How Controlling People Use Fear To Manipulate

My favorite M. Night Shyamalan movie isn’t The Sixth Sense, it’s his lesser-known movie, The Village. I like it because it reminds me the stuff most people are afraid of in life isn’t worth fearing.

Photo Credit: Berend Broerse, Creative Commons

The story starts in a rural village in a time that seems a little confusing. There are no cars, no power tools, no electricity, and everybody’s clothes are handmade. There seem to be no roads into the village and no outside communication.

As an audience, we assume the story takes place in the late 1800’s.

Regardless, we learn pretty quickly that there are creatures in the woods haunting the village. The elders in the village tell stories about the atrocities that have taken place when people have left, and indeed, some of the monsters circle around the village and scare the villagers at night.

At the end of the film we learn, though, the story isn’t taking place in the past, it’s happening in the here and now. Somebody escapes the village to find a chain-link fence and a guard tower. The monsters in the woods turned out to be elders in costume who were scaring their own in order to keep them safe from the outside world.

I think about that story often when I look back on my life.

I grew up in a church that taught us to be afraid of people who didn’t think the same as we did. Everybody “out there” was a monster, it seemed, from racial minorities to Catholics to liberal Democrats.

As I grew up, I left all that and discovered there wasn’t anything to fear at all. As a Republican, I served on a task force in the Obama administration and as a twenty-something spent a few years on the most “Godless college campus in America.”

I understand why my old tribe wanted me to fear the outside world. In part, they were trying to protect me. That’s sweet, I guess, but it’s still manipulative and deceptive. And I believe part of the reason they wanted us to fear was because they didn’t want us to go away.

When you’re building a tribe, you have to send the elders out to scare the village every once in a while; otherwise, you’ll lose their support and “trust.”

Sadly, that’s the exact tactic that lost my trust.

Nobody likes to be manipulated or controlled except for unhealthy people who exchange their submission for supposed protection.

But what happens when those people get healthy?

It’s not that there aren’t monsters in the world, there are. It’s just that there are just as many monsters inside the church as outside. It turns out there are deceivers and manipulators in every tribe, regardless of what that tribe believes or represents.

These days, I no longer think one group of people as healthy and another unhealthy.

In fact, my community is no longer built around common beliefs; it’s built around common character.

I want to be surrounded by the good guys, whether they are Christian, atheists, Democrats or Republicans. I don’t care. What I care about is whether or not they are true and good and humble and able to have safe, healthy relationships.

This, of course, is confusing for people who live in “the village” to understand.

They are so convinced that “other people” are unsafe they are no longer capable of reaching outside their own beliefs to establish relationships. I find this sad because they are missing out on a world of experiences and friendships and memories they could have if they only knew the truth, that there are as many monsters inside their village as outside.

I wonder what it would look like to accept people and trust them based on their character rather than the things we’ve been taught to fear?

I’m heading more and more this direction, and I like it.