Manufactured folk devils serve ruling elites as tools of control

Evidence

Fear is the novel’s most useful commodity. Security gurus and government apparatchiks privately emphasize the value of keeping citizens in fear and thus quiescent. As the Doll remarks to her best friend, Sally Wilder, “People like fear. We all want to be frightened and we all want somebody to tell us how to live.… [I]f you can make up a terrorist you’ve given people the Devil. They love the Devil. They need the Devil. That’s my job. You get me?” (166). In his classic study Folk Devils and Moral Panics, Stanley Cohen shows how collective fears are amplified by the media and made to focus on a symbolic Other (the “folk devil”) but at the same time expose important fault lines within society. Flanagan’s novel suggests that stoking such fears became a central tactic of governance after 9/11, invoked in support of the expansion of Western military power and state surveillance. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 373

Categorization

• XREF: This directly connects to the reader’s core project: the moral-panic mechanism (Cohen) is the analytical vocabulary for reading whether Hamid and Naqvi contest or reinforce the folk-devil construction. — connects to: State actors manufacture folk devils that the media then amplify as secondary definers
• DEFINE: Clarifies the folk devil concept from Cohen’s work as the symbolic Other fears are focused on.