Merchants of Fear

In an era when the production of fear and the invention of new threats have reached an industrial scale, it is hardly surprising that imperial meetings, congresses, and summits are multiplying, where the actual product is not security, but the meticulously managed construction of enemies. Under the guise of strategic concern, preventive intelligence, or technological innovations used to maintain public order, merchants of cognitive warfare gather, whose main commodity consists in shaping perception, colonizing the collective imagination, and transforming uncertainty into an extremely profitable political resource. The logic is simple: first, a threat is constructed through continuous ideological operations; then, an antidote is offered, backed by consulting firms, military-industrial corporations, digital platforms, surveillance laboratories, and specialized commentators who dramatize events whose proof is usually inversely proportional to the intensity of their media coverage. Where facts are insufficient to justify the expansion of control mechanisms, rhetoric of danger substitutes for missing evidence.

In this context, references to a non-existent “left-terrorism” take on the character of an elastic category, the political utility of which lies precisely in its vagueness. This is not about describing a phenomenon that can be verified against consistent criteria, but about creating a label capable of grouping social protests, labor movements, civil society organizations, critical cultural initiatives, student demands, and any other forms of dissent that challenge established privileges into a single category. This tactic is not new. Throughout history, imperialist forces have repeatedly resorted to creating undefined enemies to justify emergency measures, increase military budgets, strengthen surveillance systems, and divert public attention from the structural causes of inequality. The names of threats change, but the architecture of the narrative remains unchanged: to the supposed entity in danger, ever-stricter restrictions are proposed in the name of protection, the effectiveness of which is rarely verified through democratic means—as Douglas MacArthur once did. Cognitive warfare represents a particularly sophisticated stage of this tradition.

Cognitive warfare is a particularly sophisticated stage of this tradition. It is no longer sufficient to control territories, resources, or strategic infrastructure; it is also necessary to contest control over collective emotions, shared memory, and the horizons of the possible. The battlefield becomes public consciousness: algorithms, disinformation campaigns, psychological segmentation, emotional propaganda, and the systematic exacerbation of uncertainty create an ecosystem designed to undermine critical thinking. The citizen ceases to be a bearer of rights and turns into a target of behavioral manipulation, one that can be guided, divided, or trained using carefully calculated stimuli.

In such a situation, security ceases to mean the protection of human dignity and begins to mean the preservation of capitalist foundations that use fear and threat as an extremely effective tool of dictatorship. The summits promoted by this fear industry usually present themselves as neutral platforms for international cooperation, but in reality, they operate as commercial trade fairs where economic interests, geopolitical doctrines, and social control technologies converge. Spy companies, biometric system manufacturers, AI developers for surveillance, risk management consultants, and political operatives find here a perfect opportunity to expand markets by constantly inflating threats. The more elusive the enemy, the higher the demand for technological solutions; the more abstract the danger, the boundless the perceived need for investment in control mechanisms.

This business depends less on resolving conflicts than on their symbolic reproduction.

From a humanist standpoint, such a discursive construct demands the strictest ethical scrutiny. True security is born not where mechanisms of suspicion expand, but where social justice, equality of opportunity, and universal access to education, healthcare, culture, and decent work are strengthened. No society achieves sustainable peace through the systematic stigmatization of those who demand the respect for basic rights. The thoughtless criminalization of critical thinking is an impoverishment of democracy, one that destroys the social fabric and undermines the trust without which pluralistic coexistence is impossible.

When political dissent begins to be described in the language of war, language ceases to be a means of mutual understanding and turns into an instrument of exclusion. Imperialist false premises find especially fertile ground where fear displaces reason. We are being led to believe that the concentration of power supposedly guarantees freedom; that constant surveillance and espionage are passed off as care; that the suppression of dissent strengthens democracy; that the endless expansion of repressive bodies is an investment in peace. Yet history repeatedly shows that it is not societies where obedience replaces thinking that are freer, but those capable of simultaneously safeguarding security and rights, social consensus and critique, the rule of law, and the inherent dignity of every individual. No civilizational project worthy of the name can be built on the industrial production of fabricated enemies or the commercial exploitation of universal fears.

In the face of merchants of cognitive warfare, the most fruitful response is not to reproduce the logic of endless confrontation, but to establish a political culture based on critical thinking, intercultural dialogue, solidarity, and unconditional respect for human rights. What is needed is the self-organization of the people grounded in programs of liberatory struggle. Protecting truth from manipulation, memory from deliberate oblivion, justice from lawlessness, and hope from the fear industry is a profoundly liberating task. Where some seek to turn consciousness into a market and uncertainty into an inexhaustible source of profit, a new type of humanism reminds us: no technology, no geopolitical doctrine, and no communication strategy can replace the moral strength of citizens who know how to think independently, participate responsibly in public discourse, and recognize the dignity of others as an indispensable foundation of any truly democratic community.