How Totalitarianism Happens

My post on “The Psychology of Totalitarianism” is pinned at the top of my substack because I believe totalitarianism is the greatest danger of our time.

This is a Facebook post that does a nice summary of our peril as described by Hannah Arendt, a Holocaust survivor.

My view is that the Internet and social media make our peril greater because people increasingly give up on any foundation of truth and believe the narrative they listen to is “as good as any, and better than yours.” Everyone gets their own “truth.” A couple of quotes from the FB post:

She sat in Berlin cafés where professors who once debated philosophy now whispered propaganda, testing each other to see who could be trusted. She read newspapers that contradicted themselves daily until facts became meaningless. She saw neighbors grow cynical, exhausted, indifferent—shrugging and saying “everyone lies anyway” until they stopped trying to know what was real. She watched people surrender their minds before the first camps were built. And she understood: the real danger wasn’t that people believed Nazi lies. It was that they stopped believing in truth at all.

One of Arendt's most chilling conclusions:

“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.”

The temptation is finally to shrug, turn off the “news” and believe whatever you want to because you are just too tired of being constantly lied to. You give up on truth.

I’m tempted too, however, as a Christian. I believe that there is an I AM, as in “I AM the way, the truth, and the life.” Nietzsche said that “without God, everything is permitted.” Christ is God, Christ is truth. Nietzsche also said that God was dead … and he said it as a lament because he probably realized the grave danger of the “Übermensch,” the ideal superior man that would rise up in the future, destroy Christianity and create and impose his own values. Hitler, Stalin, Mao and others have filled the role with less than utopian results. No Christ, no truth, and all is permissible.

The UN wants to control “disinformation,” an unsubtle way of saying that they want thought control. Biden took a shot at creating a “Disinformation Board."

Jankowicz weighed in more recently on Elon Musk’s bid to buy Twitter, writing, “I shudder to think about if free speech absolutists were taking over more platforms, what that would look like for the marginalized communities … which are already shouldering … disproportionate amounts of this abuse.

One can’t be too careful about those “free speech absolutists!”

You can go out and look at how they were proceeding if you want. Thankfully it didn’t actually get created - or did it? I recommend as much vigilance as we can muster … many sources, books, post-narrative-of-the-day analyses, searching for context, avoiding the quick, simple conclusion, etc.

Totalitarians are experts at the “Weapon of Mass Confusion.” They want to wear us down so we quit thinking critically by getting us to refuse to listen to opposing views, to “cancel” people who hold different views, stop discussing issues, accept censorship, etc.

In short, just accept things like Hillary Clinton’s comment on the Benghazi attack in which 4 Americans were killed and the US refused to allow ready troops to go defend the embassy.

”At this point, what difference does it make?”