Among the many issues of great interest in connection with the totalitarian phenomenon is the question of the relationship between the so-called mass society phenomenon, and totalitarianism, as a definitive social answer to it.
Mass society is described by Encyclopaedia Britannica as “a term intended by its proponents to connote the main features that distinguish modern industrial societies from feudal, peasant, or tribal societies. A mass society, they argue, is one, in which the most important institutions are large, centralized, bureaucratic, and impersonal; where most human relationships are shallow, partial, and transitory; where individuals tend to be lonely, anxious, rootless, and in search for a sense of community.”
Compare this to Marx’s idea of alienation of the individual under the capitalist system. Clearly, for Marx, mass society, as described above, is capitalist society. His solution to the problems of capitalism is the advent of “communism,” or, in more modest and practical terms, the socialist alternative.
Enough has been said already about Marxism, capitalism, and anti-capitalism, in their proper places. What is of interest for the purpose of this series on totalitarianism is how the latter can be seen as an alternative (or should I say the alternative?) to mass society, that is, to capitalist society. As I see it, the main symptom of the malaise affecting capitalist mass society is alienation, whereas the totalitarian remedy manifests itself in social coming-together, a regeneration of sorts. It is this positive feature of totalitarianism, which the great Hannah Arendt inadvertently singles out, when she writes about social convictions shared by all classes of totalitarian society alike. (See her exact quotation to this account later in this entry.)
The broad emergence of the idea of the masses was the result of the ascendancy of the bourgeoisie onto the world stage at the dawn of the French Revolution. Marquis de Condorcet, who should have stayed with his beloved mathematics, instead of volunteering his services to political science, and that infamous utilitarian monster Sir Jeremy Bentham, became the chief apologists of the masses, although Voltaire was, as always, quick to note that the masses (“la public”) were “a ferocious beast,” either to be chained, or fled from…
John Stuart Mill, to his credit, gave multiple warnings of his fear of the masses. Alexis de Tocqueville was another voice of concern about the dangers of egalitarianism and a mass society. In his notes on American democracy, he observed that people in an egalitarian society lost faith in one another, and lost respect for authority of a superior person or a superior class. Instead, they placed their faith in the “public as a whole,” and in the nation-state as its embodiment.
Tocqueville’s observations in particular reveal an astonishingly thin line between a democratic society and its totalitarian (I am continuing to use this term with conviction and relish!) counterpart.
The concept of mass society, which incorporates the ideas of social democratization and the splintering of community, would lead many serious scholars to believe that the emergence of a mass society has been the causa prima of the twentieth-century totalitarianism. In her analysis of the Nazi phenomenon in Germany, Hannah Arendt, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, suggested that, unlike the nineteenth-century mob, that was built along the class lines, modern totalitarianism was built on masses, being shaped “by all-pervasive influences and convictions which were tacitly and inarticulately shared by all classes of society alike.”
Another German émigré, Franz Leopold Neumann, has made an intriguing and far-reaching conclusion that the main reason for the rise of Hitler and of Nazism was not the psychological susceptibility of the German mass society to political extremism, but social discontent with the bureaucratization and depersonalization of the government of the Weimar Republic, and with its inability to provide proper leadership.
In other words, public dissatisfaction with inadequate leadership in a mass society culture may lead to the rise of totalitarianism… A remarkable observation, indeed! To which I may add that mass society alienation in the Weimar Republic may indeed have led Germany to an attempt at social regeneration, resulting in the monster of the Third Reich.
Is mass society totalitarianism-prone? This question was to create a furious debate, with some outraged scholars rushing to the defense of democracy, trying to prove that even though the United States and Great Britain do fit the profile of a mass society the best, neither has developed any significant extremist social movements that could indicate a tendency toward totalitarianism in them.
In my opinion, there is a very thin line separating totalitarianism from ‘non-totalitarianism’ within modern mass societies, whether it be Russia or the United States. Russia is a nation with a well-shaped totalitarian psychology. Calling it a mass society may be just a little stretch, if the detailed definition is employed with insistence on every technicality. But, by the same token, the United States is a full-blown mass society, yet exhibiting certain totalitarian tendencies, particularly in this nation’s foreign policy. Let us recall from the entry on the descriptions and formal definitions of totalitarianism the following illuminating passage, here presented in an abbreviated form:
“Controlled economy allows the totalitarian dictatorship to exploit its population for foreign conquest and world revolution. For example, all resources can be concentrated on a single military project.”
I actually do contend that American economy shows some evidence of being controlled, in the ability of the government to print large quantities of paper money, to allow, and to cover up, trillions of dollars of deficit spending. The rest of the passage above shows an eerie relevance to the still current neoconservative policy to exploit the American population for foreign conquest and world revolution (gently dubbed as “spreading democracy around the world”), and to lavish exorbitant amounts of resources “on a single military project” (like in that senseless war in Iraq, as perhaps the most outrageous example).
There is also evidence of an intense public dissatisfaction with the quality of government leadership in the executive branch and the representation in the Congress. There is a fatigue with bureaucratic incompetence, a nostalgia for a competent dictatorship, even if that erstwhile competence is largely illusory, in the return of, say, the Clinton dynasty to the White House.
Do understand me correctly, none of this is to suggest that America is somehow on the verge of becoming a totalitarian state without even knowing or understanding it. However, I have indeed observed some further creepy tendencies of an erosion of the multi-party (or rather the two-party) system, which I have described as “neo-bipartisanship” in modern American politics, in my Twilight’s Last Gleaming section. This means that, in a sense, the two-party system has lost its effectiveness and legitimacy, as the provider of alternative policies to the public choice. These days the clueless Democrats in the United States Congress have nothing to offer to the public to counteract, or rather to countermand, the policies of the Bush Administration on the issues of great importance, limiting their differences with the Republicans to non-essential, and even trivial, trifles.
No, America is by no means a “totalitarian wannaby,” and to describe her as such would be to completely misunderstand the nature of the totalitarian ideal, which presupposes a sense of national cohesion, of which America today has none. (Otherwise, there would have been a far greater sense of social appreciation of the fact that this nation is at war, and that her children are dying every day out there… for a presumably worthy national cause?!)
…But what this entry does strive to suggest is that there exists a deplorable paucity of public understanding of certain key points of political philosophy, regarding social political alternatives in all societies, and the hidden property of totalitarianism, as a natural alternative to a mass society in crisis, is prominently among these. There may even exist, if I am following the signals correctly a core group of highly disaffected white Americans who may be eager for a political takeover, if not of the United States as a whole, then of certain geographical parts of the United States, gaining autonomy, or even independence, in a splintered collection of entities currently known as the world’s sole superpower.
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