Saturday, August 24, 2024

The Totalitarian Way


Anchors in a Sea of Chaos



Things are getting quite interesting in the mainstream media. Here and there, something real is seeping through the omnipresent facade.

I read in an opinion paper in the New York Times (author: Maureen Dowd) that Biden was removed from the presidential race through a genuine “coup” or overthrow. It’s just an isolated article amidst the vast sea of media content that upholds the illusion of the day, but it’s still being picked up here and there in the mainstream media.

The content of the original article goes like this: Biden fell victim to an actual conspiracy by Obama, Pelosi, Schumer, and Jeffries. On alternative media, this conclusion was reached much earlier: the way Biden was removed from the race bears all the characteristics of a coup. This conclusion was drawn from a series of factors, including the fact that in the first days after the withdrawal, neither Biden himself nor people from his entourage publicly communicated about the withdrawal from the race, except through a letter signed by Biden “as if with a gun to his head.”

Is it a problem that a number of influential Democratic figures forced Biden behind the scenes to withdraw? Yes, because Biden was indeed democratically elected as the presidential candidate by millions of Democratic Party members. Kamala Harris was not democratically nominated at all.

The coup against Biden confronts Biden himself with a core characteristic of totalitarian systems. As Hannah Arendt already said: a totalitarian system always ultimately becomes a monster that devours its own children. Biden now knows this: he became a victim of the beast he himself abundantly fed.

That rising beast is, of course, not merely an American affair. It is a global phenomenon. The social dynamics set in motion by the riots in Great Britain illustrate this abundantly, for example. What is happening in Great Britain is socially so important that I will dedicate a separate article to it, but I will already touch on it here.

The totalitarian censorship there entered the next stage. People who articulated a dissident opinion on social media are now being imprisoned almost arbitrarily. In some cases, the posts indeed incite violence to some extent; but in other cases, it’s hard to detect anything in the post that could be legally sanctionable. And ultimately, this is exactly what the legislator announces: the post doesn’t have to be illegal for social media platforms to be forced to censor it.

In this way, the totalitarian system achieves something typical: it cancels every law (see, for example, Solzhenitsyn’s “there is no law”) and replaces it with a system of ad hoc rules that whirls around and ultimately descends into radical absurdity. In that sense, totalitarian systems are variants and outgrowths of the bureaucratization of society:

In a fully developed bureaucracy there is nobody left with whom one can argue, to whom one can present grievances, on whom the pressures of power can be exerted. Bureaucracy is the form of government in which everybody is deprived of political freedom, of the power to act; for the rule by Nobody is not no-rule, and where all are equally powerless, we have a tyranny without a tyrant.

Hannah ArendtOn Violence


Ultimately, in such a bureaucratic-totalitarian system, every psychological anchor that the law normally provides is lost. In place of the law is a completely irrational and inconsistent rule system. In this way, our rationalist culture culminates in exactly the opposite of what it sought to achieve.

The absurd, suffocating networks of rules first turn against those who do not want to go along with the system. But those who do engage with the system also fall prey to it, narrowly escaping, if at all, the machine they themselves built.

In a totalitarian system, no one is safe; everything and everyone can fall under the rules that are rewritten daily on the walls of Animal Farm by the pigs in charge. This gives us a glimpse of what the coming years will mainly bring: unimaginable chaos and psychological dislocation. And the only anchor will be precisely what our rationalist Enlightenment society pushed to the background: loyalty to ethical principles even if it means losing whatever you possess in the world of appearances.

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