I grew up in Jakarta, where fear had a specific shape. Traffic that could trap you for hours, flooding that came without warning and the casual violence of a city built on precarity. My mother’s anxieties were immediate and material:will the rain flood the streets; will the protest turn violent; will the rupiah collapse again?
When I moved to the US, I thought I had left those fears behind, but fear in St. Louis took place differently. Instead of flooding: healthcare anxiety, mass shootings and artificial intelligence in the job market dominated. I worry about climate collapse in the abstract, ICE deportations in the particular. Labeling fear as “being informed,” this new definition goes beyond our typical boundaries of the word and makes us certain.
This is what makes fear diagnostic: a rhetoric that reveals what we have already decided is true about the world.
Fear compresses complexity into clarity, and migration becomes the symbol onto which deeper cultural disorientation is projected.
Recent reporting shows how migration narratives make this visible. A 2024 analysis by The Marshall Project analyzed over 12,000 immigration-related statements by presidential candidates, finding that Trump referred to unauthorized immigrants as criminals at least 575 times, as coming from prisons, jails, and mental institutions no less than 560 times, and described construction of a border wall as essential to public safety 675 times: claims the report found to be either false or highly misleading. The language functions less as a description of border dynamics and more as a narrative shortcut for a world that feels unrecognizable. Phrases like “invasion,” “replacement,” and “losing our country” resonate not because people fear literal border crossings, but because they offer a storyline for diffuse uncertainty: here is the problem, here is the enemy, here is what we are losing. It is a simplification tool. Fear compresses complexity into clarity, and migration becomes the symbol onto which deeper cultural disorientation is projected.
The same compression happens online, only faster. In March 2024, deepfake videos of presidential candidates were circulated before being debunked. Even after confirmation they were AI generated, the emotional impact had already settled. A 2025 Nielsen study of over 6,000 respondents reported in Forbes found that 55% of audiences feel uncomfortable on websites that rely heavily on AI-generated content, and nearly half do not trust brands advertising on such sites. People did not become more rigorous in verification but retreated into pre‑existing beliefs instead. Fear of being deceived made them more susceptible to narratives that confirmed what they already suspected, the deepfakes affirming distrust rather than creating it. This is fear functioning as filter rather than response. It fits neatly into existing anxieties about manipulation, media bias, or political antagonism.
Economic precarity follows the same pattern. A friend once shared with me: “My dad bought a house at 24. I am 20 and applying to jobs that pay less than my rent.” The fear here is not about resumes or LinkedIn optimization, it is about discovering that the paths that once promised stability have eroded, and nothing coherent has replaced them. A 2022 report by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue shows how “manosphere” communities often defined as incels, men’s rights activists andpickup artists are united by a shared ideology of male victimhood, “specifically that women and feminism are at fault for the ‘lowly’ status at which modern men find themselves.” Young men searching for explanations for unemployment or unaffordable housing encounter a ready-made framework that redirects structural grievance into gender antagonism. Yes, the labor market is unstable, social mobility has stalled and the future looks nothing like the one their parents had, but the explanation offered, that gender equality destabilized everything, is simple. It provides an enemy and offers nostalgia as the solution.
These dynamics are not about individual pathology. They are about vulnerability. When structural explanations feel too abstract or too implicating of systems beyond individual control, people reach for stories that restore clarity: frameworks that make instability legible, where fear becomes the organizing principle.
These dynamics are not about individual pathology. They are about vulnerability.
Fear is not neutral. It is shaped long before we name it, structured by what we were taught to fear, what we inherited from family, culture, or school, and what we believe we stand to lose. Some fears arrive disguised as common sense like strangers, instability, outsiders, failure, adopted so early they become part of identity. Others are developed through cultural narratives about safety and belonging: a society that glorifies self‑reliance learns to fear dependency whereas a society built on borders learns to fear their erosion. These inherited logics determine which threats feel plausible and which stories resonate, but the most revealing fears are the ones tied to loss. Migration becomes frightening when it is framed as a loss of cultural coherence. AI becomes frightening when it is framed as a loss of shared reality. Economic precarity becomes frightening when it is framed as a loss of the future one was promised.
Political actors understand this function better than we do. They know fear does not need to be rational to be effective. One research published in the British Journal of Political Science (Huber et al., 2025) shows how precise this manipulation can be: simply asking voters to imagine a political opponent being happy if they stayed home on Election Day, what they called the ‘Gloating Villain treatment’, increased voter turnout by 1.3 to 1.7 percentage points. The mechanism was anticipated anger, not just anger in the moment. This means emotions do not need to be real to be effective, they just need to be made imaginable. The mechanism is consistent: repetition, emotional storytelling, nostalgia, moral panic. Repetition works because fear requires reinforcement. A single exposure to a threatening narrative produces skepticism; repeated exposure produces familiarity, and familiarity produces plausibility. Next, emotional storytelling personalizes structural problems: instead of discussing immigration policy through statistics about labor markets or asylum processing, the narrative becomes about a specific victim: the family whose daughter was killed, the worker whose job was taken, the neighborhood that “changed”. The story bypasses rational evaluation and triggers immediate emotional identification. Nostalgia deepens the effect by offering a past that feels safer than the present, regardless of whether it ever existed. ‘Make America Great Again’ is not simply a policy platform, it is an emotional promise that the confusion of the present can be resolved by returning to an imagined past. The past itself is irrelevant. What matters is the emotional relief of believing things can be fixed. Moral panic then frames the threat as existential: it is not about policy disagreement or cultural change; it is about survival of civilization, protection of children, preservation of everything that matters. When stakes are framed this way, compromise becomes betrayal and nuance becomes weakness. And this is exactly how fear gets weaponized: take real anxiety and offer a simple explanation, take a structural problem and personalize it, take a complex fear and turn it into a clear enemy. It works because we want it to work, because an enemy you can name is less terrifying than a system you cannot change or a future you cannot predict.
Once fear becomes identity, once it is not just something you feel but something you are, you have an investment in staying afraid. Because if the threat goes away, who are you?
But when fear becomes your framework for understanding the world, you stop being curious. You stop asking whether your interpretation is accurate and you choose the story that makes sense of your fear rather than the one that makes sense of the world. Once fear becomes identity, once it is not just something you feel but something you are, you have an investment in staying afraid. Because if the threat goes away, who are you? What holds your worldview together? This is what I mean when I say fear reveals more than belief. It exposes what we value, what we think we deserve, what we imagine we have a right to expect from the future. It shows us where we feel vulnerable and where we place our own sense of self and belonging. When people fear demographic change, they are revealing anxiety about cultural legibility. When people fear AI, they are revealing anxiety about obsolescence and worth. When people fear economic precarity, they are revealing anxiety about dignity and rest and the possibility of building something lasting. The fears themselves are diagnostic. They tell us what kind of world we think we’re living in and what kind of world we think we deserve.
Here is the tension: I know these narratives are designed to manipulate me. I know the algorithm optimizes for outrage. I know the threat is probably less imminent than it feels. But I still feel it. Sometimes I wonder if this is what my parents felt during Reformasi, living through a time where rules were rewritten in real time and no one knew what came next. The difference is they did not have Twitter and so the fear moved slower. Ours has none of that: it is instant and global.
I think back to Jakarta. My mother’s fears were specific: the flood, the rupiah, the streets. They had edges she could trace. What I have learned living between two cities, two value systems, two ways of being afraid, is that the most dangerous fears are the ones without edges; the shapeless ones political rhetoric is always eager to fill in for us. Maybe fear is not a sign of what we believe. Maybe it is a sign of what we have not yet learned to articulate about what we value, what we need, what we think we deserve from the future. Learning to sit with that uncertainty, to resist the compression of fear into clarity, might be the quietest political act we have left.
Alexa Djalal ‘28 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences and can be reached at a.djalal@wustl.edu.