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Governments use fear of threats at home and abroad to increase their power and abridge individual freedom. If there is any singular lesson in Antiwar.com’s motto,\u00a0War is the Health of the State<\/em><\/a>, that is it.<\/p>\n Peter Ludlow,\u00a0a professor of philosophy at Northwestern University, has a must-read piece<\/a> in the New York Times<\/em> Opinion Pages that explores how the state uses “fear to induce the rollback of individual rights” and fortify its hold on power.<\/p>\n The 20th century was littered with wars and ethnic cleansings that were propelled in large measure by fear of a neighboring state or political or ethnic group. Given this obvious truth, one might suppose that modern democratic states, with the lessons of history at hand, would seek to minimize fear \u2014 or at least minimize its effect on deliberative decision-making in both foreign and domestic policy.<\/p>\n But today the opposite is frequently true.\u00a0Even democracies founded in the principles of liberty and the common good often take the path of more authoritarian states. They don\u2019t work to minimize fear, but use it to exert control over the populace and serve the government\u2019s principle aim: consolidating power.<\/p>\n …Philosophers have long noted the utility of fear to the state. Machiavelli notoriously argued that a good leader should induce fear in the populace in order to control the rabble.<\/p>\n Hobbes in \u201cThe Leviathan\u201d argued that fear effectively motivates the creation of a social contract in which citizens cede their freedoms to the sovereign. The people understandably want to be safe from harm. The ruler imposes security and order in exchange for the surrender of certain public freedoms.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Of course, this has relevance for one of the hottest issues of the day. Everything about the debate over NSA surveillance is based in fear. Politicians warn that Edward Snowden’s decision to inform the American people of what their government is doing in the shadows helps our enemies and endangers our safety. NSA surveillance that encroaches on Americans’ liberty and privacy is justified, they say, because evil terrorists are out to kill us at every moment in every corner of the world.<\/p>\n We’re essentially supposed to take these arguments on faith, considering no one has been able to produce a single piece of evidence demonstrating Snowden’s leaks endangered our security. Likewise, several federal judges, congressional committees<\/a>, and independent studies<\/a> have concluded that there is<\/a> no evidence<\/a> that the meta-data program, for instance, has done anything to stop terrorist attacks on the U.S.<\/p>\n As Jay Stanley of the ACLU put it recently<\/a>, “national security is the justification for our security establishment\u2019s existence and powers, but self-preservation, defense of prerogatives and reputation, and expansion of powers is truly mission number one.”<\/p>\n