what hope will we have left to hold on to? Thus in the name of preserving hope do we disdain it. That is how a phobocracy maintains its grip on power.

   • 2017, Peter Sloterdijk, “On Pseudonymous Politics: Regarding Implicit and Explicit Misconceptions of Democracy”, in Victoria Stiles, transl., New Perspectives‎^[3], volume 25, number 2, pages 53, 65:

     In this passage as well as in the following three extracts, I would like to develop evidence for the thesis that in its current usage, the term “democracy” is charged with pseudonymous energy. In the everyday course of public-law semantics, it serves the purpose of concealing four more or less discernible forms of how political power is really exerted, which could never be consented to under their true names. I have named these four forms of intensive pseudonism: oligocracy, fiscocracy, mobocracy and phobocracy. Together these embody the darkened partial operation of nominal democracies. […] Through the progress of the French Revolution, the phobocratic syndrome has fixed itself in the memory of the modern age; it was deliberately and emphatically re-enacted in the Russian Revolution. Jacobinism was essentially a synthesis of eco- nomic dictatorship and arbitrary justice. In its instruments, the threat ranked above the ‘measures’, and the measures above the laws. Saint-Just’s Alsatian decree of the 3^rd Nivose Year II (1793) that every house whose inhabitants were convicted of usury was to be torn down – usury here referred to deviation from the state-decreed ‘maximum’ price for grain – betrays the phobocratic dynamic of a minority rule which is lashing out blindly. It is unnecessary to explain why generalised threats and measures lead to shortcomings. Phobocracy holds the characteristic of keeping its victims in check for as long as possible by denying them the ability to complain.

   • 2019 November 25, Fred Dalmasso, “Public Spheres, Counterpublics’ Fears and Syncopolitics”, in Humanities, volume 9, number 2, →DOI, page 31 seqq.:

     According to Mondzain, fear has become the most common social norm, a social bond that tends to replace any other forms of public discussion or solidarity. Fear binds and the most accomplished forms of power have become phobocracies, thus installing “the reign of fear that feeds off images and uses them to establish its domination.” (Mondzain 2007, p. 73, my translation).

Related terms

• phobocratic