A Society Governed Primarily by Fear Will Accept Measures It Would Otherwise Reject

From the Vault: This article is a masterclass in societal thought and moral urgency. We are resharing it because the ‘gems’ found within the story offer a blueprint for our current climate. Sometimes the best way to move forward is to study the path we’ve already walked.

The recent attack at Bondi Beach in Australia was evil, plain and undeniable, a violent rupture in a place associated with light, ease, and ordinary human joy, and the lives lost there deserve to be mourned without qualification or agenda. Families were shattered, a public space was violated, and a nation felt the familiar shock that follows when brutality intrudes where it does not belong. Any honest response must begin there, with grief grounded in the shared understanding that human life is sacred and its loss carries real and lasting weight.

Grief, however, is not a governing philosophy, nor should it be treated as a lever for immediate political certainty. It is a human response that requires time, reflection, and restraint if it is not to be exploited by impulse or authority. The desire to protect in moments of shock is understandable, even commendable in our society, but history repeatedly shows that when protection is pursued without patience by governments and bureaucrats, it generally mutates into something far less noble. Grief invites pause, while power, almost without exception, seeks momentum and fills a vacuum.

What now deserves examination is not the sincerity of public mourning in Australia, but the speed, confidence, and predictability of the political response that followed. Before the facts had settled and before the public had time to reflect, solutions were already circulating—not solutions aimed at understanding what had occurred, but solutions designed to reshape what would be permitted going forward. This sequence is not accidental, nor is it new. Tragedy shocks the public, fear narrows debate, and institutional machinery moves with remarkable efficiency.

In the days following the Bondi attack, Australia moved quickly toward expanded police powers, tighter restrictions on protest, renewed gun buyback initiatives, and broader measures framed as unavoidable requirements of public safety. Each proposal, when viewed alone, was presented as reasonable, measured, and necessary, yet taken together they revealed a clear and consistent direction of travel in which civil liberties were treated less as foundational rights and more as adjustable variables, contingent on circumstance and compliance. The response arrived fully formed, confident in its moral framing, and largely insulated from challenge.

This pattern has been reinforced globally in recent years, perhaps most starkly in the aftermath of October 7th in Israel—an event that was immediately presented to the world through tightly controlled narratives of horror, urgency, and moral absolutes. What occurred that day, in its full detail and complexity, remains obfuscated by competing claims, restricted investigations, and media coverage that largely mirrored official government framing, with major questions left unanswered. Yet certainty was demanded almost immediately, and from that certainty flowed an open-ended mandate for action that expanded rapidly beyond initial claims of necessity or proportionality.

What followed was not a careful, restrained response shaped by verified facts and transparent accountability, but an ongoing campaign justified by perpetual emergency and a bombardment of propaganda—one in which civilian devastation became normalized and entire populations were subjected to consequences far removed from the original event itself. The lesson is not about the legitimacy of defense, but about how quickly defense becomes doctrine once shock is allowed to override skepticism and once uncertainty is treated as disloyalty rather than prudence.

This is not a comparison of tragedies, nor an overt assertion of hidden coordination, but an observation about mechanism. I will let the reader investigate and decide whether correlation is causation in these cases. When societies are confronted with sudden violence, moral clarity is often replaced by moral urgency, and urgency compresses debate until questioning itself is framed as dangerous. Emergency language creates permission, and permission, once granted, rarely contracts back to its original scope. This is not an accident, in my view.

What makes this dynamic especially troubling is how prepared the solutions appear to be when the moment arrives. Policies that would normally require prolonged debate, legal scrutiny, and public consent surface almost instantly, complete with enforcement frameworks, media narratives, and moral framing already in place. They are not improvised in response to a crisis but activated by it. Over time, this creates the unsettling impression that tragedy functions less as disruption and more as trigger, because institutions have learned how to convert fear into authority.

A society governed primarily by fear will accept measures it would otherwise reject, gradually recalibrating its understanding of rights, responsibility, and obedience. Freedoms become conditional, dissent becomes suspect, and compliance is reframed as virtue rather than submission. Emergency powers introduced as temporary safeguards develop a habit of permanence, lingering long after the initial crisis has faded from public memory. The danger is not that these measures arrive suddenly, but that they remain quietly.

Tragedy demands justice, truth, and accountability, and it demands genuine care for the innocent whose lives are irrevocably altered by violence, regardless of the perpetrator. What it does not demand is reflexive surrender of liberty, nor unquestioning acceptance of authority cloaked in urgency. A free society must retain the capacity to grieve without abandoning its judgment, and to respond without forfeiting its principles.