When Amira first stepped onto the tram, the city was still arguing with itself. Posters for a new public-housing initiative were half-peeled beside glossy portraits of a man so carefully lit he seemed carved from light. He had a broad smile and a name that fit on a T-shirt. People pointed at him like they pointed at the moon—less to look and more to promise themselves something by looking.
Amira taught political theory to late-night students and spent her free hours in translation work. She had read the old essays—Gustave Le Bon on crowds, Antonio Gramsci on cultural hegemony, Robert Michels on the iron law of oligarchy—and they sat in her mind like a set of lenses. They showed the same thing from different angles: power does not float above society like a weather system; it is stitched into the fabric of consent, attention, and repeated ritual. What looked like raw force was often a pattern of beliefs and practices that made rule feel inevitable.
The man on the poster—Mayor Halim, the city’s newly minted celebrity—was not a singular cause so much as the visible knot where several threads met. There were policy failures to be angry about, yes, but there were also influencers who cropped his headlines into three-second loops, fans who wrote him into poetry on late-night message boards, and municipal PR that fed a curated narrative into every search. Outside the old arguments about coercion and consent, a new mechanism had joined the machine: algorithmic attention. Platforms that sorted what people saw rewarded emotionally intense signals; the more a clip stirred feeling—outrage, pity, pride—the more it spread. That feedback loop made certain images look like destiny.
One winter night, Amira agreed to speak on a panel about leadership. A young reporter asked her, “Is Halim a hero, or did we make him one?” Amira smiled and told a story.
“A hero,” she said, “is an interface between an idea and a person. Societies long for shorthand—a figure who embodies courage, sacrifice, or defiance—because it lets us outsource complexity. We don’t have to argue through every policy when we can point to a face and say, ‘there: that’s our courage.’” People in the room nodded. She added, “That projection can be generous or dangerous. The individual who becomes a hero rarely sees themselves as the symbol; the public’s image is an overlay.”
Her students learned this the hard way. There was a municipal volunteer—Rashid—who spent three winters building a network of free clinics in the city’s districts. The press called him “the fixer,” the online fandom called him “Pak,” and a late-night talk show declared him a savior. Rashid had not asked for murals. He kept saying, in interviews, that the clinics were a collective project. But the murals stayed. Once the symbol coalesced, stories flattened: nuance gave way to narrative. The crowd stitched its morals to his back and, with that, to the political uses the crowd’s leaders found convenient. When a crisis came—an electrical blackout that exposed infrastructural neglect—those who had power lined the crowd’s feelings into policy moves that bolstered their hold. The crowd’s desire had produced instruments of power.
Amira’s favorite classroom trick was to point to mechanisms rather than villains. “Look,” she’d say, “at the chain: ideology and ritual produce consent; consent produces institutions; institutions reproduce elites.” She borrowed Michels’s blunt conclusion—bureaucracy tends to produce its own masters—and showed how modern institutions now include social-media ecosystems that speed this reproduction. The iron law had not been repealed; it simply acquired new engines.
One student, Mina, pressed her after class. “If the crowd wants a dictator, does that mean they deserve one?” Mina asked, frightened by the simplicity of the proposition.
Amira’s answer was a refusal of either/or. “Public desire is not a single demand,” she said. “It’s an aggregate of grievances, hopes, boredom, and stories. Sometimes societies channel those into deliberation: elections, debates, unions. Other times the channel narrows: a single image, a viral promise, a charismatic voice. Dictatorship, when it arrives, is less an accident than the end-point of repeated choices—when institutions fail to translate grievances into accountable power, and when attention markets reward simplicity over deliberation.” She pointed out that modern information infrastructures can accelerate both democratic conversation and its collapse; they make hero-production cheap and relentless.
The story did not stop in a lecture hall. Years later, Amira watched as a former volunteer—Rashid—stood at a podium under spotlights. He spoke well; his words were supple, promising stability in exchange for unity. Parts of the crowd cheered, parts were silent, and some—who had once called him savior—felt betrayed when the clinics were quietly folded into a broader municipal contract with an allied firm. The hero’s image, once affixed, made those bargains easier to rationalize. People told themselves the tradeoffs were for someone they already trusted.
Amira wrote an essay about this: not a moralizing piece but a map. She named what had happened—projection, ritual, algorithm, institutional closure—and she traced how each step reinforced the next. She urged small reforms: strengthen civic translation (forums, binding town councils), limit algorithmic feedback loops that privilege emotional virality over verified fact, protect independent civic reporting so that symbols could be interrogated instead of worshiped. Her prescriptions were technical and incremental, because she had learned from Gramsci that power is most durable when it manufactures consent quietly, and from contemporary studies that information systems are baked into that manufacturing.
In the end, the book did not stop a campaign or dry up any murals. But in the city’s cafés, the question changed from “Who is our hero?” to “Why does this hero matter to us now?” It was an ugly improvement: it forced people back into conversation. For Amira, that was the point. Power could not exist without being desired—but desire could be educated. The project of a democratic life, she believed, was to make that desire deliberate again.
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