Fear Dressed Up as Authority: When the Freezer Door Stays Open

You open the freezer, take something out, and in the preoccupation of everyday life, you forget to close the door properly. At first nothing seems to change. The hum continues. The frost clings to the walls. The ice-cream remains firm. But somewhere deep within the structure a process has begun.

The temperature is rising imperceptibly. Micro-molecules of ice are loosening their crystalline hold. Over time… not all at once, but inevitably… the interior begins to thaw. And then, suddenly, you are looking at water pooling on the floor and food that has lost its integrity. Civilisation often collapses this way: slowly, quietly, structurally.

The Fear of Chaos, Dressed Up as Authority

We are living through a cultural moment where the system… by which I mean the complex mesh of political, economic, and institutional forces… has lost control not just of material conditions but of moral vision. Authority now feels weaker, not stronger. Its response is not confidence, but fear dressed up as authority, a phrase that captures both the anxiety within power and the way that anxiety is translated into social control.

This is not the bold totalitarianism of dystopian narrative. It is not the overt domination that bursts through with slogans and uniforms. It is subtler: rules, nudges, cameras, metrics, incentives, performance targets. Governance that tells us where to drive, how to live, where to work, how to think, with the gentle patina of efficiency and “for your own good.” One does not need internal passports or overt tyrants to create a world where freedom is burdened with bureaucracy.

This creeping managerial authority is the emotional and spiritual register many feel but seldom articulate. It isn’t force oppressed… it is friction imposed.

Neoliberalism and the Fragmenting of the Political Soul

If we want to trace the lineage of this crisis, we can look back towards the neoliberal era: the ideological insistence that the individual… unmediated by community, institution, or collective responsibility… is the ultimate unit of value. Wealth was supposed to trickle down, markets self-correct, and individuals, freed from tradition, would flourish. The social fabric did not flourish. It frayed.

Communities dissolved into competition. Meaning was outsourced to consumption. Dignity was quantified as productivity. Freedom became a commodity.

For decades nothing appeared to have changed… growth continued, technology advanced, markets expanded. But underneath, like those unseen degrees of warming in the forgotten freezer, structures of trust and moral authority thawed. Fragmentation set in political, cultural, personal. The system lost control of its own coherence.

Now, in the face of ecological precarity, economic instability, and cultural polarisation, institutions grasp at what they can manage: human behaviour itself.

Surveillance as Symptom: CCTV, Face Recognition, and the “Nothing to Hide” Argument

One of the most striking manifestations of this shift is the explosion of surveillance technologies, particularly closed-circuit television (CCTV) and automated face recognition systems. In cities across the UK, these technologies are increasingly deployed not only for specific criminal investigations but as a routine feature of public life. Why do we tolerate this? In public debate, a disturbing rationale often surfaces: “If I have nothing to hide, why should I care about being filmed?”

This response reveals a deeper cultural acquiescence…  a willingness to trade freedom for the promise of security or convenience. But that trade is neither neutral nor trivial.

Surveillance and the Loss of Moral Agency

The French philosopher Michel Foucault famously explored the dynamics of visibility and power in Discipline and Punish. He used the metaphor of the Panopticon… an architectural design in which prisoners never know whether they are being watched… to describe how modern power functions through internalised surveillance:

“Visibility is a trap.”
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish 

For Foucault, the essence of modern disciplinary power is precisely this: not the overt exercise of force, but the psychological effect of being potentially watched. The subject begins to regulate themselves because the possibility of observation becomes constant and invisible.

In this sense, CCTV and automated face recognition do not simply record behaviour; they shape it. They alter the field of possibility in which human action occurs. When we accept being filmed as ordinary, we are complicit in producing ourselves as legible subjects for systems of power. We begin to internalise the gaze of authority.

The “Nothing to Hide” Fallacy

The popular refrain … “If I have nothing to hide, I shouldn’t care about being filmed” … is often framed as commonsense. But it misunderstands both privacy and agency. Philosopher Daniel Solove has critiqued this argument extensively, noting that privacy is not merely about hiding wrongdoing but about preserving the space in which self-definition occurs free from external scrutiny:

“Privacy is not secrecy; it is the ability to control the conditions of one’s own visibility, and therefore to cultivate personal autonomy.”

Daniel Solove, Understanding Privacy

This insight reveals why surveillance… even when ostensibly benign… is a threat to human dignity. It is not the exposure of wrongdoing that is dangerous, but the persistent shaping of behaviour by an external gaze. When every movement can be recorded, categorized, and retrospectively analysed, we begin to live for the camera rather than for each other.

The Slipperiness of “Acceptance”

There is a profound moral danger in accepting surveillance because it feels helpful, or because we do not feel immediately threatened. The acceptance of external monitoring today… as a convenience, a security measure, or a cost of modern life… plants seed of future constraint. Power taken is rarely taken back. As legal scholar William Bradford notes in the context of regulatory expansion:

“Once governments assume powers… even for laudable ends… they are difficult to relinquish.”
William D. Bradford, Regulation Without the Public

The logic of surveillance often begins with narrow exceptions: to catch criminals, to deter terrorism, to manage traffic. But exceptions have a way of accreting into norms. The temperature rises a little more each time… until the interior has already thawed before we recognise the loss.

And it is precisely at this point… when systems intrude not only upon our movements but upon our inner sense of agency… that the question can no longer be addressed solely through the language of policy or technology. What is now at stake is cultural power: how human agency is formed, narrowed, or reclaimed through shared meaning and lived expression. It is here, at the boundary between managed behaviour and human freedom, that the work of Baz Kershaw becomes unexpectedly relevant.

Kershaw, a theatre scholar who has written about the politics of performance, argues that performance… especially radical, community-engaged, or oppositional work… is deeply political. Theatre is not separate from its social context but embedded within it; the stage is where ideology and culture meet, where norms are challenged and transformed. In The Politics of Performance: Radical Theatre as Cultural Intervention, Kershaw shows how cultural forms can either reinforce the status quo or act as sites of resistance and intervention. Theatre, in this sense, is not a distraction. It is a micro-political space, a place where human agency asserts itself against institutional sameness. The radical performer does not merely entertain; they intervene in culture.

Performance, Power, and the Politics of Culture

If we allow Kershaw’s frame to expand beyond the literal stage, we see something striking: our broader civic culture is in danger of becoming institutional theatre. By that, I mean a space where policies, metrics, and procedures replace moral imagination, where what matters is not whether people are thriving but whether they conform to systems of management. This is the “theatre-as-institution” Kershaw puts at odds with what performance (the lived, human event) can be… vivid, unpredictable, relational, and transformative.

What is at stake is not just how we move through space, but how we feel in the world; not just how we act, but how we believe in our own agency.

Climate Change as Analogy, Not Metaphor

There is a reason that climate change feels like a political analogue: both are structural processes that resist immediate perception. Just as the atmosphere warms imperceptibly until entire ecosystems shift, so too do the undercurrents of cultural authority change until everyday life feels precarious, constrained, and unfamiliar. The freezer door was left open long ago. The thaw began before we named it. Neoliberal fragmentation did not end with triumph. It ended with erosion. Not collapse in shock. But collapse in drip.

What Is Left to Us?

If the crisis of our era is not just about money or power, but about the loss of moral and cultural authority, then culture… in the broadest sense… becomes the place where resistance is possible. Not resistance as opposition for its own sake, but resistance as the renewal of human relationality, moral imagination, shared life, and communal meaning. We are not powerless. We are not irredeemable. The freezer door may have stayed open, but we can still build a kitchen worth living in.