Understanding Totalitarianism
My attempt to understand and articulate the dangers of totalitarianism today as outlined by Matters Desmet in The Psychology of Totalitarianism
We often look at the violent regimes of our past in reference to who their leaders were. Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Mussolini often come to mind as the causes behind the atrocities of the 20th Century. But there was something unique to those regimes. Something that lead us to need a different descriptor. Something about the extremes to which the individuals in those populations went to in service of those leaders and more specifically, their ideologies. We’ve named this unique brand of absurdity, totalitarianism.
Totalitarianism is unique as compared to authoritarian dictatorships of the past in that there is a different psychological factor at play. Authoritarian dictatorships used the fear of political violence as a means to subdue the population and enforce their will. But totalitarianism is different in that individuals within the population are characterized by a sense of selflessness which Professor Mattias Desmet describes as an "exaggerated willingness of individuals to sacrifice their own personal interests out of solidarity with the collective, a profound intolerance of dissident voices, and pronounced susceptibility to pseudo-scientific indoctrination and propaganda."
Totalitarianism as we see it today is composed of three main ingredients:
A population level belief that we are unlimited in our ability to understand and control our world.
The desire to control our world.
A population primed in its sense of isolation, loneliness, anxiety and lack of meaning to desperately seek out a sense of belonging with other humans.
Our secular movement towards science and reason as our only guiding principles to understand the world give us the first factor, the anxiety that comes with knowing our own mortality gives us the second, and a successive progression away from nature and into disconnectedness through technology gives us the third.
The belief in the scientific method as the key to understanding everything in the natural world leads us to believe we can understand then control everything. Because we know that we are mortal and fragile, we have the desire to control the natural world as a hedge against our own mortality and fragility. The knowledge of our own mortality and fragility creates an ever present sense of anxiety which we believe can be addressed through more and more control of the natural world.
But when that anxiety doesn’t go away, or even grows, we seek more control.
The means of control often puts us in a position to generate more anxiety as the control mechanisms separate us from the natural world. The natural world and its variability reminded us of how unpredictable and complicated the world really is. Moving away from the natural world into a mechanized setting reduces our contact with that natural unpredictability and reduces our contact with other humans. This negative feedback loop grows and feeds into itself until the means of control evolve and contribute to further heightened levels of anxiety used to rationalize totalitarianism: total control.
But there is one more aspect of totalitarianism that is missing from this equation.
As we have witnessed with the totalitarian regimes of the 19th Century, there was an element of absurdity around the atrocities committed in service of this ideology. And it was not completely top down driven. The people themselves became willing participants in these deranged societies. As a group of people, high in anxiety with a need to control their environment become aware of a perceived threat, they latch onto defense mechanisms in response to that perceived threat as the source of their anxiety.
It mirrors what any individual person does with perceived threats, but on a population level.
By naming the source of anxiety they are more secure in understanding that anxiety, which makes them incredibly aggressive towards any dissenting voices, and easily susceptible to any evidence, factually true or not, that supports this framework. This aggression can and has lead to censorship, bullying, physical violence, torture, and death.
To understand how we arrived in this position, Desmet takes us to an Italian cathedral in the summer of 1582.
Unlimited Control
In the summer of 1582, Galileo discovered what turned out to be a means to measure time. While sitting in the cathedral of Pisa, a four-hundred year old Romanesque cathedral in Italy, he noticed that a chandelier would swing to and fro as the light breeze from an opened, vaulted window, snuck in during that summer day. The sermon starts to fade into the background as Galileo notices something he thought to be peculiar, with which he soon was obsessed: no matter how far the breeze pushed the chandelier, it always took the same amount of time to return to its original, still position. Big swing or little swing did not matter. It seemed to always take the same amount of time to settle back down. In studying this phenomenon, he was able to consistently measure time. This is why many old, tall clocks have a pendulum attached to them today.
If there is a consistency to this phenomenon, we can measure time. So maybe there is a consistency to everything else. And if so, we can measure and understand everything else as well. This is the spirit with which we can understand the shift in mindset that characterizes what is known as the Enlightenment. A people who can measure and manipulate, seek to measure and manipulate, believing that they are no longer subject to the whims of their unpredictable environment.
Today, that ability to measure and control has expanded to every corner of our environments when we heat or cool our homes. We extend the amount of time we have to work or play with the light bulb. We use technology to produce so much food that obesity's more of a problem than starvation.
But that ability to manipulate comes with some consequences.
Two major consequences are what we'll look at here: A constant increase in the search for more means of control, and a separation from the unpredictability of the natural world.
Existential angst
What is it that differentiates humans from animals? Is it our science? Our reason? Our language? Likely, it's all of these things to some extent and maybe more. For the purpose of connecting these points in which totalitarianism comes to be, the difference is the awareness of our own mortality.
Human beings are the only creatures that are aware of their own demise - that we will all die and death could come at any time. Birds, dogs, bears or any other animals do not have existential angst. They don't have what can be an eternally simmering sense of anxiety around their mortality. Prey animals perceive threats, but it is instinctual and relegated to instances, not a permanent manner of being.
For some people, that sense of anxiety can be stultifying. We all deal with it differently.
Some of us take a practical approach and apply that energy towards our health. Some of us simply avoid all risk, maybe to an extreme degree. But as a human collective, we have focused our energies on control.
We study, identify, measure and manipulate our environment using our science, reason and logic in order to control those things that cause human suffering and death. We have vaccines, medicines and thousands of medical treatments. We build safer cars to allow us to travel in more safety. Our homes and buildings protect us from changes in water and climate disasters.
The many manners in which we control our world for the reduction of our suffering is so extensive we no longer see it, but unconsciously expect it. Our ability to measure and manipulate our world has turned into a tool to manage the anxiety that comes with being human.
Again, this manipulation itself has its own consequences.
Disconnecting
It used to be that the seasons and sun regulated our sleep and wake cycles. Although electric light gives us the ability to produce light after the sun goes down, it removes us from a connection with the natural cycles of the sun and the rotation of the Earth.
Our homes and their heat shield us from environmental changes that allow us to expand where we live, but disconnects us from the variation of seasons.
Readily available food of any kind in our supermarkets burst from their packed shelves, but we no longer know where it comes from, how to produce it. We also no longer feel any pride and connection to specific humans when producing food for their sustainment.
These comfortable pleasures bring a great reduction in human suffering and an ability for freedom and prosperity. But they also separate us from the world we evolved out of, giving us a sense that we are not of this world, but in it.
Combining these factors creates the conditions for totalitarianism: Humans that live in constant fear of death figure out how to use their minds to manipulate their surroundings in order to control their environment. This control leads them to forget how truly unpredictable the world really is. Creatures who can manipulate their world and don't see themselves as of their world, can develop a sense that they are outside of nature and not of it.
We forget the limits of our natures, and seek to continuously increase our ability to control our environment and the anxiety it can produce. We forget the inherent unpredictability of the world, which is a result of us being disconnected from nature. As we assume that control of risk is the cure for the inevitable anxiety that comes with our humanity, we seek further control over those risks, but the anxiety never goes away. So we seek more ways to control.
More people to control.
The natural anxiety that comes as a consequence of our mortality is further increased as we lose our connections to other humans and the natural world as our social order becomes digitized. Meaning and purpose for humans is to be found in our connections with other humans and the world within which we live.
Our mechanisms of control put us in houses that shield us from changing climate. Medical interventions reduce our risk of disease and death. Abundant food eliminates our daily toil in the dirt and in the wild alongside other humans, seeking out our next meals. Although all of these innovations allow for longer, healthier lives, they come with a consequence.
Reducing any direct connection and interaction with other humans just stacks on to that loss of understanding our meaning and purpose. Who we are as individuals is a social process.
Our societies are like massive bodies of water made up of individual humans. How we navigate that mass is dependent on those other individuals in it. We test out our skills and then sink or swim. If we swim, we know we're doing something right. If we sink, then we should check our technique.
The fundamental unit will always be the individual, but the individual develops as a consequence of interactions with other individuals. The fewer interactions with other individuals we have, the less feedback we receive and the more disconnected we become from the reality of humanity. The reality of humanity that holds something which cannot be measured or manipulated by other humans.
Professor Desmet provides several examples of unpredictability in science along with the development of language and how it contributes to our understanding of uncertainty and nuance. He also wades through some current political movements and how these phenomena present themselves in concrete ways we are all now familiar with. I’ll leave that to him and his readers to enjoy and critique.
This basic outlining process has helped me to understand, through articulation, what totalitarianism is and how to recognize it in its beginnings.
For further reading on totalitarianism, try The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt, and The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind by Gustave LeBon. Desmet references them often and they add some depth and history to the study of these regimes and the psychology behind their development.