Society And The State.
It may have been observed that throughout this Collective Guilt And Glory section, I have been frequently using the words Society and The State interchangeably, as if they were completely synonymous, which, of course, cannot quite be the case, even though Thomas Hobbes may be pushing us into thinking thus, in his writings.
Kant ties the two together as follows: A state is not like the soil, upon which it is situated, a patrimony. It consists of a society of men, over whom the state alone has a right to command and dispose. It is a trunk that has its own roots. (Immanuel Kant: Perpetual Peace, I, 1795)
Hugo Grotius, writing in 1625, does not seem to see any distinction between the two, though, which may be attributed to his somewhat idyllic picture of a perfect state of affairs: A state is a perfect body of free men, united together to enjoy common rights and advantages. (Hugo Grotius: De jure belli ac pacis, I) In this he is a kind of precursor to Hobbes, who seems to do his thinking along the same lines.
On the other hand, we have Louis XIV’s alleged quip, “L’état, c’est moi!” One cannot possibly mistake the king of France for the whole French nation here!
Unlike the government of a nation, the State is so much more all-embracing. Montesquieu approaches this subtle point with great perspicacity in the following single sentence: In the birth of societies it is the chiefs of a state who give it its special character; and afterwards it is this special character that forms the chiefs of state. (Montesquieu: La grandeur et décadence des Romains, 1734)
In my understanding, which will become extremely pertinent to my subsequent discussion of the concept of totalitarianism, the ideal State is a perfect self-expression of the society it embodies, if not of its totality, at least of its overwhelming majority. In a dictatorship, such self-expression is maintained by force, as though this family violence is a necessity for the society to protect itself from crumbling down. In a democracy, the best guarantee of holding the people together is nationalism, also known as patriotism. However, within an affluent democracy, where the rich are definitely reluctant to identify themselves with their poorer volk, and therefore getting annoyed by all government intrusion into their lives, there is a growing alienation between the people and the state, as the nation is kept together mainly by the forces of inertia. Such a nation is likely to go into decline.
Totalitarismo E La Dottrina Del Fascismo.
As an acknowledgment of the fact that the word totalitarianism is Italian-born (how many people who have this word in their vocabulary, I wonder, know this little bit of very important trivia?), I start the Totalitarian subsection with this recognition in its first two entries.
It is a sad reality of politics that once a political phenomenon is pronounced objectionable, and the powers of agitprop are unleashed against it, we are all expected to toe the line, and, in whatever we say about that subject, never to deviate from the officially authorized version of the truth, and any attempt on our part to give it a serious review would be inevitably, and often deliberately, misinterpreted as a sign of our support for the objectionable phenomenon, resulting in our immediate condemnation on those grounds.
Being fascinated with the subject of social legitimacy of the totalitarian phenomenon, and eager to explore its ramifications, I must not be mistaken for an enthusiast of totalitarianism, which I am not. Having been born a Soviet citizen, I used to try to rationalize the totalitarian principles of the Soviet State, found them sufficiently compelling in theory, but falling apart in practice, but eventually settled my preferences on the Western socialist model.
Everything “positive” I have to say about totalitarianism throughout this section is never to be understood as a stamp of personal approval, but only as an effort to rationalize and understand, occasionally having to play the devil’s advocate, otherwise, my attempt would have been futile. With this in mind, and, hopefully, constantly mindful of this proviso, let us carefully proceed with our subject, granted that this is only a first try at it, and a much more thorough in-depth analysis of it will be in store for the future.
As promised to myself and to the reader, I am now starting the series on the historical meaning, substance, and practice of totalitarianism. Considering how notoriously contentious, and substantially unestablished, this term has been in the technical lexicon of political science, ranging from its legitimate, although fairly arbitrary, philosophical usage, to a hollow-sounding blank shot, fired by the cheap cold war-style agitation and propaganda, this tricky subject is to be either shunned, as is most often the case, or, on the contrary, to become a definite and irresistible lure, especially, if there is a compelling rationale for keeping it alive, as I forcefully maintain, in the pursuit of my inquisitive point.
One of the main ironies of its usage is that no one seems to have a good word to say about it, ever since the defeat of the Axis Powers in World War II. The West has steadily assigned the term totalitarianism to the political systems of Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia and Mao’s China, while the Russian politologists have always detested this term, seeing it as a rabid anti-Soviet propaganda weapon. It appears that anyone who might dare to say something fresh about it, better find himself a new term to describe whatever he wishes to represent in his new, more lucid light.
Faced with this prospect, I once consider an alternative term, to use in my study, but I had summarily given up on such an ignominious copout, as only the precise word totalitarianism, with its connotation of totality, is good enough, and precise enough, to suit my purpose.
In the process of appropriating this term, I am finding myself in a rather dubious company. It may seem that the word totalitarianism must have been coined exclusively for anti-Soviet cold war consumption (today it sounds as dead as the erstwhile purpose for its application). Now that Drs. Zbigniew Brzezinski and Jeane Kirkpatrick have won their cold war and Hannah Arendt is conveniently becoming more and more forgotten with every passing day, the interest in bringing it back to public attention has all but evaporated, in favor of the new Globalist ideology of money turning everybody (except maybe for the sinister Spectre of AlQaeda) into bona fide capitalists.
But the term totalitarismo has a much longer history than the second half of the twentieth century, that has been so generously, but disingenuously, allotted to it by the cold war political science of the West. It is first found in the most interesting work of the once eminent (later, unsurprisingly, disremembered) Italian philosopher and social reformer Giovanni Gentile, coauthored with none other than the notorious Il Duce Benito Mussolini, under the title La dottrina del fascismo, published in 1932. Among my other entries that are scattered throughout the book, this important manifesto is reproduced and commented on in my Acorn entry La Dottrina Del Fascismo and further discussed in the Significant Others philosophical section under the title A Fascist And A Humanist (referring to Giovanni Gentile). But for the purposes of this introductory entry, it is quite clear that Gentile, called the Philosopher of Fascism by Mussolini, and also self-described as such, sees totalitarismo as a categorically progressive development, positing the State as the source of supreme authority, as well as the object of absolute loyalty for all its citizens. The Roman symbol of fascis: a bundle of sticks each made stronger by being tied together with the others and all of them with the central ax, symbolizing the authority of the state, reinforces the idea of the totalitarian totality, embodying national unity, strength, and the ultimate self-realization (compare this last article to Abraham Maslow’s once madly popular concept of self-actualization).
Let us be reminded, and for those who disagree, let this be an intellectual challenge, that the fate of Italian fascism, or of German national-socialism (which is a similar form of fascism, as the Russians have always insisted, always referring to it as German fascism) has little to do with the viability of the totalitarian idea in itself. Although unlikely to reemerge in substantial force anywhere in Western Europe (the current pan-European socialist system serving as a potent antidote), the philosophy of fascism, even if it is never called by that name again, possesses a certain appeal in the modern context of nationalism, defying with apparent success the ongoing Globalist offensive.
Incidentally, in my analysis, the future of the Russian society, in accordance with the will of its people and the unmistakable intellectual predisposition of the Russian national brain, embodied in the intelligentsia, is certain to embrace strong totalitarian social and political tendencies, shifting closer to the Stalinist concept of social organization and government than at any time since Russia’s voluntaristic de-Stalinization, which was conducted by Khrushchev, with troubling nonchalance, not on principle, but as a gimmick in his power struggle against the united front of his peers.
Stalin today is coming back into Russian life as a symbol of Russia’s superpower greatness, and not just in name, but as a broad phenomenon, an attitude, an expression of Mein Kampf, Russian style, against all the enemies of the people, both foreign and domestic, whose identities, and ill intent, had become so distinctly identifiable in the course of the disastrous last decade of the twentieth century, called the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century (overshadowing the tragedy of the war against Nazi Germany and other horrific disasters) by President Vladimir Putin.
To sum all this up, totalitarianism, by its own or any other name, represents a very compelling concept of the totality of the national will, a national socialist State (I intentionally put these two adjectives together, not to be confused with the term national-socialist, but yes, to be reminded of it). Having a strong personal dislike for the word fascist, I am yet aware of the natural intellectual attractiveness fascism had for a mind with a strong liberal philosophical bend. Giovanni Gentile had, indeed, believed in its philosophical worth and even welcomed intellectual opposition to it, convinced that a meaningful debate could only strengthen and otherwise validate the truth of his conception of Fascism (and of the principle of Totalitarianism), as a philosophically sustainable, liberally-minded ideology, and a superior political system.
The Totalitarian Ideal In Historical Perspective.
The time has come for me, perhaps, to clarify the meaning of what I have been calling the totalitarian ideal, and once again to explain and justify the employment of such a controversial word.
I believe that no other term can as effectively convey the idea of a vigorous social organization of a young ambitious nation, or an old nation in the excitement of a spiritual revival (I might have preferred using the more inclusive German word Geist here), involving the totality of its citizens and presupposing everyone’s active participation in the collective effort.
It may be argued that my cheerful portrayal of a rosy totality has nothing in common with the real sinister nature of all known totalitarian regimes in history, and that I am, in fact, twisting the terminology, to create the false impression of totalitarianism as being something natural and even innocent, which of course simply is not the case.
To which I will reply that much as I deplore the extreme and ugly forms that the totalitarian ideal may have taken in Soviet Russia, or Fascist Italy, or Nazi Germany, the ideal itself, like the Communist ideal, based on Christian principles, needs to be distilled from its polluted states and examined without preconceptions and biases.
As a free-thinking intellectual, I do not like government control, or any kind of group tyranny, and, in most circumstances, I would rather have been left alone or at least always had this as an option. But in examining my anti-social bias (as a matter of fact, I have never been anti-social, but I have always liked companies of my own choosing, and even those always taken in moderation) I am discovering in myself an individual in a state of alienation from society (as I am currently alienated from the American society, or before, used to be alienated from the corruption of the Soviet system, if not so much from the ideals of either). The alienation from society, on the part of a healthy individual, is always a symptom of a society in ill health. It concerns all sorts of individuals, the doers and the thinkers alike. Ironically, the once well-respected Italian thinker and social critic Giovanni Gentile, the self-proclaimed humanist, and the author of Absolute Immanentism, often accused of solipsism, and thus, a naturally expected epitome of the alienated individual, had found a social solution for himself, both as an individual and as a philosopher, in embracing, of all terrible things, the doctrine of fascism, that is, of course, he became an enthusiast of the totalitarian ideal (as I mentioned before, the specific term totalitarianism is basically of his invention (although it was coined in 1923 by the notable opponent of Italian fascism Giovanni Amendola, its meaning was essentially refined and established as a socio-philosophical term by Gentile), and he saw it in a perfectly positive light).
That is to say that, whether one likes it or not, the totalitarian ideal has a powerful social and philosophical appeal, and this fact must not be gallantly dismissed, or otherwise taken lightly.
A few years ago I had a spat with Professor Douglas Dalgleish, of Arizona State University, at his home in Phoenix, over my ascription of the totalitarian ideal to Hegel’s view of history. Angrily, he insisted that it was improper to apply a twentieth-century term referring to a twentieth-century phenomenon, to an earlier age. To which I replied that, on the contrary, it was imperative to look for answers to the questions of our time in the experiences of the past. Hegel’s idealization of the historical process, his totality of history and life and his teleology of the state in particular, created in the context of his philosophy (which in summary is about the evolution of the Geist from the animal sensuality to the Absolute Knowledge) a philosophical and moral imperative for the thinking individual to become an active participant in the life and advance of the state. Considering that it is the thinking person and his alienation from society, which epitomizes the anti-totalitarian conflict between the individual and the state, such reversal of intellectual priorities goes to the heart of the rationale for the totalitarian ideal, and it explains its appeal to people like Giovanni Gentile (and many others, like him, even if less vocal about it), in solid Hegelian terms.
Hegel, to me, crystallizes the philosophical rationale for the totalitarian ideal, but the latter’s principles are in evidence in most major political philosophies, be that Plato’s Politeia, or Thomas More’s Utopia, or the Commonwealth of Hobbes, or the Collectivism of Rousseau’s social theories, etc., etc., etc. (I need not even have to mention Karl Marx, or several others, just as obvious as he is).
A very instructive example of totalitarian mentality and of practical efforts to establish a totalitarian world order on theological and philosophical principles is the collectivist ideal of the Roman Catholic Church. I have already mentioned previously in this connection Dostoyevsky’s Legend of the Grand Inquisitor, in his great novel The Karamazov Brothers, where Jesus, coming back into the world, is denied entry by Church authorities, on the grounds that His appearance would disrupt the happiness of its totalitarian paradise.
There is a downside to the totalitarian ideal after all, and no one shows it better than Dostoyevsky! But mind you, a great many people would contest, at least privately, that this downside can be all that negative.
Adam And God As Man And State.
Here is a lighthearted look at the origins of the totalitarian ideal, which carries some serious connotations well worth further exploration, which I am then proceeding with, accordingly.
The essence of totalitarian philosophy is the State taking care of Man, while Man gives up his freedom for the greater glory of the State. Is there any parallel here between God and Adam before the Fall, God being the State and Adam as the Man? Going even further, isn’t there an ultimate realization of the totalitarian ideal in the establishment of God’s kingdom on earth?
Once again, my treatment of the totalitarian ideal establishes its philosophical legitimacy and clarifies the rationale of the so-called totalitarian states in establishing their philosophical and social legitimacy. There can be no denying of the connection between the totalitarian ideal and the totalitarian states in actuality. I have cited on several occasions already the case of Giovanni Gentile, who was a liberal social reformer, as well as a notable philosopher, but saw the connection in question so clearly, that he became an outspoken advocate of the fascist state in Italy, and, furthermore, strongly objected to all forms of political oppression there, on the grounds of the natural appeal of fascism, which, in his view, should require only non-violent elaboration of its principles, on the conviction that its full understanding would render all coercion tactics unnecessary and even counterproductive. In the meantime, before such an understanding was achieved, he would reluctantly and selectively put up with some forms of repression just as Hegel before him had insisted on the necessity of state violence in the service of historical progress.
Thus, submission to the benevolent will of the state became the philosophical principle paralleling man’s submission to the benevolent will of God and His Church, in Christian theology. Now, how can we apply moral standards to such a relationship?
In the case of Adam and God, man’s voluntary submission to the Absolute Will was the good thing to do, even if it was perpetuated through Man’s ignorance. Interestingly, God’s Thou shalt not eat from the Tree of Knowledge is not an enforced prohibition, but an appeal to voluntary obedience, as free will must never be subdued by force. However Adam’s eventual disobedience results in severe immediate punishment, that is his banishment from Eden, and a host of other penalties, associated with the Fall.
In a similar vein, man’s mandatory submission to the will of the Catholic Church is theologically justified by equating the will of the Church with the Will of God, and the terrible punishments for heresy in earlier times could not have been found excessive in the light of God’s punishment of humanity for Adam’s sin.
But how can anyone morally justify man’s submission to the will of other men, representing the authority of the state? Equating the will of Caesar with the Will of God has to be a blasphemy against God! Or is it?
Kant famously says, There is no greater Evil than one man’s will controlled by another’s. The totalitarian rationale does not contradict Kant’s dictum, because the ruler does not really impose his own personal will on the ruled, but creates a philosophical construct of the Will of the State, and, as he forces it on the others, submits to it himself. A self-indulgent authoritarian despot, in this scenario, will be totally unacceptable to the system, and, therefore, rejected by it outright. A fanatical servant of the state, on the other hand, will be assured of longevity.
From this leaps out an instant connection with the Soviet, particularly the Stalinist state. Great cruelty and great statesmanship, a distinctive trademark of Stalinism at its worst and its best, which Doktor Hegel, for one, would have very much appreciated. Those who fail to see it, are hopelessly missing the whole thing!
The rest of the argument is fairly simple. In line with Hegel’s idealistic conceptualization of the State (this is exactly why Hegel is so special to the materialization of the totalitarian ideal [the pun in this sentence is delightful to me, I hope it will not be lost on the reader, not that it brings anything to the substance of this exposition, but so that like a more expensive bottle of wine, it enhances the enjoyment of the meal without necessarily contributing anything, except psychology, to its quality]), the State comes out, on par with the Catholic Church’s claim to the divine infallibility, as the vox Dei, supplanting in both cases the proverbial vox populi. It is piquant how in both these cases, between prophesy and blasphemy there is not even a tiny step, but only an angle of looking at it, but there it is.
Besides, just as the Catholic Church cannot be condemned for godlessness, except by competing churches, one cannot accuse Hegel of religious secularism, in deifying the State at the expense of God. After all, his theistic devotion runs deep throughout his philosophy, and his well-known attacks on religious practices may disqualify him as a man of the Church, but by no means as a man of God.
Rewards Of Righteousness.
This highly controversial reflection is a psychological socio-puzzle, intended not to be agreed or disagreed with on the spot, but to be introduced as a curious line of thinking, and contemplated accordingly.
Is it true, the way I see it, that righteousness has potentially greater rewards within totalitarian societies with their strict, uncompromising social code of ethics (right or wrong is beside the point), than within free mass societies, with their loose interpretation of ethics and the idealization of material success?
Let not this question be dismissed right away as nonsense, nor anyone jump to the defense of democracy, or even worse, of totalitarianism…. This is purely a matter of philosophical curiosity and challenging inquiry. Just leave it hanging!
Totalitarianism And Efficiency.
It is virtually universally accepted that efficiency, industrial creativity, and other such wonders are exclusive products of private enterprise, as it is generally believed that only the prospect of personal profit can create enough motivation to achieve them.
On the other hand, there is a parallel disdain and overwhelming ridicule of the so-called command economy where, as it is argued, economic decisions are being made by bureaucratic morons with no understanding of the miracle workings of the capitalist spirit of entrepreneurship.
I understand that so many people have been taking this for granted that this must be true. (Please, appreciate this as sarcasm, to avoid the mistake of taking it with a straight face.) But I am not sure that it is true. There is a large body of evidence that totalitarian societies have been quite capable of successfully competing with and against capitalistic enterprises and, to be sure, the miracles of Stalinist industrialization in Soviet Russia cannot be all attributed to slave labor and military discipline. Nor can Hitler’s successes in turning Germany into a great superpower be attributed to the existence of capitalist elements in Nazi Germany’s economy. By the same token, a certain stagnation in post-Stalin Soviet economy particularly during the Brezhnev era, can well be attributed to the decline in totalitarian enthusiasm precipitated by Nikita Khrushchev’s ill-conceived de-Stalinization campaign which started in 1956. (All subsequent Soviet triumphs in space, etc. were clearly carry-overs from the earlier era still bearing fruit of yore, despite itself having come to an end.)
Generally speaking, there is no philosophical or even psychological foundation to the claim that freedom of private enterprise is the only game in town.
I believe that totalitarian enthusiasm can handily match and raise the capitalist incentive of self-enrichment, and totalitarian education has been proven to be superior to free democratic education; what may be lacking is just the technological know-how in certain areas, and specific managerial skills, which reveal deficiencies within particular totalitarian contexts, rather than some inherent fatal flaws in the totalitarian ideal as such.
Law And Order.
The infamous Mussolini is best remembered (kindly notice my intentional wordplay here!) for “making his trains run on time.” The poor devil, all his personal faults and blemishes notwithstanding, did thus provide all essential public services to the people of Italy, and he did maintain law and order in his fascist State. A far less bloody dictator than, say, Francisco Franco in Spain, it was not his style of government that would do him in, but his most unfortunate alliance with Hitler, and his ill-fated, even if very reluctant, declaration of war on the eventual winners of World War II.
With this prelude having been played, let us now proceed with the central theme of my entry. Totalitarian states are, indeed, very big on law and order. Not that free societies are all lawless and orderless, but their enforcement zeal is admittedly greatly diminished by the perpetrator-friendly system of justice, that would rather have a hundred criminals get off the hook, than let one innocent person fall through the cracks, and be wrongly accused, guiltlessly condemned, and summarily punished. As a result of this ‘pro-criminal’ bias, law enforcement agencies in free societies are not too eager to prosecute, barring an overwhelming body of evidence, and they would seldom go after rich perpetrators, knowing that their ability to buy themselves an army of skillful lawyers makes the chances of their conviction very slim.
In other words, if you wish to escape the rule of crime, precipitated by people’s freedom of activity, giving them greater opportunities to commit all sorts of crime, welcome to the totalitarian paradise, where the law provides you a much better protection from crime than in free societies, unless, of course, you get in trouble with the law, and suddenly find yourself on the other side of the offender-unfriendly system of justice.
Thus we are confronted with a great paradox, and the need to choose the lesser of two evils, which is by no means an obvious choice, that, in their pursuit of individual freedoms, free societies provide an inadequate protection of their citizens from the sophisticated and legally well-researched criminal, as well as from those lazy and sloppy providers of public services who are being constantly reassured that the very worst kind of punishment for their incompetence and wrongdoing would be, relatively speaking, a slap on the wrist.
On the other hand, the totalitarian ideal finds its attractiveness in the promotion of the public good, rather than of the individual freedom, in the meticulous maintenance of law and order, so that the public at large can sleep better at night knowing that the ever-watchful sentinel of the State is standing guard over them.
Once again, let it be known that my objective here is not to disparage freedom and defend the totalitarian ideal, but only to make all those chanting Freedom-freedom! aware that there is a certain downside to the free-society model, and that the proponents of the totalitarian ideal are making their argument along quite legitimate lines and may be assured of substantial public support even in the free societies of today, should a serious rhetoric--and name-calling-free social debate be ever allowed to take place.
In his later Dialogue Politicus (Statesman), Plato concedes that although an exact science of government is available, it may not be necessarily followed in practical applications. The most benevolent dictator is still not a god. A much better alternative to a personal supremacy is the impersonal supremacy of the Law. His yet later Dialogue Laws continues to realize that, considering the evil nature of man, the Politeia would be just a Utopian (pardon the anachronism) exercise, without strict enforcement of effective laws and an able apparatus of state violence dedicated to this purpose. Therefore, in his Laws, Plato’s focus is no longer the construction of a perfect State, but the development of a Codex of Laws, under the State Constitution. The actual laws are now becoming even more restrictive and prohibitive than in his Politeia, and his State, by now, has become a full-blown police state. Welcome to the twentieth century, friends, we may now safely assume that our poor and much-maligned Giovanni Gentile was in fact a much kinder and gentler version of the old Plato, insofar as his political philosophy was concerned…
The subsequent development of political philosophy did little to upset Plato’s basic assumptions. Aristotle, his pupil and intellectual successor, has spoken on behalf of law and order, in this famous characterization of man as a political animal, in his Politics:
Man, when perfected, is the best of animals, but when separated from law and justice he is the worst of all since armed injustice is the most dangerous, and he is equipped at birth with the arms of intelligence and wit, moral qualities which he may use for the worst ends.
There is no need for me in this entry to dwell any longer on the further development of the concept of Law and Order. This subject will be discussed at length in the One Step Beyond Wishful Thinking Section, and, in fact, political philosophy will constitute a large bulk of it. It will suffice to say that, come to think of it, Law and Order, being a restriction on individual freedom, is more at home within the totalitarian domain, than within the lax and permissive structure of a free society. And yet, the latter cannot survive without an ample measure of law and order, and it is via this medium that the two opposite types of society meet each other, not on a neutral turf, mind you, but on the totalitarian ground, and it is right here that a free society becomes the most vulnerable to the spasms of the totalitarian envy.
It is not only the realm of law and order, where free societies meet their totalitarian counterpart on its own turf. In fact, there is no such thing as a perfectly free society. At least half of the idea of people organizing into a commonwealth, or any kind of polity for that matter, is precisely, to restrict the individual freedoms of their own constituents (the other half being to protect themselves from outsiders, exercising theirs).
Observe, however, the thin line between freedom and oppression, as even the freest of societies habitually use state violence to protect themselves domestically from the criminal activities of their citizens. Whether public immorality is to be considered a crime against society, on a par with other political crimes, already recognized as such and including hate speech, sedition, etc., is only a technical matter of where the line is to be drawn, and the answer here does not exhibit any qualitative difference in principle.
Communism And Totalitarianism.
A quick note in passim. Communism and Totalitarianism are two badly politically-polluted and hopelessly misused, to the point of signifying nothing, terms. Yet, assuming that they do signify something, at least in their original meanings, it will be worthwhile to observe the basic difference between the two.
Communism glorifies the community, totalitarianism glorifies the state. Inasmuch as this much is true, the core distinction between communism and totalitarianism, which are supposed to be incompatible, but not so clearly, in our confused reality, becomes palpably obvious and allows us to grasp how the Soviet State, for instance, could be called communist and totalitarian at the same time, by Western political science.
As a matter of fact, the Soviet communist ideology was totally futuristic and, in such way, would overcome its glaring inconsistency, demanding a dictatorship of the State, in its pursuit of a state of Statelessness, as the ultimate realization of the communist ideal. Needless to say, statelessness destroys the foundations of a nation-state, the latter being exactly the ultimate goal of the great-Russian ‘hidden agenda,’ thus logically and philosophically exposing the disingenuous claim of the Soviet version of Marxism-Leninism, and now making it clear why that particular claim had to be dropped by the wayside in the dissolution of the Soviet Empire, a natural artificial “calamity,” clearing the way for the hidden agenda to become apparent, under President Putin, quidquid latet, apparebit.
Judged by these standards, we can resolutely conclude that none of the totalitarian states have ever been in reality “communistic” states, which, of course, would have been an oxymoron. Only the absolutely utopian communities, the likes of Owen’s and such, to be discussed later in my Wishful Thinking section, or maybe even some early British colonies in America (at least at the time of their conception) could be looked upon as Communist-leaning, in some of their humanist-Christian ways, and all these were doomed all along, not so much to perish as to immediately mutate into something else.
On the other hand, socialism is a completely different thing than communism, and all totalitarian states, in their essence, simply had to be socialist (as I have noted in the Contradiction section, my understanding of State Capitalism, supported by the reality of the early Soviet, and the current Russian experience, sees it as a form of socialism, and, as such, invites no further controversy). Any free nation can organically develop into a post-Bernsteinian socialist state, which is now the state of most free nations of Europe, in the process, gently curbing the laissez-faire freedoms of their citizens, and encouraging the thought of an eventual social convergence between the free and the totalitarian nations along much more benign lines than state violence, characterizing the prevalent trend of the American State, demonstrably, under the last Bush Administration, with its avowed state of permanent war on “terror,” but rather as peaceable socialist polities.
Finally, let me comment on how much insight in this particular matter is offered to us by Nietzsche. In my section exclusively dedicated to him I will have a whole subsection on his political philosophy, where these issues will be raised again and in much greater detail than here, insofar as our Nietzsche is concerned. But before I leave this entry on the fundamental differences between communism and totalitarianism, here is a curious passage from his Jenseits, where my subject is thrown an additional light on, especially considering what I previously said about the alleged incompatibility between anarchism and totalitarianism:
"Witness the howling of the anarchist dogs. They seem the opposite of the peacefully industrious democrats and ideologists of revolution, and even more so of the doltish philosophasters and brotherhood enthusiasts who call themselves socialists and want a free society; but in fact are at one with the lot in their hostility to every other form of society, except the autonomous herd. They are at one in their tough resistance to every special claim, right, and privilege (which means every right, for, once all are equal, no one needs “rights” anymore). They are at one in their faith in community as the savior, in short, in the herd, in 'themselves.'” (Jenseits 202)
Considering that the irreconcilable differences between communism and totalitarianism may be eventually dissolved in the soothing panacea of socialism (where even the ravenous capitalist miscreant might regain his peace on that loving motherly bosom of all mankind), the anarchist, too, may in time relinquish his old grudge against the State and reconcile himself with the fact that, insofar as his socialist nation-state goes, there is no place, real or imagined, like home.
Totalitarianism And Freedom: A Four-Part Coda.
This “four-part coda,” concluding the subsection on totalitarianism, is to be taken figuratively only in part, as its deliberate “poetic” form is clearly in evidence, and thus, bears a literal association with the musical term as well.
I love freedom. As Thomas Hobbes says, “A free man is he that, in those things which by his strength and wit he is able to do, is not hindered to do what he has a will to do.” (Leviathan, XXI). Thus, do I desire to pursue my own idea of happiness, and I resent all hindrance to my pursuit. Being a good man, I love good freedom. Bad freedom is unworthy of the name freedom. In John Milton’s words, “None can love freedom heartily but good men; the rest love not freedom but license.” (The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates). My freedom is of the highest order, and its worth is above all riches and sensual pleasures. Lord God so loved freedom (God Himself is free, ergo, freedom is with God, and it must be good), that He just had to gave it to Adam, even with the foreknowledge that its weight would crush His greatest creation, and bring him to ruin. Alas, freedom, you are a two-faced goddess, a daughter of God, you have conspired with the Serpent to turn free men into slaves!
I hate freedom for being a chimera. “No one is free, save Jove,” says Aeschylus (in Prometheus Bound). It may not be fit for man to be free, after all: Quod licet Jovi, non licet bovi. Adam’s freedom brought about his fall. In the Milton quotation above, thin is the line between good freedom (God’s freedom) and license. “It is not good to be too free,” writes Pascal, and no one can say it better, as “too free” says it all. For me, there is just one kind of man’s freedom that I recognize: it is the freedom from another man’s oppression, freedom to exercise one’s own God-given freedom of choice, the incomparable freedom to surrender one’s freedom voluntarily, and not under duress. Alas, I also hate other people’s freedom, and oftentimes, when I am making particularly wrong choices, I hate my own. I wish I had no freedom of choice, and, knowing that freedom of choice is God’s Law, I wish I had nothing. I wish I were nothing. “Tired with all this, for restful death I cry…” (Shakespeare) And, if God would not free me from all those freedoms, I wish the good State would have done it for me! Alas, there is no such thing as a good State…
I love the totalitarian ideal as the ultimate self-assertion of a nation-state. All for one, one for all. A sense of belonging to a benign slave-master who is far greater than one’s fellow man (for, being enslaved by a fellow man is an indignity and abomination), even though, as even Doktor Hegel would have agreed, not quite as great as God. But, unlike God, who gives freedom to all, thus allowing evil to enter the world via freedom, the totalitarian State restricts individual freedom, from top to bottom, and thus, makes its citizens morally conscious through the fear of a certain punishment in this life, rather than through the fear of an uncertain punishment in the next life, utterly dismissed by disbelief, or effectively diminished by an expectation of a deathbed redemptive confession and absolution. Thus, while acknowledging and continuously reaffirming the nation-state as my broader family, I seek in it a competent reassurance as a guardian of social morality and as my protector from other people’s freedom.
I hate totalitarianism not for what it is ideally supposed to stand for, but for the crude manner, in which it imposes itself on people. Its restrictions on freedom are coercion taken too far. For instance, why should it restrict its citizens from going abroad? If they wish to go abroad and stay there, let them! Cool comparison will always trump the stubbornness of defiance... All things considered, I would rather have a free society, and live in it, even with its ugly blemishes. I only wish a truly free society were somewhere in existence…
Totalitarianism And Democracy: What Is The Difference?
(The previous entry said something about the end of the Totalitarian subsection? Not so fast!)
At first sight the title looks rather idiotic. We all know that totalitarianism and democracy are antipodes… or do we? Isn’t it true that totalitarianism is one of the natural expressions of the will of the people, and in this sense, perfectly democratic?
In my analysis of the political organization of society, I have distinguished two basic forms of government: democratic and totalitarian, as being of the greatest interest from the psychological and philosophical point of view. By totalitarianism and democracy (in the sense of modern Western democracy, as practiced in the United States, in Europe, and in a number of other places) I mean not so much any particular instances of such organization, as the social mental outlook, which shapes national preferences for this or that political form of social organization.
The trick question of the title therefore catches one by surprise due to the multiplicity and ambiguity of the meanings of the word democracy, and once we have restricted this word’s meaning to just one, it is safe to proceed now with answering the title’s question.
Totalitarianism and democracy, being both expressions of the will of the people (depending on the national and historical circumstances each time), are different on three levels, of which the most obvious one is also the least interesting to us at this moment, that is, describing the actual nuts and bolts of both societies and defending their mutual incongruity with a straight face. The second level, which is an invitation to the third, is the easiest to describe in one-word formulations: Totalitarianism is idealistic, and democracy is practical. The third level now uses a single criterion, which is, however, crucial to our distinction. We can call it the social attitude to power. Totalitarianism trusts power, seeing it as the power of the State, which, in its eyes, contains an element of Hegelian divinity, and therefore, possesses the essential quality of goodness. We can see how totalitarianism in this wishful aspect is hopelessly idealistic. But in practical terms, its experience is hardly any different from the experience of the Roman Catholic Church from its establishment in power to fairly recent times. In order to protect its idealism, it resorted to brutal violence. So does totalitarianism in defending its own brand of idealism.
By contrast, democracy is much more down to earth and thus it has far less to defend by force. Its practical bias is characterized by a basic distrust of power, for which reason democracy deliberately and assiduously diffuses the power of its own political institutions through the system of checks and balances, thus making their functioning grotesquely inefficient, but at least restricting their ability to enforce the good by force.
Inquiry And Prejudice.
Every honest philosopher understands that any bona fide inquiry starts without preconceptions. Its integrity will be fatally compromised by even the slightest trace of prejudice. The philosopher must be able to play the roles of Advocatus Dei and Advocatus Diaboli together at the same time, with such full conviction and dedication that both Deus and the Diabolus would have to be abundantly satisfied with his defense of their respective cases.
Italian fascism and German Nazism (which, of course, was also a form of fascism) were two extreme world-historical experiences of tremendous importance to the future of mankind. As such, they deserve an intense philosophical investigation, and yet, such an investigation is completely out of the question, because neither is legally permitted to be studied without prejudice, and any objective philosopher might easily find himself in jail or blacklisted for eternity, should he decide to play the role of Advocatus Diaboli in this sordid and probably hopeless matter… Well, after the tragic experience of World War II, which is still very much alive in public memory, who can blame mankind for remaining intensely personal and full of prejudice about it?
Seeing that these two specific cases have been fatally compromised by the shadows of Hitler and Mussolini, we may just as well give up on them, which leaves us with just one more case to study philosophically, and that is Stalinist Russia. Unlike Mussolini and Hitler, Stalin was on the right side of World War II, and it was he, rather than anybody else among the Allied Powers, who made the right side’s victory at all possible. For this reason, it is possible to study the Stalinist experience without prejudice and without legal restraint. Such a study should be highly desirable both in socio-philosophical and practical terms, and I expect it to be done in good conscience, perhaps, already in the nearest future. On my part, I intend to pursue it to the best of my ability on the pages of this book.
Totalitarian Democracy.
Considering that our rather lengthy discussion of totalitarianism strives to touch all bases, the dedication of this entry to the fairly recently coined term totalitarian democracy makes very good sense. To start with, it would be pointless and overly generous to pay any attention whatsoever to the most recent usage of this big phrase (not the term, mind you) in describing the current political state of the United States in the aftermath of the neo-liberal-neo-conservative post-Soviet grand offensive, which has forever epitomized the so-called “new world order,” as it has been designated by President George Herbert Walker Bush, of the Senior Bush Administration. We do not need such grandstanding on important socio-philosophical issues, even when we whole-heartedly agree with the criticism itself. What is most important, however, is that such core terms as “totalitarianism” ought not to be used misleadingly, and applying it to the United States at any point of her history is obviously a glaring example of such irresponsible use.
Of far greater interest to us ought to be the original use of this phrase, almost six decades ago, by the Israeli Professor Jacob Leib Talmon (1916-1960), Professor of Modern History at Hebrew University, Jerusalem, whose seminal work The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy dates back to 1951 with the English translation coming out in 1960. In distinguishing liberal democracy from totalitarian democracy, Talmon distinguishes the principle of liberty from the principle of collectivism. It has been noted that Talmon was an anti-Marxist in his personal philosophy, but this is a purely emotional caveat, as it would be un-constructive to somehow equate Marxism with totalitarianism.
The following is a short sequence of excerpts from Talmon’s magnum opus, which offers the best summary of what he has in mind when talking of totalitarian democracy:
"The essential difference between the two schools of democratic thought, as they have evolved, is not, as is often alleged, in the affirmation of the value of liberty by the one and its denial by the other. It is in their different attitudes to politics. The liberal assumes politics to be a matter of trial and error, and he regards political systems as pragmatic contrivances of human ingenuity and spontaneity. It recognizes a variety of levels of personal and collective endeavor, which are altogether outside the sphere of politics.
The totalitarian democratic school, on the other hand, is based upon the assumption of a sole and exclusive truth in politics. It can be called political Messianism, in the sense that it posits a preordained, harmonious and perfect scheme of things, to which men are irresistibly driven, and at which they are bound to arrive. It recognizes, ultimately, only one plane of existence, the political. It widens the scope of politics to embrace the whole of human existence. (pp. 1-2) Modern totalitarian democracy is a dictatorship resting on popular enthusiasm (!!!), and is thus completely different from absolute power wielded by a divine-right King, or by an usurping tyrant." (p. 6)
The most significant accomplishment of Professor Talmon is his recognition of the clear democratic origin of totalitarianism, and his acknowledgment of popular enthusiasm, as the driving force behind the successes of the totalitarian regimes. Ironically, it was for these accomplishments that he was later severely criticized, and even denounced by his critics. But how else can the still on-going ban on the objective study of Italian fascism and German Nazism be explained, if not by the fear of the rekindling of that public enthusiasm for both or either, in case such a study, with their concomitant legitimation, is allowed to bring them back from hell?!
Dollars And Health.
My socialist view on the subject of healthcare has already been abundantly expressed in previous sections, and will most certainly be forcefully reiterated in the future sections, such as the Twilight’s Last Gleaming. I find this subject so ethically uncomplicated and basic, that there is little else to add in this Social section, which ought to explain the small amount of space and detail in this single entry on the topic. Such brevity, however, must not be misconstrued as a lack of attention.
One more thing. The seemingly one-sided bias of this supposedly generalized entry, yet one unmistakably singling out the failure of the American national healthcare system, or the absence thereof, is, regrettably, unavoidable. Among all major nations, it is the US that demonstrably suffers from this dreadful deficiency, and thus, inadvertently, but owing it to its own shortcoming, becomes the punching bag for criticism here, and there is nothing else I can do about it.
The question of healthcare as a social obligation of the Commonwealth to its members, to which I am now turning my attention in this single, fairly short entry on that subject, centers on the issue of social ethics. It does not matter all that much, whether society provides free medical care to the poorest. As with education, this is a matter of principle.
Free education is a social statement of principle. It has to be sound and solid. The rich can buy themselves a few educational extras, such as private tutoring, but the state must not allow them to buy a better school, or a better opportunity, not by denying them such a right, but by allowing an equal opportunity to all, and that for free, with only the magnitude of the natural talent for learning of each particular individual inserting the discriminating criteria into the egalitarian equation.
By the same token, free healthcare is not so much a question of availability, as a statement of principle. We must consider adequate public healthcare as a prerequisite of personal liberty, as a means in the pursuit of personal happiness, stated as an inalienable right in the American Declaration of Independence, explicitly guaranteed in the Preamble to the United States Constitution, as a solemn pledge to “promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.”
Dollars and war. Considering the trillions of dollars spent by this nation’s government on protecting itself and its citizens from sometimes real, but mostly imaginary enemy, how much larger, one might ask, should the total free healthcare expense be, compared to the extravagance of the inessential war expense, building up Washington’s total debt to the environs of a fourteen-digit dollar figure?
But I guess, it is not the total dollar amount, nor even the additional taxation becoming necessary to achieve this goal, without having to relinquish any of the others, which complicates the issue. It is the immorality of the government’s attitude toward healthcare, that this particular social program, like many others, can also be pushed onto the private sector. Those who can’t afford to buy their own healthcare, Washington says, are getting it free of charge anyway, so why should we bother about raising this issue again and again?
Wrong answer. There are certain things which money cannot buy, as the Bible says, and as a commercial on TV says as well. I must add that there are certain things that money must not decide, healthcare being one of them. It is immoral for society to put price tags on Hippocratic services provided to the individuals, at least on the essential ones, affecting people’s lives and basic well-being.
Unless free public healthcare is seen as an ethical issue, society’s moral obligation to God and to man, the cancerous growth of cynicism in assuming that money buys all will keep metastasizing through the whole body of that society, consigning it to its ultimate doom.
Protect And Serve.
Just as the brevity of my last entry on healthcare must have raised some eyebrows, so might this concluding tribute to all other social responsibilities of the state toward its citizens appear as a hurried catchall glimpse of very important subject matter treated disrespectfully and extremely inadequately. Perhaps, an explanation is in order, and this explanation is quite simple.
In fact, all constructive pieces of my writing on the State’s social responsibilities belong to the section under the title One Step Beyond Wishful Thinking, and, consequently, the bulk of what may have been expected to be found here rightfully belongs there, and there it will be found.
Thus, there is no point for me now to expand on the subject of general welfare as a requisite social program. Aside from some redundant criticism of the existing welfare programs, there will be little to add to my notes on what social welfare ought to be which will be the subject of a subsection in the Wishful Thinking section. (I must, however, have a better coordination between these sections, perhaps addressing the inconsistency in devoting so much space to education here, and not there, using the same logic. The next troubling question may be, why do I need this section at all, if its content may be successfully distributed among the others? It is obvious to me that I still need this section for such material which is best suited for it, and for none other, but I must make it explicit by improving the overall structure of my sections, and this is a task for the future, whether I like it or not.)
In the meantime, Protect and Serve is a closing meditation on the role of the state in protecting the lives and other essential interests of its citizens from foreign and domestic harm.
Whereas the functions of the police and other methods of ensuring peace at home can be easily rationalized, the problem of the military function of the state is much less susceptible to rationalization. On the surface, things are simple: Whenever the nation is facing an outside threat, which must be assumed to be the case at all times, the state must provide full military protection for its citizens, and, whenever possible, preempt the threat.
Had it been as simple as that, there would have been no controversy about the Bush-43 Administration’s so-called Preemption Doctrine. In fact, when it was first announced, I even jumped to its defense, concluding, in theoretical terms, that preemption, whenever it is possible, is the most natural part of national defense. I now stand corrected. What is natural in theory, may become horribly abused and exploited in practice.
From now on, the main criterion of advisability of a military policy must not be its natural merit, but, first and foremost, its susceptibility to misuse and cynical trickery.
When a nation is under attack, it has the right to defend itself with all available means, oftentimes even at the expense of some innocent bystanders. When it is not under attack, however, but there is a perception of a clear and present danger, great effort must be made to assess the situation responsibly and correctly. The leaders of the nation must be held accountable for their political and military analysis of the situation, and judged with maximum severity on the outcome of their actions. Any irresponsible use of military power is bound to create a greater threat to national security than the one that had existed before, and therefore must be equated to high treason in the immediate aftermath of such irresponsible action.
What is even more shocking to me, in the long-drawn-out wake of the still unraveling Iraq fiasco, than the irresponsibility of the George W. Bush Administration, is the irresponsibility of the American public, of its elected representatives, and of, presumably, the watchdog over them all, the media, in failing to understand the gravity of the offense, that is, of the huge mass deception involved and of the exponential increase of the threat to this nation’s security, as a result of the Bush Administration’s actions. Treason has, indeed, been committed, but the guilty have not been charged either in the court of law or in the court of public opinion.
I maintain that every nation must take its military function with utmost seriousness, and seek to redress any mistakes made in its handling of the matters of war and peace as soon as they become noticeable. What is happening in Iraq today has affected everything going on around the world, to the detriment of the United States. The totally inadequate domestic reaction to this constantly unfolding calamity is a testimony to the unhealthy state of the American Union, showing a disintegration of the American society as a whole. In a few more years, I am afraid, this trend will make itself known in full force, and for everybody to see…
And finally, here is a very important social-military question: should a modern nation have a draft policy, or should it limit its military force to well-paid volunteers?
In my view, there can be no universal answer to this question. To each nation its own solution. I do not see the need for a draft among those nations of Europe who, in the spirit of the Paris Agreement of 1992, have renounced violence as a national policy option. Their participation in subsequent NATO operations, such as the infamous 1999 bombing war on Yugoslavia, for instance, all its moral repulsiveness notwithstanding, is an exception, rather than the rule, and does not constitute an aggressive policy of any of the member states.
On the other hand, the aggressive nature of the American foreign policy, and its trigger-happiness to enter whichever war of choice can be found, demands, as a matter of moral imperative, that this nation returns to the draft, so that the grim downside of any war of choice, rather than of necessity, can be felt by the society as a whole, and thus judged by the nation in its totality, regardless of the opinions and special interests of the nation’s leaders, or of the mercenaries, both willing and those, whose commitment has been compelled by the dire financial circumstances in their previous lives as civilians.
It may have been observed that throughout this Collective Guilt And Glory section, I have been frequently using the words Society and The State interchangeably, as if they were completely synonymous, which, of course, cannot quite be the case, even though Thomas Hobbes may be pushing us into thinking thus, in his writings.
Kant ties the two together as follows: A state is not like the soil, upon which it is situated, a patrimony. It consists of a society of men, over whom the state alone has a right to command and dispose. It is a trunk that has its own roots. (Immanuel Kant: Perpetual Peace, I, 1795)
Hugo Grotius, writing in 1625, does not seem to see any distinction between the two, though, which may be attributed to his somewhat idyllic picture of a perfect state of affairs: A state is a perfect body of free men, united together to enjoy common rights and advantages. (Hugo Grotius: De jure belli ac pacis, I) In this he is a kind of precursor to Hobbes, who seems to do his thinking along the same lines.
On the other hand, we have Louis XIV’s alleged quip, “L’état, c’est moi!” One cannot possibly mistake the king of France for the whole French nation here!
Unlike the government of a nation, the State is so much more all-embracing. Montesquieu approaches this subtle point with great perspicacity in the following single sentence: In the birth of societies it is the chiefs of a state who give it its special character; and afterwards it is this special character that forms the chiefs of state. (Montesquieu: La grandeur et décadence des Romains, 1734)
In my understanding, which will become extremely pertinent to my subsequent discussion of the concept of totalitarianism, the ideal State is a perfect self-expression of the society it embodies, if not of its totality, at least of its overwhelming majority. In a dictatorship, such self-expression is maintained by force, as though this family violence is a necessity for the society to protect itself from crumbling down. In a democracy, the best guarantee of holding the people together is nationalism, also known as patriotism. However, within an affluent democracy, where the rich are definitely reluctant to identify themselves with their poorer volk, and therefore getting annoyed by all government intrusion into their lives, there is a growing alienation between the people and the state, as the nation is kept together mainly by the forces of inertia. Such a nation is likely to go into decline.
Totalitarismo E La Dottrina Del Fascismo.
As an acknowledgment of the fact that the word totalitarianism is Italian-born (how many people who have this word in their vocabulary, I wonder, know this little bit of very important trivia?), I start the Totalitarian subsection with this recognition in its first two entries.
It is a sad reality of politics that once a political phenomenon is pronounced objectionable, and the powers of agitprop are unleashed against it, we are all expected to toe the line, and, in whatever we say about that subject, never to deviate from the officially authorized version of the truth, and any attempt on our part to give it a serious review would be inevitably, and often deliberately, misinterpreted as a sign of our support for the objectionable phenomenon, resulting in our immediate condemnation on those grounds.
Being fascinated with the subject of social legitimacy of the totalitarian phenomenon, and eager to explore its ramifications, I must not be mistaken for an enthusiast of totalitarianism, which I am not. Having been born a Soviet citizen, I used to try to rationalize the totalitarian principles of the Soviet State, found them sufficiently compelling in theory, but falling apart in practice, but eventually settled my preferences on the Western socialist model.
Everything “positive” I have to say about totalitarianism throughout this section is never to be understood as a stamp of personal approval, but only as an effort to rationalize and understand, occasionally having to play the devil’s advocate, otherwise, my attempt would have been futile. With this in mind, and, hopefully, constantly mindful of this proviso, let us carefully proceed with our subject, granted that this is only a first try at it, and a much more thorough in-depth analysis of it will be in store for the future.
As promised to myself and to the reader, I am now starting the series on the historical meaning, substance, and practice of totalitarianism. Considering how notoriously contentious, and substantially unestablished, this term has been in the technical lexicon of political science, ranging from its legitimate, although fairly arbitrary, philosophical usage, to a hollow-sounding blank shot, fired by the cheap cold war-style agitation and propaganda, this tricky subject is to be either shunned, as is most often the case, or, on the contrary, to become a definite and irresistible lure, especially, if there is a compelling rationale for keeping it alive, as I forcefully maintain, in the pursuit of my inquisitive point.
One of the main ironies of its usage is that no one seems to have a good word to say about it, ever since the defeat of the Axis Powers in World War II. The West has steadily assigned the term totalitarianism to the political systems of Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia and Mao’s China, while the Russian politologists have always detested this term, seeing it as a rabid anti-Soviet propaganda weapon. It appears that anyone who might dare to say something fresh about it, better find himself a new term to describe whatever he wishes to represent in his new, more lucid light.
Faced with this prospect, I once consider an alternative term, to use in my study, but I had summarily given up on such an ignominious copout, as only the precise word totalitarianism, with its connotation of totality, is good enough, and precise enough, to suit my purpose.
In the process of appropriating this term, I am finding myself in a rather dubious company. It may seem that the word totalitarianism must have been coined exclusively for anti-Soviet cold war consumption (today it sounds as dead as the erstwhile purpose for its application). Now that Drs. Zbigniew Brzezinski and Jeane Kirkpatrick have won their cold war and Hannah Arendt is conveniently becoming more and more forgotten with every passing day, the interest in bringing it back to public attention has all but evaporated, in favor of the new Globalist ideology of money turning everybody (except maybe for the sinister Spectre of AlQaeda) into bona fide capitalists.
But the term totalitarismo has a much longer history than the second half of the twentieth century, that has been so generously, but disingenuously, allotted to it by the cold war political science of the West. It is first found in the most interesting work of the once eminent (later, unsurprisingly, disremembered) Italian philosopher and social reformer Giovanni Gentile, coauthored with none other than the notorious Il Duce Benito Mussolini, under the title La dottrina del fascismo, published in 1932. Among my other entries that are scattered throughout the book, this important manifesto is reproduced and commented on in my Acorn entry La Dottrina Del Fascismo and further discussed in the Significant Others philosophical section under the title A Fascist And A Humanist (referring to Giovanni Gentile). But for the purposes of this introductory entry, it is quite clear that Gentile, called the Philosopher of Fascism by Mussolini, and also self-described as such, sees totalitarismo as a categorically progressive development, positing the State as the source of supreme authority, as well as the object of absolute loyalty for all its citizens. The Roman symbol of fascis: a bundle of sticks each made stronger by being tied together with the others and all of them with the central ax, symbolizing the authority of the state, reinforces the idea of the totalitarian totality, embodying national unity, strength, and the ultimate self-realization (compare this last article to Abraham Maslow’s once madly popular concept of self-actualization).
Let us be reminded, and for those who disagree, let this be an intellectual challenge, that the fate of Italian fascism, or of German national-socialism (which is a similar form of fascism, as the Russians have always insisted, always referring to it as German fascism) has little to do with the viability of the totalitarian idea in itself. Although unlikely to reemerge in substantial force anywhere in Western Europe (the current pan-European socialist system serving as a potent antidote), the philosophy of fascism, even if it is never called by that name again, possesses a certain appeal in the modern context of nationalism, defying with apparent success the ongoing Globalist offensive.
Incidentally, in my analysis, the future of the Russian society, in accordance with the will of its people and the unmistakable intellectual predisposition of the Russian national brain, embodied in the intelligentsia, is certain to embrace strong totalitarian social and political tendencies, shifting closer to the Stalinist concept of social organization and government than at any time since Russia’s voluntaristic de-Stalinization, which was conducted by Khrushchev, with troubling nonchalance, not on principle, but as a gimmick in his power struggle against the united front of his peers.
Stalin today is coming back into Russian life as a symbol of Russia’s superpower greatness, and not just in name, but as a broad phenomenon, an attitude, an expression of Mein Kampf, Russian style, against all the enemies of the people, both foreign and domestic, whose identities, and ill intent, had become so distinctly identifiable in the course of the disastrous last decade of the twentieth century, called the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century (overshadowing the tragedy of the war against Nazi Germany and other horrific disasters) by President Vladimir Putin.
To sum all this up, totalitarianism, by its own or any other name, represents a very compelling concept of the totality of the national will, a national socialist State (I intentionally put these two adjectives together, not to be confused with the term national-socialist, but yes, to be reminded of it). Having a strong personal dislike for the word fascist, I am yet aware of the natural intellectual attractiveness fascism had for a mind with a strong liberal philosophical bend. Giovanni Gentile had, indeed, believed in its philosophical worth and even welcomed intellectual opposition to it, convinced that a meaningful debate could only strengthen and otherwise validate the truth of his conception of Fascism (and of the principle of Totalitarianism), as a philosophically sustainable, liberally-minded ideology, and a superior political system.
The Totalitarian Ideal In Historical Perspective.
The time has come for me, perhaps, to clarify the meaning of what I have been calling the totalitarian ideal, and once again to explain and justify the employment of such a controversial word.
I believe that no other term can as effectively convey the idea of a vigorous social organization of a young ambitious nation, or an old nation in the excitement of a spiritual revival (I might have preferred using the more inclusive German word Geist here), involving the totality of its citizens and presupposing everyone’s active participation in the collective effort.
It may be argued that my cheerful portrayal of a rosy totality has nothing in common with the real sinister nature of all known totalitarian regimes in history, and that I am, in fact, twisting the terminology, to create the false impression of totalitarianism as being something natural and even innocent, which of course simply is not the case.
To which I will reply that much as I deplore the extreme and ugly forms that the totalitarian ideal may have taken in Soviet Russia, or Fascist Italy, or Nazi Germany, the ideal itself, like the Communist ideal, based on Christian principles, needs to be distilled from its polluted states and examined without preconceptions and biases.
As a free-thinking intellectual, I do not like government control, or any kind of group tyranny, and, in most circumstances, I would rather have been left alone or at least always had this as an option. But in examining my anti-social bias (as a matter of fact, I have never been anti-social, but I have always liked companies of my own choosing, and even those always taken in moderation) I am discovering in myself an individual in a state of alienation from society (as I am currently alienated from the American society, or before, used to be alienated from the corruption of the Soviet system, if not so much from the ideals of either). The alienation from society, on the part of a healthy individual, is always a symptom of a society in ill health. It concerns all sorts of individuals, the doers and the thinkers alike. Ironically, the once well-respected Italian thinker and social critic Giovanni Gentile, the self-proclaimed humanist, and the author of Absolute Immanentism, often accused of solipsism, and thus, a naturally expected epitome of the alienated individual, had found a social solution for himself, both as an individual and as a philosopher, in embracing, of all terrible things, the doctrine of fascism, that is, of course, he became an enthusiast of the totalitarian ideal (as I mentioned before, the specific term totalitarianism is basically of his invention (although it was coined in 1923 by the notable opponent of Italian fascism Giovanni Amendola, its meaning was essentially refined and established as a socio-philosophical term by Gentile), and he saw it in a perfectly positive light).
That is to say that, whether one likes it or not, the totalitarian ideal has a powerful social and philosophical appeal, and this fact must not be gallantly dismissed, or otherwise taken lightly.
A few years ago I had a spat with Professor Douglas Dalgleish, of Arizona State University, at his home in Phoenix, over my ascription of the totalitarian ideal to Hegel’s view of history. Angrily, he insisted that it was improper to apply a twentieth-century term referring to a twentieth-century phenomenon, to an earlier age. To which I replied that, on the contrary, it was imperative to look for answers to the questions of our time in the experiences of the past. Hegel’s idealization of the historical process, his totality of history and life and his teleology of the state in particular, created in the context of his philosophy (which in summary is about the evolution of the Geist from the animal sensuality to the Absolute Knowledge) a philosophical and moral imperative for the thinking individual to become an active participant in the life and advance of the state. Considering that it is the thinking person and his alienation from society, which epitomizes the anti-totalitarian conflict between the individual and the state, such reversal of intellectual priorities goes to the heart of the rationale for the totalitarian ideal, and it explains its appeal to people like Giovanni Gentile (and many others, like him, even if less vocal about it), in solid Hegelian terms.
Hegel, to me, crystallizes the philosophical rationale for the totalitarian ideal, but the latter’s principles are in evidence in most major political philosophies, be that Plato’s Politeia, or Thomas More’s Utopia, or the Commonwealth of Hobbes, or the Collectivism of Rousseau’s social theories, etc., etc., etc. (I need not even have to mention Karl Marx, or several others, just as obvious as he is).
A very instructive example of totalitarian mentality and of practical efforts to establish a totalitarian world order on theological and philosophical principles is the collectivist ideal of the Roman Catholic Church. I have already mentioned previously in this connection Dostoyevsky’s Legend of the Grand Inquisitor, in his great novel The Karamazov Brothers, where Jesus, coming back into the world, is denied entry by Church authorities, on the grounds that His appearance would disrupt the happiness of its totalitarian paradise.
There is a downside to the totalitarian ideal after all, and no one shows it better than Dostoyevsky! But mind you, a great many people would contest, at least privately, that this downside can be all that negative.
Adam And God As Man And State.
Here is a lighthearted look at the origins of the totalitarian ideal, which carries some serious connotations well worth further exploration, which I am then proceeding with, accordingly.
The essence of totalitarian philosophy is the State taking care of Man, while Man gives up his freedom for the greater glory of the State. Is there any parallel here between God and Adam before the Fall, God being the State and Adam as the Man? Going even further, isn’t there an ultimate realization of the totalitarian ideal in the establishment of God’s kingdom on earth?
Once again, my treatment of the totalitarian ideal establishes its philosophical legitimacy and clarifies the rationale of the so-called totalitarian states in establishing their philosophical and social legitimacy. There can be no denying of the connection between the totalitarian ideal and the totalitarian states in actuality. I have cited on several occasions already the case of Giovanni Gentile, who was a liberal social reformer, as well as a notable philosopher, but saw the connection in question so clearly, that he became an outspoken advocate of the fascist state in Italy, and, furthermore, strongly objected to all forms of political oppression there, on the grounds of the natural appeal of fascism, which, in his view, should require only non-violent elaboration of its principles, on the conviction that its full understanding would render all coercion tactics unnecessary and even counterproductive. In the meantime, before such an understanding was achieved, he would reluctantly and selectively put up with some forms of repression just as Hegel before him had insisted on the necessity of state violence in the service of historical progress.
Thus, submission to the benevolent will of the state became the philosophical principle paralleling man’s submission to the benevolent will of God and His Church, in Christian theology. Now, how can we apply moral standards to such a relationship?
In the case of Adam and God, man’s voluntary submission to the Absolute Will was the good thing to do, even if it was perpetuated through Man’s ignorance. Interestingly, God’s Thou shalt not eat from the Tree of Knowledge is not an enforced prohibition, but an appeal to voluntary obedience, as free will must never be subdued by force. However Adam’s eventual disobedience results in severe immediate punishment, that is his banishment from Eden, and a host of other penalties, associated with the Fall.
In a similar vein, man’s mandatory submission to the will of the Catholic Church is theologically justified by equating the will of the Church with the Will of God, and the terrible punishments for heresy in earlier times could not have been found excessive in the light of God’s punishment of humanity for Adam’s sin.
But how can anyone morally justify man’s submission to the will of other men, representing the authority of the state? Equating the will of Caesar with the Will of God has to be a blasphemy against God! Or is it?
Kant famously says, There is no greater Evil than one man’s will controlled by another’s. The totalitarian rationale does not contradict Kant’s dictum, because the ruler does not really impose his own personal will on the ruled, but creates a philosophical construct of the Will of the State, and, as he forces it on the others, submits to it himself. A self-indulgent authoritarian despot, in this scenario, will be totally unacceptable to the system, and, therefore, rejected by it outright. A fanatical servant of the state, on the other hand, will be assured of longevity.
From this leaps out an instant connection with the Soviet, particularly the Stalinist state. Great cruelty and great statesmanship, a distinctive trademark of Stalinism at its worst and its best, which Doktor Hegel, for one, would have very much appreciated. Those who fail to see it, are hopelessly missing the whole thing!
The rest of the argument is fairly simple. In line with Hegel’s idealistic conceptualization of the State (this is exactly why Hegel is so special to the materialization of the totalitarian ideal [the pun in this sentence is delightful to me, I hope it will not be lost on the reader, not that it brings anything to the substance of this exposition, but so that like a more expensive bottle of wine, it enhances the enjoyment of the meal without necessarily contributing anything, except psychology, to its quality]), the State comes out, on par with the Catholic Church’s claim to the divine infallibility, as the vox Dei, supplanting in both cases the proverbial vox populi. It is piquant how in both these cases, between prophesy and blasphemy there is not even a tiny step, but only an angle of looking at it, but there it is.
Besides, just as the Catholic Church cannot be condemned for godlessness, except by competing churches, one cannot accuse Hegel of religious secularism, in deifying the State at the expense of God. After all, his theistic devotion runs deep throughout his philosophy, and his well-known attacks on religious practices may disqualify him as a man of the Church, but by no means as a man of God.
Rewards Of Righteousness.
This highly controversial reflection is a psychological socio-puzzle, intended not to be agreed or disagreed with on the spot, but to be introduced as a curious line of thinking, and contemplated accordingly.
Is it true, the way I see it, that righteousness has potentially greater rewards within totalitarian societies with their strict, uncompromising social code of ethics (right or wrong is beside the point), than within free mass societies, with their loose interpretation of ethics and the idealization of material success?
Let not this question be dismissed right away as nonsense, nor anyone jump to the defense of democracy, or even worse, of totalitarianism…. This is purely a matter of philosophical curiosity and challenging inquiry. Just leave it hanging!
Totalitarianism And Efficiency.
It is virtually universally accepted that efficiency, industrial creativity, and other such wonders are exclusive products of private enterprise, as it is generally believed that only the prospect of personal profit can create enough motivation to achieve them.
On the other hand, there is a parallel disdain and overwhelming ridicule of the so-called command economy where, as it is argued, economic decisions are being made by bureaucratic morons with no understanding of the miracle workings of the capitalist spirit of entrepreneurship.
I understand that so many people have been taking this for granted that this must be true. (Please, appreciate this as sarcasm, to avoid the mistake of taking it with a straight face.) But I am not sure that it is true. There is a large body of evidence that totalitarian societies have been quite capable of successfully competing with and against capitalistic enterprises and, to be sure, the miracles of Stalinist industrialization in Soviet Russia cannot be all attributed to slave labor and military discipline. Nor can Hitler’s successes in turning Germany into a great superpower be attributed to the existence of capitalist elements in Nazi Germany’s economy. By the same token, a certain stagnation in post-Stalin Soviet economy particularly during the Brezhnev era, can well be attributed to the decline in totalitarian enthusiasm precipitated by Nikita Khrushchev’s ill-conceived de-Stalinization campaign which started in 1956. (All subsequent Soviet triumphs in space, etc. were clearly carry-overs from the earlier era still bearing fruit of yore, despite itself having come to an end.)
Generally speaking, there is no philosophical or even psychological foundation to the claim that freedom of private enterprise is the only game in town.
I believe that totalitarian enthusiasm can handily match and raise the capitalist incentive of self-enrichment, and totalitarian education has been proven to be superior to free democratic education; what may be lacking is just the technological know-how in certain areas, and specific managerial skills, which reveal deficiencies within particular totalitarian contexts, rather than some inherent fatal flaws in the totalitarian ideal as such.
Law And Order.
The infamous Mussolini is best remembered (kindly notice my intentional wordplay here!) for “making his trains run on time.” The poor devil, all his personal faults and blemishes notwithstanding, did thus provide all essential public services to the people of Italy, and he did maintain law and order in his fascist State. A far less bloody dictator than, say, Francisco Franco in Spain, it was not his style of government that would do him in, but his most unfortunate alliance with Hitler, and his ill-fated, even if very reluctant, declaration of war on the eventual winners of World War II.
With this prelude having been played, let us now proceed with the central theme of my entry. Totalitarian states are, indeed, very big on law and order. Not that free societies are all lawless and orderless, but their enforcement zeal is admittedly greatly diminished by the perpetrator-friendly system of justice, that would rather have a hundred criminals get off the hook, than let one innocent person fall through the cracks, and be wrongly accused, guiltlessly condemned, and summarily punished. As a result of this ‘pro-criminal’ bias, law enforcement agencies in free societies are not too eager to prosecute, barring an overwhelming body of evidence, and they would seldom go after rich perpetrators, knowing that their ability to buy themselves an army of skillful lawyers makes the chances of their conviction very slim.
In other words, if you wish to escape the rule of crime, precipitated by people’s freedom of activity, giving them greater opportunities to commit all sorts of crime, welcome to the totalitarian paradise, where the law provides you a much better protection from crime than in free societies, unless, of course, you get in trouble with the law, and suddenly find yourself on the other side of the offender-unfriendly system of justice.
Thus we are confronted with a great paradox, and the need to choose the lesser of two evils, which is by no means an obvious choice, that, in their pursuit of individual freedoms, free societies provide an inadequate protection of their citizens from the sophisticated and legally well-researched criminal, as well as from those lazy and sloppy providers of public services who are being constantly reassured that the very worst kind of punishment for their incompetence and wrongdoing would be, relatively speaking, a slap on the wrist.
On the other hand, the totalitarian ideal finds its attractiveness in the promotion of the public good, rather than of the individual freedom, in the meticulous maintenance of law and order, so that the public at large can sleep better at night knowing that the ever-watchful sentinel of the State is standing guard over them.
Once again, let it be known that my objective here is not to disparage freedom and defend the totalitarian ideal, but only to make all those chanting Freedom-freedom! aware that there is a certain downside to the free-society model, and that the proponents of the totalitarian ideal are making their argument along quite legitimate lines and may be assured of substantial public support even in the free societies of today, should a serious rhetoric--and name-calling-free social debate be ever allowed to take place.
In his later Dialogue Politicus (Statesman), Plato concedes that although an exact science of government is available, it may not be necessarily followed in practical applications. The most benevolent dictator is still not a god. A much better alternative to a personal supremacy is the impersonal supremacy of the Law. His yet later Dialogue Laws continues to realize that, considering the evil nature of man, the Politeia would be just a Utopian (pardon the anachronism) exercise, without strict enforcement of effective laws and an able apparatus of state violence dedicated to this purpose. Therefore, in his Laws, Plato’s focus is no longer the construction of a perfect State, but the development of a Codex of Laws, under the State Constitution. The actual laws are now becoming even more restrictive and prohibitive than in his Politeia, and his State, by now, has become a full-blown police state. Welcome to the twentieth century, friends, we may now safely assume that our poor and much-maligned Giovanni Gentile was in fact a much kinder and gentler version of the old Plato, insofar as his political philosophy was concerned…
The subsequent development of political philosophy did little to upset Plato’s basic assumptions. Aristotle, his pupil and intellectual successor, has spoken on behalf of law and order, in this famous characterization of man as a political animal, in his Politics:
Man, when perfected, is the best of animals, but when separated from law and justice he is the worst of all since armed injustice is the most dangerous, and he is equipped at birth with the arms of intelligence and wit, moral qualities which he may use for the worst ends.
There is no need for me in this entry to dwell any longer on the further development of the concept of Law and Order. This subject will be discussed at length in the One Step Beyond Wishful Thinking Section, and, in fact, political philosophy will constitute a large bulk of it. It will suffice to say that, come to think of it, Law and Order, being a restriction on individual freedom, is more at home within the totalitarian domain, than within the lax and permissive structure of a free society. And yet, the latter cannot survive without an ample measure of law and order, and it is via this medium that the two opposite types of society meet each other, not on a neutral turf, mind you, but on the totalitarian ground, and it is right here that a free society becomes the most vulnerable to the spasms of the totalitarian envy.
It is not only the realm of law and order, where free societies meet their totalitarian counterpart on its own turf. In fact, there is no such thing as a perfectly free society. At least half of the idea of people organizing into a commonwealth, or any kind of polity for that matter, is precisely, to restrict the individual freedoms of their own constituents (the other half being to protect themselves from outsiders, exercising theirs).
Observe, however, the thin line between freedom and oppression, as even the freest of societies habitually use state violence to protect themselves domestically from the criminal activities of their citizens. Whether public immorality is to be considered a crime against society, on a par with other political crimes, already recognized as such and including hate speech, sedition, etc., is only a technical matter of where the line is to be drawn, and the answer here does not exhibit any qualitative difference in principle.
Communism And Totalitarianism.
A quick note in passim. Communism and Totalitarianism are two badly politically-polluted and hopelessly misused, to the point of signifying nothing, terms. Yet, assuming that they do signify something, at least in their original meanings, it will be worthwhile to observe the basic difference between the two.
Communism glorifies the community, totalitarianism glorifies the state. Inasmuch as this much is true, the core distinction between communism and totalitarianism, which are supposed to be incompatible, but not so clearly, in our confused reality, becomes palpably obvious and allows us to grasp how the Soviet State, for instance, could be called communist and totalitarian at the same time, by Western political science.
As a matter of fact, the Soviet communist ideology was totally futuristic and, in such way, would overcome its glaring inconsistency, demanding a dictatorship of the State, in its pursuit of a state of Statelessness, as the ultimate realization of the communist ideal. Needless to say, statelessness destroys the foundations of a nation-state, the latter being exactly the ultimate goal of the great-Russian ‘hidden agenda,’ thus logically and philosophically exposing the disingenuous claim of the Soviet version of Marxism-Leninism, and now making it clear why that particular claim had to be dropped by the wayside in the dissolution of the Soviet Empire, a natural artificial “calamity,” clearing the way for the hidden agenda to become apparent, under President Putin, quidquid latet, apparebit.
Judged by these standards, we can resolutely conclude that none of the totalitarian states have ever been in reality “communistic” states, which, of course, would have been an oxymoron. Only the absolutely utopian communities, the likes of Owen’s and such, to be discussed later in my Wishful Thinking section, or maybe even some early British colonies in America (at least at the time of their conception) could be looked upon as Communist-leaning, in some of their humanist-Christian ways, and all these were doomed all along, not so much to perish as to immediately mutate into something else.
On the other hand, socialism is a completely different thing than communism, and all totalitarian states, in their essence, simply had to be socialist (as I have noted in the Contradiction section, my understanding of State Capitalism, supported by the reality of the early Soviet, and the current Russian experience, sees it as a form of socialism, and, as such, invites no further controversy). Any free nation can organically develop into a post-Bernsteinian socialist state, which is now the state of most free nations of Europe, in the process, gently curbing the laissez-faire freedoms of their citizens, and encouraging the thought of an eventual social convergence between the free and the totalitarian nations along much more benign lines than state violence, characterizing the prevalent trend of the American State, demonstrably, under the last Bush Administration, with its avowed state of permanent war on “terror,” but rather as peaceable socialist polities.
Finally, let me comment on how much insight in this particular matter is offered to us by Nietzsche. In my section exclusively dedicated to him I will have a whole subsection on his political philosophy, where these issues will be raised again and in much greater detail than here, insofar as our Nietzsche is concerned. But before I leave this entry on the fundamental differences between communism and totalitarianism, here is a curious passage from his Jenseits, where my subject is thrown an additional light on, especially considering what I previously said about the alleged incompatibility between anarchism and totalitarianism:
"Witness the howling of the anarchist dogs. They seem the opposite of the peacefully industrious democrats and ideologists of revolution, and even more so of the doltish philosophasters and brotherhood enthusiasts who call themselves socialists and want a free society; but in fact are at one with the lot in their hostility to every other form of society, except the autonomous herd. They are at one in their tough resistance to every special claim, right, and privilege (which means every right, for, once all are equal, no one needs “rights” anymore). They are at one in their faith in community as the savior, in short, in the herd, in 'themselves.'” (Jenseits 202)
Considering that the irreconcilable differences between communism and totalitarianism may be eventually dissolved in the soothing panacea of socialism (where even the ravenous capitalist miscreant might regain his peace on that loving motherly bosom of all mankind), the anarchist, too, may in time relinquish his old grudge against the State and reconcile himself with the fact that, insofar as his socialist nation-state goes, there is no place, real or imagined, like home.
Totalitarianism And Freedom: A Four-Part Coda.
This “four-part coda,” concluding the subsection on totalitarianism, is to be taken figuratively only in part, as its deliberate “poetic” form is clearly in evidence, and thus, bears a literal association with the musical term as well.
I love freedom. As Thomas Hobbes says, “A free man is he that, in those things which by his strength and wit he is able to do, is not hindered to do what he has a will to do.” (Leviathan, XXI). Thus, do I desire to pursue my own idea of happiness, and I resent all hindrance to my pursuit. Being a good man, I love good freedom. Bad freedom is unworthy of the name freedom. In John Milton’s words, “None can love freedom heartily but good men; the rest love not freedom but license.” (The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates). My freedom is of the highest order, and its worth is above all riches and sensual pleasures. Lord God so loved freedom (God Himself is free, ergo, freedom is with God, and it must be good), that He just had to gave it to Adam, even with the foreknowledge that its weight would crush His greatest creation, and bring him to ruin. Alas, freedom, you are a two-faced goddess, a daughter of God, you have conspired with the Serpent to turn free men into slaves!
I hate freedom for being a chimera. “No one is free, save Jove,” says Aeschylus (in Prometheus Bound). It may not be fit for man to be free, after all: Quod licet Jovi, non licet bovi. Adam’s freedom brought about his fall. In the Milton quotation above, thin is the line between good freedom (God’s freedom) and license. “It is not good to be too free,” writes Pascal, and no one can say it better, as “too free” says it all. For me, there is just one kind of man’s freedom that I recognize: it is the freedom from another man’s oppression, freedom to exercise one’s own God-given freedom of choice, the incomparable freedom to surrender one’s freedom voluntarily, and not under duress. Alas, I also hate other people’s freedom, and oftentimes, when I am making particularly wrong choices, I hate my own. I wish I had no freedom of choice, and, knowing that freedom of choice is God’s Law, I wish I had nothing. I wish I were nothing. “Tired with all this, for restful death I cry…” (Shakespeare) And, if God would not free me from all those freedoms, I wish the good State would have done it for me! Alas, there is no such thing as a good State…
I love the totalitarian ideal as the ultimate self-assertion of a nation-state. All for one, one for all. A sense of belonging to a benign slave-master who is far greater than one’s fellow man (for, being enslaved by a fellow man is an indignity and abomination), even though, as even Doktor Hegel would have agreed, not quite as great as God. But, unlike God, who gives freedom to all, thus allowing evil to enter the world via freedom, the totalitarian State restricts individual freedom, from top to bottom, and thus, makes its citizens morally conscious through the fear of a certain punishment in this life, rather than through the fear of an uncertain punishment in the next life, utterly dismissed by disbelief, or effectively diminished by an expectation of a deathbed redemptive confession and absolution. Thus, while acknowledging and continuously reaffirming the nation-state as my broader family, I seek in it a competent reassurance as a guardian of social morality and as my protector from other people’s freedom.
I hate totalitarianism not for what it is ideally supposed to stand for, but for the crude manner, in which it imposes itself on people. Its restrictions on freedom are coercion taken too far. For instance, why should it restrict its citizens from going abroad? If they wish to go abroad and stay there, let them! Cool comparison will always trump the stubbornness of defiance... All things considered, I would rather have a free society, and live in it, even with its ugly blemishes. I only wish a truly free society were somewhere in existence…
Totalitarianism And Democracy: What Is The Difference?
(The previous entry said something about the end of the Totalitarian subsection? Not so fast!)
At first sight the title looks rather idiotic. We all know that totalitarianism and democracy are antipodes… or do we? Isn’t it true that totalitarianism is one of the natural expressions of the will of the people, and in this sense, perfectly democratic?
In my analysis of the political organization of society, I have distinguished two basic forms of government: democratic and totalitarian, as being of the greatest interest from the psychological and philosophical point of view. By totalitarianism and democracy (in the sense of modern Western democracy, as practiced in the United States, in Europe, and in a number of other places) I mean not so much any particular instances of such organization, as the social mental outlook, which shapes national preferences for this or that political form of social organization.
The trick question of the title therefore catches one by surprise due to the multiplicity and ambiguity of the meanings of the word democracy, and once we have restricted this word’s meaning to just one, it is safe to proceed now with answering the title’s question.
Totalitarianism and democracy, being both expressions of the will of the people (depending on the national and historical circumstances each time), are different on three levels, of which the most obvious one is also the least interesting to us at this moment, that is, describing the actual nuts and bolts of both societies and defending their mutual incongruity with a straight face. The second level, which is an invitation to the third, is the easiest to describe in one-word formulations: Totalitarianism is idealistic, and democracy is practical. The third level now uses a single criterion, which is, however, crucial to our distinction. We can call it the social attitude to power. Totalitarianism trusts power, seeing it as the power of the State, which, in its eyes, contains an element of Hegelian divinity, and therefore, possesses the essential quality of goodness. We can see how totalitarianism in this wishful aspect is hopelessly idealistic. But in practical terms, its experience is hardly any different from the experience of the Roman Catholic Church from its establishment in power to fairly recent times. In order to protect its idealism, it resorted to brutal violence. So does totalitarianism in defending its own brand of idealism.
By contrast, democracy is much more down to earth and thus it has far less to defend by force. Its practical bias is characterized by a basic distrust of power, for which reason democracy deliberately and assiduously diffuses the power of its own political institutions through the system of checks and balances, thus making their functioning grotesquely inefficient, but at least restricting their ability to enforce the good by force.
Inquiry And Prejudice.
Every honest philosopher understands that any bona fide inquiry starts without preconceptions. Its integrity will be fatally compromised by even the slightest trace of prejudice. The philosopher must be able to play the roles of Advocatus Dei and Advocatus Diaboli together at the same time, with such full conviction and dedication that both Deus and the Diabolus would have to be abundantly satisfied with his defense of their respective cases.
Italian fascism and German Nazism (which, of course, was also a form of fascism) were two extreme world-historical experiences of tremendous importance to the future of mankind. As such, they deserve an intense philosophical investigation, and yet, such an investigation is completely out of the question, because neither is legally permitted to be studied without prejudice, and any objective philosopher might easily find himself in jail or blacklisted for eternity, should he decide to play the role of Advocatus Diaboli in this sordid and probably hopeless matter… Well, after the tragic experience of World War II, which is still very much alive in public memory, who can blame mankind for remaining intensely personal and full of prejudice about it?
Seeing that these two specific cases have been fatally compromised by the shadows of Hitler and Mussolini, we may just as well give up on them, which leaves us with just one more case to study philosophically, and that is Stalinist Russia. Unlike Mussolini and Hitler, Stalin was on the right side of World War II, and it was he, rather than anybody else among the Allied Powers, who made the right side’s victory at all possible. For this reason, it is possible to study the Stalinist experience without prejudice and without legal restraint. Such a study should be highly desirable both in socio-philosophical and practical terms, and I expect it to be done in good conscience, perhaps, already in the nearest future. On my part, I intend to pursue it to the best of my ability on the pages of this book.
Totalitarian Democracy.
Considering that our rather lengthy discussion of totalitarianism strives to touch all bases, the dedication of this entry to the fairly recently coined term totalitarian democracy makes very good sense. To start with, it would be pointless and overly generous to pay any attention whatsoever to the most recent usage of this big phrase (not the term, mind you) in describing the current political state of the United States in the aftermath of the neo-liberal-neo-conservative post-Soviet grand offensive, which has forever epitomized the so-called “new world order,” as it has been designated by President George Herbert Walker Bush, of the Senior Bush Administration. We do not need such grandstanding on important socio-philosophical issues, even when we whole-heartedly agree with the criticism itself. What is most important, however, is that such core terms as “totalitarianism” ought not to be used misleadingly, and applying it to the United States at any point of her history is obviously a glaring example of such irresponsible use.
Of far greater interest to us ought to be the original use of this phrase, almost six decades ago, by the Israeli Professor Jacob Leib Talmon (1916-1960), Professor of Modern History at Hebrew University, Jerusalem, whose seminal work The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy dates back to 1951 with the English translation coming out in 1960. In distinguishing liberal democracy from totalitarian democracy, Talmon distinguishes the principle of liberty from the principle of collectivism. It has been noted that Talmon was an anti-Marxist in his personal philosophy, but this is a purely emotional caveat, as it would be un-constructive to somehow equate Marxism with totalitarianism.
The following is a short sequence of excerpts from Talmon’s magnum opus, which offers the best summary of what he has in mind when talking of totalitarian democracy:
"The essential difference between the two schools of democratic thought, as they have evolved, is not, as is often alleged, in the affirmation of the value of liberty by the one and its denial by the other. It is in their different attitudes to politics. The liberal assumes politics to be a matter of trial and error, and he regards political systems as pragmatic contrivances of human ingenuity and spontaneity. It recognizes a variety of levels of personal and collective endeavor, which are altogether outside the sphere of politics.
The totalitarian democratic school, on the other hand, is based upon the assumption of a sole and exclusive truth in politics. It can be called political Messianism, in the sense that it posits a preordained, harmonious and perfect scheme of things, to which men are irresistibly driven, and at which they are bound to arrive. It recognizes, ultimately, only one plane of existence, the political. It widens the scope of politics to embrace the whole of human existence. (pp. 1-2) Modern totalitarian democracy is a dictatorship resting on popular enthusiasm (!!!), and is thus completely different from absolute power wielded by a divine-right King, or by an usurping tyrant." (p. 6)
The most significant accomplishment of Professor Talmon is his recognition of the clear democratic origin of totalitarianism, and his acknowledgment of popular enthusiasm, as the driving force behind the successes of the totalitarian regimes. Ironically, it was for these accomplishments that he was later severely criticized, and even denounced by his critics. But how else can the still on-going ban on the objective study of Italian fascism and German Nazism be explained, if not by the fear of the rekindling of that public enthusiasm for both or either, in case such a study, with their concomitant legitimation, is allowed to bring them back from hell?!
Dollars And Health.
My socialist view on the subject of healthcare has already been abundantly expressed in previous sections, and will most certainly be forcefully reiterated in the future sections, such as the Twilight’s Last Gleaming. I find this subject so ethically uncomplicated and basic, that there is little else to add in this Social section, which ought to explain the small amount of space and detail in this single entry on the topic. Such brevity, however, must not be misconstrued as a lack of attention.
One more thing. The seemingly one-sided bias of this supposedly generalized entry, yet one unmistakably singling out the failure of the American national healthcare system, or the absence thereof, is, regrettably, unavoidable. Among all major nations, it is the US that demonstrably suffers from this dreadful deficiency, and thus, inadvertently, but owing it to its own shortcoming, becomes the punching bag for criticism here, and there is nothing else I can do about it.
The question of healthcare as a social obligation of the Commonwealth to its members, to which I am now turning my attention in this single, fairly short entry on that subject, centers on the issue of social ethics. It does not matter all that much, whether society provides free medical care to the poorest. As with education, this is a matter of principle.
Free education is a social statement of principle. It has to be sound and solid. The rich can buy themselves a few educational extras, such as private tutoring, but the state must not allow them to buy a better school, or a better opportunity, not by denying them such a right, but by allowing an equal opportunity to all, and that for free, with only the magnitude of the natural talent for learning of each particular individual inserting the discriminating criteria into the egalitarian equation.
By the same token, free healthcare is not so much a question of availability, as a statement of principle. We must consider adequate public healthcare as a prerequisite of personal liberty, as a means in the pursuit of personal happiness, stated as an inalienable right in the American Declaration of Independence, explicitly guaranteed in the Preamble to the United States Constitution, as a solemn pledge to “promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.”
Dollars and war. Considering the trillions of dollars spent by this nation’s government on protecting itself and its citizens from sometimes real, but mostly imaginary enemy, how much larger, one might ask, should the total free healthcare expense be, compared to the extravagance of the inessential war expense, building up Washington’s total debt to the environs of a fourteen-digit dollar figure?
But I guess, it is not the total dollar amount, nor even the additional taxation becoming necessary to achieve this goal, without having to relinquish any of the others, which complicates the issue. It is the immorality of the government’s attitude toward healthcare, that this particular social program, like many others, can also be pushed onto the private sector. Those who can’t afford to buy their own healthcare, Washington says, are getting it free of charge anyway, so why should we bother about raising this issue again and again?
Wrong answer. There are certain things which money cannot buy, as the Bible says, and as a commercial on TV says as well. I must add that there are certain things that money must not decide, healthcare being one of them. It is immoral for society to put price tags on Hippocratic services provided to the individuals, at least on the essential ones, affecting people’s lives and basic well-being.
Unless free public healthcare is seen as an ethical issue, society’s moral obligation to God and to man, the cancerous growth of cynicism in assuming that money buys all will keep metastasizing through the whole body of that society, consigning it to its ultimate doom.
Protect And Serve.
Just as the brevity of my last entry on healthcare must have raised some eyebrows, so might this concluding tribute to all other social responsibilities of the state toward its citizens appear as a hurried catchall glimpse of very important subject matter treated disrespectfully and extremely inadequately. Perhaps, an explanation is in order, and this explanation is quite simple.
In fact, all constructive pieces of my writing on the State’s social responsibilities belong to the section under the title One Step Beyond Wishful Thinking, and, consequently, the bulk of what may have been expected to be found here rightfully belongs there, and there it will be found.
Thus, there is no point for me now to expand on the subject of general welfare as a requisite social program. Aside from some redundant criticism of the existing welfare programs, there will be little to add to my notes on what social welfare ought to be which will be the subject of a subsection in the Wishful Thinking section. (I must, however, have a better coordination between these sections, perhaps addressing the inconsistency in devoting so much space to education here, and not there, using the same logic. The next troubling question may be, why do I need this section at all, if its content may be successfully distributed among the others? It is obvious to me that I still need this section for such material which is best suited for it, and for none other, but I must make it explicit by improving the overall structure of my sections, and this is a task for the future, whether I like it or not.)
In the meantime, Protect and Serve is a closing meditation on the role of the state in protecting the lives and other essential interests of its citizens from foreign and domestic harm.
Whereas the functions of the police and other methods of ensuring peace at home can be easily rationalized, the problem of the military function of the state is much less susceptible to rationalization. On the surface, things are simple: Whenever the nation is facing an outside threat, which must be assumed to be the case at all times, the state must provide full military protection for its citizens, and, whenever possible, preempt the threat.
Had it been as simple as that, there would have been no controversy about the Bush-43 Administration’s so-called Preemption Doctrine. In fact, when it was first announced, I even jumped to its defense, concluding, in theoretical terms, that preemption, whenever it is possible, is the most natural part of national defense. I now stand corrected. What is natural in theory, may become horribly abused and exploited in practice.
From now on, the main criterion of advisability of a military policy must not be its natural merit, but, first and foremost, its susceptibility to misuse and cynical trickery.
When a nation is under attack, it has the right to defend itself with all available means, oftentimes even at the expense of some innocent bystanders. When it is not under attack, however, but there is a perception of a clear and present danger, great effort must be made to assess the situation responsibly and correctly. The leaders of the nation must be held accountable for their political and military analysis of the situation, and judged with maximum severity on the outcome of their actions. Any irresponsible use of military power is bound to create a greater threat to national security than the one that had existed before, and therefore must be equated to high treason in the immediate aftermath of such irresponsible action.
What is even more shocking to me, in the long-drawn-out wake of the still unraveling Iraq fiasco, than the irresponsibility of the George W. Bush Administration, is the irresponsibility of the American public, of its elected representatives, and of, presumably, the watchdog over them all, the media, in failing to understand the gravity of the offense, that is, of the huge mass deception involved and of the exponential increase of the threat to this nation’s security, as a result of the Bush Administration’s actions. Treason has, indeed, been committed, but the guilty have not been charged either in the court of law or in the court of public opinion.
I maintain that every nation must take its military function with utmost seriousness, and seek to redress any mistakes made in its handling of the matters of war and peace as soon as they become noticeable. What is happening in Iraq today has affected everything going on around the world, to the detriment of the United States. The totally inadequate domestic reaction to this constantly unfolding calamity is a testimony to the unhealthy state of the American Union, showing a disintegration of the American society as a whole. In a few more years, I am afraid, this trend will make itself known in full force, and for everybody to see…
And finally, here is a very important social-military question: should a modern nation have a draft policy, or should it limit its military force to well-paid volunteers?
In my view, there can be no universal answer to this question. To each nation its own solution. I do not see the need for a draft among those nations of Europe who, in the spirit of the Paris Agreement of 1992, have renounced violence as a national policy option. Their participation in subsequent NATO operations, such as the infamous 1999 bombing war on Yugoslavia, for instance, all its moral repulsiveness notwithstanding, is an exception, rather than the rule, and does not constitute an aggressive policy of any of the member states.
On the other hand, the aggressive nature of the American foreign policy, and its trigger-happiness to enter whichever war of choice can be found, demands, as a matter of moral imperative, that this nation returns to the draft, so that the grim downside of any war of choice, rather than of necessity, can be felt by the society as a whole, and thus judged by the nation in its totality, regardless of the opinions and special interests of the nation’s leaders, or of the mercenaries, both willing and those, whose commitment has been compelled by the dire financial circumstances in their previous lives as civilians.
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