A demagogue is someone who gains power by appealing to the emotions and fears of people, rather than reason and logic.

Democracy is the perfect breeding ground for demagogues. In an autocracy, the tools and conditions necessary for a demagogue to take over are not present. A tyrant maintains control through control, not necessarily public support, but a demagogue needs others to lift him to the throne. What he does after depends on his skills. If he can subvert the system to his favor, like Hitler, he can transition neatly to dictator and free himself of the necessity of putting on a sideshow for the public. Otherwise, he has to master the playbook that brought him into public favor in the first place.

What the people like is a good show. In a democracy, what gets you elected is not virtue, but attention. Even a virtuous act will have multiple interpretations based on who witnesses it and who talks about it. Hence, it is impossible to persuade everyone that your act is virtuous. The good news is that you do not need to persuade everyone. You only need to persuade a majority. If you are only going to persuade people, the nature of your actions do not matter. You can amplify a positive act. You can spin a negative act as a meta-positive act that questions the values of the system. You can even squeeze something out of a neutral gesture. Since the virtue of your acts does not really matter in their effectiveness in persuading people, you must not worry too much about doing the right thing, i.e developing a conscience. What you instead need to do is to develop a facade of absolute sincerity and conviction, that you are doing the right thing at all times, even in the moments when you confess that you have done the wrong thing. It is in the strength of your conviction that the strength of your performance lies, and that is what will convince people.

At first, you need to sway a core group of people. Swaying a core group of people has self-perpetuating benefits. Once someone supports you and speaks on your behalf, he wouldn’t want to look like a fool to the people he preached to you about. He will defend even your heinous actions by separating your personal life from your public life, creating a case for why you are the exception to the rule, or denying that the sky is blue even when a picture is pushed under his nose. Of course, to spark such fanaticism, you need to be a fanatic believer in yourself. If you are following this essay and taking notes about what you need to do, having qualms at every step about whether you can change your established way of doing things to become a remorseless demagogue, I’m sorry to say that you, like me, can probably not tread this path. But if at every step, you were nodding along, thinking “Yes, this is what I do. It makes absolute sense. At last I have someone who understands the necessity of me doing what I do,” then you are a natural candidate for demagoguery and you should read on.

I said that a demagogue needs a populist audience, and the audience needs a show. But for the show to go on, you also need media. If the media are held by an independent entity, you might need to coax or bribe or entice them to do your bidding. If the media is popular culture, like cinema or songs, you are perfectly positioned to pitch your larger than life persona directly into the hearts of people. If the media is social media, you do not need to depend on anyone to speak for you. All you need is for people to notice you, talk about you, and keep spreading the word. Of course, these are simple instructions, but they are not easy. People like different people for different reasons, but they do not vote every person they like on a passing basis.

You know whom people vote for? They vote for daddies. I’m not being humorous here. Why does a population become populist in the first place? They do not get the education that the sophisticated elites think they need, or the culture that will let them belong. For this, they are judged as classless boors by the very people they aspire to be like, and rejected, they turn to to the comfort of their homes. They crave the certainty and hope for a better life they cannot get from the system that is out of their reach from their parents. But their parents have done no better. They turn to religion. But though they suspect God exists, he doesn’t talk to them. And that is when you, the chosen one, the daddy, arrive. You tell them that you are God’s representative, and you will set everything right. Hush now, children, daddy is here and everything will be alright. Tomorrow will be a glorious day and I will show you what marvelous things we can accomplish together. As soon as you vote daddy in.

Let’s talk about religion. You ever notice that demagogues usually come to power when the religious vibes in the air are kind of high? That isn’t an accident. People turn to religion as a vessel to stuff all their feelings that they are uncomfortable with. They used to turn to science, when it promised that they could control all the uncertainties around them, and for a while, science was pretty useful in controlling the wild elements. But now we’re at a point where the savior has become the monster, and people are running away from science because they think we don’t know how to get science to serve us any more. We know how to get science to serve us alright. We just get it to serve a very limited “us”, not all of us. And the others turn to religion. When you speak the language of religion, they trust you, and they understand. You will deliver them from the darkness of science to the light of religion.

The ones who will elevate you will be the ones that the elites have shunned. Have you noticed that whenever demagogues are elected, the ones who can read and write go around like gaping goldfishes with their mouths open, muttering “I can’t believe that happened. How did that happen? The country has gone to the dogs. They’re all idiots. Nobody can save us now.” These are usually the same people who are so confident that you can never make it as a demagogue. Their confidence is rooted in the ignorance of the very world they have sequestered themselves in glass bubbles to avoid. They did not want anything to do with the crude people, they mocked their attempts to become like them, and now that you have spoken the language of the crudes who outnumber them and been elected to power, they bundle you with the crudes as well. Crude is what they call your followers. They cannot process that maybe your followers are just different, not crude. And maybe someday, there will be people different from your followers, whom your followers will call crude. If you don’t speak their language and they outnumber you (and you are still in a democracy), you will lose. But you will have a long time to become multilingual.

You must remember though, that what got you into the ruler’s chair is your performance. It’s not who you are as a person, not who you feel yourself to be deep inside. As long as you play God’s messenger, as long as you play daddy, they will love you and they will excuse every action of yours that you perform with confidence. Falter a bit, show a glimpse of conscience or self-doubt, and there you sow the seeds of your fall.