Human society began with small isolated groups, typically of 20-30 individuals, that self-organised by developing individual and group skills and responsibilities to ensure survival. As societies became more complex, so too did the ways of organising and managing them. A few took upon themselves, or were nominated by the many, to take decisions that ensured the prosperity of all.
Today, the governments of China and India each manage the affairs of over a billion people, and most countries count their populations in the millions. How are such large populations managed as a single political entity? How do governments succeed in inspiring their populations to have a shared identity and collective aspirations?
India and China reinvented themselves after centuries of deflection of their traditional systems by colonial adventurism. To put it simplistically, India has done it by recalling its ancient civilisational achievements, China by gathering around Confucianism. Europe developed a collective identity as a privileged economic power.
World War II brought in its wake forces that transformed the cultural and political landscape of the entire world. Colonisation withdrew as a political presence but expanded its cultural presence. A new colonial force emerged from across the Atlantic. One of its first actions was the 1948 Marshall Plan, proposed by US Secretary of State George Marshall. It provided economic assistance to rebuild 17 western European economies shattered by World War II. Its goal was to stabilise democratic institutions, prevent the spread of communism and revive European industrialisation to boost global trade.
While the tools of control may have changed, the struggle to shape and manage the masses continues through the use of culture, education and media
More significantly, it sought to spread American ‘values and culture.’ The British colonists had spread their language, culture, laws and administrative systems across the world through physical occupation. The Americans realised the power of cultural expansion, mainly through the entertainment industry. Professor of Geography and Public Policy Allen J. Scott points out how the interests of Hollywood and the aims of Washington have consistently coincided.
As an example, the Marshall Plan linked levels of aid directly to recipients’ willingness to accept imports of US motion pictures. Today, US-led entertainment and culture has spread across the globe, not just in the form of cinema but also music, youth culture, casual clothing, video games, social media, idiomatic language and journalism, to name only a few things. Hong Kong cinema and K-Pop throws the cultural ball back across the net, and Bollywood aspires to.
At a subtler level, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco) was established in 1946 with the intent to prevent further wars. Its main author, Julian Huxley, an English evolutionary biologist and eugenicist, believed the more ‘genetically endowed’ should weed out the ‘genetically weaker’ populations through birth control, thus creating a universal environment of ‘harmony’ and a new world of order. Although he was widely travelled, it was to be, by default, the education and culture of the ‘superior gene pool’, Europeans, which we see manifested in the universal systems of education, museum culture and scientific research methods across the world.
However, the creation of a docile, compliant populace continues to elude the powers that be. Intellectual challenges came from non-Europeans, such as the French-West Indian psychiatrist and philosopher Frantz Fanon, author of Black Skin, White Masks, and a growing number of thinkers from China to Jamaica. Traditional cultures, literatures and religious beliefs are being revisited.
Authoritarian countries traditionally use force to suppress dissent, but today the same tactics are seen in Britain, Europe and America. The same devices, such as films, literature and history writing, are being used to challenge controlled narratives. The Tunisian film The Voice of Hind Rajab, which follows the Red Crescent response during the killing of a six-year-old Palestinian girl by the Israel Defence Forces (IDF), has won awards in the citadels of Western cinema. Women inventors erased from history books are being reinstated. The achievements of great Arab scholars and thinkers, such as Ibn Khaldun and Al Khwarizmi, are being acknowledged.
The struggle to regulate and contain the vast populace of the world by a vested elite continues. Tsarist Russia offered cheap vodka to keep its population compliant. Today, free internet keeps people physically isolated where once they would have gathered in cafés and street corners. Discrediting opponents no longer works, as multiple authors have a phone keyboard to present alternate views and the very devices that were thought to keep people socially distant have become rallying mechanisms for announcing street protests.
The revolution brewing is not the chaotic destructive mob of the French Revolution, but the pushback of a thoughtful, informed generation.
Durriya Kazi is a Karachi-based artist.
She may be reached at
durriyakazi1918@gmail.com
Published in Dawn, EOS, March 1st, 2026
