The Roots of Modern Totalitarianism
This is the third installment of my The God of Scientism series. It may surprise some that one would even talk about totalitarianism in the contemporary western world. Why indeed? One reason would be to have a counterpoint to articles like the highly popular Intolerant Liberals which states: “[We] Progressives aren’t interested in diversity. We aren’t interested in inclusion. We aren’t interested in tolerance”. Why do so many resonate with this intolerance manifesto? To answer, I will simply defer to Hannah Arendt, who suffered from totalitarianism in Hitler’s Germany, WWII France and was an astute libertarian critic of modern US, perhaps more so than Ayn Rand whose family escaped from Soviet Union much earlier. While I escaped to US in 1982 to flee Czechoslovak communism and Ms Arendt escaped from German fascism I find our experiences rather similar. In her 1951 book Origins of Totalitarianism, Ms Arendt, a favorite student of German phenomenologist Martin Heidegger places the origins of totalitarianism firmly in Cartesian dualism of western science. I find her observations, similarly to the observation of another early US visitor, Alexis de Tocqueville, very valuable.
Her book starts with the claim that 19th century emerging middle class “wanted scientists, who could prove that great men, not aristocrats, were the representatives of the nation. English and German national feelings originated with middle class writers and not the nobility and were meant to extend the benefits of noble standards to all classes”. She equates Darwin’s and Marx’s naturalistic approaches which replace human action with the objectivistic “natural movement”. For Marx, survival of the fittest becomes the survival of most progressive class. After WWI there were millions of displaced stateless people in Europe and the greater the power of police has become, the more difficult it was for states to resist the temptation to deprive all citizens of legal status and rule them with omnipotent police. Arendt argues: “Logical extension is One World government. Only with a completely organized humanity will the loss of home and political status be identical with the expulsion from humanity altogether”. Cartesian dualism goes way back to Plato, who, negating Anaxagoras, said: “Not man, but a god, must be the measure of all things”. Arendt extrapolates: “The danger is that a global, universally interrelated civilization may produce barbarians from its own midst by forcing millions of people into conditions which, despite all appearances, are conditions of savages. Ideology of this novel form of government will be that of totalitarianism”.
“Totalitarianism differs essentially from other forms of oppression such as despotism, tyranny or a dictatorship. It develops entirely new political institutions and destroys all social, legal and political traditions of the country. Totalitarian governments always transformed classes into masses, supplanted party system with mass movement, shifted the centre of power from the army to the police and established a foreign policy openly directed toward world domination. Totalitarian lawfulness applies the law directly to mankind, without bothering with the behavior of men. It is expected to produce mankind as its end product”. Arendt lived in time of Hitler and Stalin, but this principle can be easily applied to Keynesian macro economic and political propaganda today. “Totalitarian policy does not replace one set of laws with another, it believes that it can do without consensus altogether and promises to release the fulfillment of law from all action and will of man”. Underlying Nazi’s belief in race laws as the expression of the law of nature in man is Darwin’s idea of man as the product of natural development, which does not necessarily stop with the present species of human beings as it is illustriously documented in Nick Bostrom’s vision of Transhumanist and Posthumanist beings with “vastly greater capacities than present human beings have”. The problem here is not that evolution will not continue, but that it is defined within boundaries of “objective” reality, outside of our perception. Term “law” changes its meaning: “from expressing the framework of stability within which human actions and motions can take place, it became the expression of the motion itself. Terror becomes total when it become independent of all opposition; it rules supreme when nobody any longer stands in its way. Terror is the essence of totalitarian domination. It is the execution of law of movement who’s ultimate goal is not the welfare of men or the interest of one man, but the fabrication of mankind, it eliminates individuals for the sake of the species, sacrifices the parts for the sake of the whole”. From the fetuses aborted by Planed Parenthood to the tragical deaths of individuals like Reddit activist Aaron Swartz, San Jose Mercury Newsjournalist Garry Webb or Rolling Stone reporter Mike Hastings, the present US reality seem to validate Arendt’s observations. Arendt continues: “Total terror, the essence of totalitarian government exists neither for or against men. From the totalitarian point of view, the fact that men are born and die can only be regarded as annoying interference with higher forces.
Arendt clearly blames Cartesian dualism with its emphasis on mind independent of our body and our world for the emergence of totalitarianism. “Ideologies always assume that one idea is sufficient to explain everything in the development from the premise and that no experience can teach us anything because everything is comprehended in this consistent logical deduction. The danger is that we are exchanging the freedom inherent in man’s capacity to think for the straight jacket of logic with which man can force himself almost as violently as if he is forced by some outside power”. Ideological thinking becomes independent of all experience and insist on “truer” reality conceded behind perceptible things. Hitler took pride in “ice cold reasoning” as Hegel did in “mercilessness of dialectic”, Marx in “logical process which like mighty tentacles seizes you on all sides” and Stalin praised Lenin for “irresistible force of logic which thoroughly overpowered his audience”. The original substance upon which ideologies based themselves, such as exploitation off the workers or the national aspirations in Germany, is gradually lost, devoured as it were, by the process itself and its “ice cold logic”. In the end, “Russian workers lost under Bolsheviks rule even those rights they had been granted under Tzarist oppression and German people suffered a kind of warfare which did not pay the slightest regard for the minimum requirements for survival of the German nation”.
Arendt offers hope. “Totalitarian rulers rely on the tyranny of logicality against which nothing stands but the great capacity of men to start something new. Freedom as an inner capacity of man is identical with the capacity to begin. Over the beginning, no logic, no cogent deduction can have any power, because its chain presupposes, in the form of a premise, the beginning”. Compulsion of terror on one side, which with iron band presses masses of isolated men together, and the self-coercive force of logical deduction on the other, which prepares each individual in his lonely isolation, need each other, to set the terror-rulled movement into motion. Terror can rule absolutely only over men who are isolated. This is why Burke talked about “men acting in concert”. Self coercion of totalitarian logic destroys man’s capacity for experience and thought just as certainly as his capacity for action. Only because we have common sense, that is only because not one man, but men in the plural, inhabit the earth can we trust our immediately sensual experience. The only capacity of the human mind which needs neither the self nor the other, nor the world, in order to function safely and which is as independent of experience as it is of thinking is the ability of logical reasoning”. Here Arendt anticipates clearly Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception whose preface states: “Analytical reflection knows nothing of the problem of other minds, or that of the world, because it insists that with the first glimmer of consciousness there appears in me theoretically the power of reaching some universal truth and that the other person are one and the same in the true world which is the unifier of minds”. For the “other” to be more than empty word, it is necessary that my existence should never be reduced to my bare awareness of existing, but that it should take in also the awareness the “one“ may have of it and thus include a historical situation”. Arendt observed that notion of processes characterized by strict self-evident logicality, from which apparently there is no escape, have some connection with loneliness, was noticed by Luther who once said that “there must be a God because man needs one being whom he can trust”. A lonely man, says Luther, “always deduces one thing from the other and thinks everything to be the worst”. To this Arendt adds: “Ice cold reasoning” and the “mighty tentacle of dialectics” appears as the last support in a world where nobody is reliable and nothing can be relied upon. “It is the inner coercion which tries to avoid contradictions, which seems to confirm a man’s identity outside all relationships with others. By teaching and glorifying the logical reasoning of loneliness, where man knows he will be utterly lost if ever he lets go of the first premise from which the whole process is being started, even the slim chance that loneliness can be transformed into solitude and logic into though is obliterated”.
Arendt concludes her book saying: “the condition under which we exist today in the field of politics are indeed threatened by these devastating sand storms. But their danger is not that they might establish a permanent world. Totalitarian domination, like tyranny, bears germs of its own destruction. There remains the truth that every end in history necessarily contains a new beginning. Beginning, before it becomes a historical event, is the supreme capacity of man, politically, it is identical with man’s freedom. This beginning is guaranteed by each new birth, it is indeed every man”.
Sixty five years after the book was published, “sand storms” are still raging. In response to British exit from EU in 2016, influential New York Times columnist James Treub, wrote an article for Washington Post owned Foreign Policy magazine, which bills itself as “trusted advisor for Global Leaders”. The article is titled: It’s Time for the Elites to Rise Up Against the Ignorant Masses, with subtitle: It’s not about the left vs. the right; it is about the sane vs. mindlessly angry. Apparently Mr Treub, an heir to Bloomingdale empire and a member of Council on Foreign Relations, has the ability to separate mankind into these two clearly distinct classes. Article claims that: “people are deluded and that the task of leadership is to un-delude them” These are the same exact words my high school teacher in communistic Czechoslovakia used to defend communistic censorship. Treub goes on, claiming that only elites believe in “reason” and expertise and “the party of accepting reality must be prepared to take on the party of denying reality and its enablers among those who know better. If that is the coming realignment, we should embrace it”. Mr Treub may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer but his words echo the famous quote from David Rockeffeler’s Memoirs: “Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as ‘internationalists’ and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure — one world, if you will. If that’s the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it.”
Fast forward to present. The capacity of Hollywood to produce conditions favorable to totalitarianism by applying an “iron band pressing masses of isolated men together”, was greatly enhanced by the advent of $200 million blockbuster movie, produced with the help of not only magnetic personalities and talented directors, but also with the help of modern computer generated cinematography, capable of making any type of context and belief appear completely realistic. While the viewer can be immersed in photorealistic worlds produced at cost of hundreds of millions of dollars for the price of a ticket, he does not get to participate in these phantasy worlds, he does not even get to talk to a person sitting next to him. Hollywood blockbusters create a world-wide population of very isolated men indeed.
Fortunately, modern man has an option to escape this isolation not only through his local social ties but also through internet social networks, person-to-person web communications like Twitter, Facebook, bitcoin, What’sApp, WeChat, AirBnB, Uber and new ones sure to emerge. There is a good reason to believe that Arendt’s message of hope in “new beginning” is real.
The fourth installment is called The Myth of Objectivity.
