Of Breads and Circuses

Politics rarely shapes societies in isolation. History offers an uncomfortable lens into how that reflection takes form.

(Image Credit - Nano Banana)

It is hard to be an Indian citizen today without feeling overwhelmed.

If you open any portal to the outside world, you are faced with the toughest of news, delivered in the most nonchalant of ways. It could be Delhi’s air quality (cough…temperature…cough) update or it could be yet another avoidable death of an Indian citizen due to reasons galore. It could be the Sisyphean task of uniting the two ends of the Gokhale Bridge in Mumbai or it could be the everlasting hope of seeing a completed Ejipura flyover in Bangalore. It could be the latest aviation disaster or it could be the latest religious one. But one thing is for sure, if you are an Indian, problems come at you, thick and fast, much like those PM 2.5 particles we are now expected to casually live with.

None of these problems are new. What is new is the feeling of accumulation. Too many issues, too little resolution, and not enough mental bandwidth to hold it all at once. When a country begins to feel exhausting, the instinctive response is to look for someone to blame. The government. The opposition (well, whatever is left of it). The bureaucracy. The system. Or, more vaguely, “the people”.

That instinct is deeply human. But it has consequences.

Psychologists have long observed that when individuals are exposed to persistent problems they feel powerless to change, they tend to drift toward one of two responses. Some disengage. They withdraw, tune out, and stop expecting improvement. Others grow increasingly hostile, directing their anger toward targets that feel emotionally available, even if they are not structurally responsible. Apathy and hostility are not opposites. They are siblings, born of the same exhaustion.

At a societal level, this matters because prolonged overwhelm does not usually produce patience for complexity. It produces a hunger for clarity. When problems feel endless and solutions feel distant, nuanced explanations lose appeal. Simple stories do better. Stories with villains do best.

This is the moment when politics changes character.

It is tempting to believe that politicians create divisions in society. History suggests something more unsettling. Divisions usually exist long before politicians arrive. What leaders do is discover which fault lines already carry emotional charge, and then organize political energy around them. Identity becomes easier to mobilize than outcomes. Belonging becomes easier to promise than reform.

The Late Roman Republic offers a remarkably familiar example. By the first century BCE, Rome was drowning in inequality, unemployment, and institutional gridlock. Small farmers had been displaced by large estates. Wealth was concentrating rapidly. Civic participation was declining, and meaningful reform moved slowly, if at all.

It was at this time that the Roman elites learned a pragmatic lesson. Structural reform was difficult and risky. Distraction was cheaper and faster. Grain doles eased immediate pain. Gladiatorial games absorbed public attention. Factional politics gave citizens identities to fight over, even as real power consolidated quietly. The Latin phrase panem et circenses (meaning bread and circuses) was not satire. It was a diagnosis of governance by diversion. Btw, if any of this sounds eerily familiar, it is because politicians are the best students of human history. Direct whatever blame you may want to at their doorstep, lack of understanding of human behaviour cannot be one.

A darker, more modern example comes from Weimar Germany. After World War I, Germany was economically broken, socially humiliated, and psychologically exhausted. Inflation wiped out savings. Unemployment soared. Institutions struggled to cope. The resentment already existed. What Adolf Hitler offered was not complexity, but simplification.

Economic pain became cultural decay. Cultural decay became the work of internal enemies. Jews, communists, liberals, intellectuals. Pick a group, assign blame, repeat relentlessly. Hitler did not invent hatred. He gave diffuse anxiety a focal point. In a society desperate for clarity, that proved devastatingly effective.

This is not a story about moral equivalence. It is a story about mechanism. When institutions feel weak and problems feel overwhelming, identity-based narratives outperform policy-based ones because they reduce cognitive load. They tell people who they are, who they are not, and who is responsible for their frustration.

India’s present moment sits uncomfortably close to this pattern.

India has always been diverse. Religion, caste, language, region, income, these are not new fault lines. They have existed for centuries. What changes over time is how politically useful they become. When economic mobility slows, when public services strain, when everyday life feels harder than it should, identity offers immediacy. It provides emotional certainty where governance feels abstract and slow.

Politicians do not need to manufacture these divisions. They only need to amplify them. And amplification works because it is rewarded. It delivers attention, loyalty, votes, and noise. In a crowded, overwhelmed public sphere, noise travels faster than nuance.

This is where an uncomfortable mirror appears.

If leaders respond to incentives, societies help create those incentives. Polarisation persists not only because it is imposed from above, but because it resonates below. When political discourse becomes a fight over identity rather than outcomes, it is worth asking who benefits from the distraction, and who pays the cost of delayed solutions.

None of this absolves leadership of responsibility. But it does complicate the story. Politics is not a one-way transmission of manipulation. It is a feedback loop. Leaders reflect society back to itself, often in an exaggerated form. Over time, that reflection hardens into reality.

History suggests that division is rarely a sudden collapse. It is a gradual adaptation. A way of coping with overload. A way of governing when fixing things feels harder than managing feelings.

And so the question is not only what our politicians are doing.

It is what kind of politics we are collectively rewarding when we are tired, angry, or disengaged.

A question worth reflecting on

When problems feel endless and exhausting, do we demand better solutions, or do we gravitate toward clearer enemies? And if our leaders increasingly resemble us, what version of ourselves are we choosing to amplify?

If you have thoughts on this,

Or write to us at plainsight@wyzr.in. We would love to feature some of the most thoughtful responses in a future edition.

What we are reading this week

The True Believer by Eric Hoffer

A sharp exploration of why mass movements thrive in moments of frustration and fatigue, and how identity and belonging often matter more than ideology when societies feel overwhelmed.

Until next time.

Best,
Utkarsh