Inverted Totalitarianism - 21st Century Style

September 14, 2020

Inverted Totalitarianism - 21st Century Style

This is how it could happen. The change will almost certainly be bound to seem, feel and appear utterly different to that which occurred on previous occasions, most notably of course in the 1930s. Following the end of WWII, journalist Milton Mayer investigated how Germany had become a totalitarian state. He wanted to know why Germans didn’t stand up for their rights as Adolf Hitler’s Nationalist Socialist Party amassed power and drove the country to war, (Ref. 3).

This world is so very different however. The change is faster, easier in an internet age. Simpler, digitally nominated globalised "money" is increasingly able to be created and moved in vast quantities, with fewer links to the realities of the governed world of nation states. Propaganda and ideas can be transmitted in a flash, with minds able to be altered and changed at a rapid pace.

There is undoubtedly a developing large gap, which started to gestate and grow three to four decades ago. This slow splitting is now leading to an Inverted Totalitarian condition where partially but increasingly corrupted corporate “Dark” money if you will, is feeding malignant transnational power. This is working far above lower levels of increasingly irrelevant, confused, weakened anaemic individual and nation-group governments and organisations.

Hannah Arendt (Ref.1): “Perpetual-motion mania of totalitarian movements that remain in power only so long as they keep moving and set everything around them in motion” and “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.”

Sheldon Wolin (Ref. 2): Inverted totalitarianism reverses things. It is all frantic and continuous politics all of the time, largely untempered by the political. Public displays of factional squabbling are occasionally on public display, between factions, interest groups, competing corporate powers and rival media concerns. The culminating moment of national elections about a choice of personalities rather than alternatives. No finding of the common good amidst a welter of well-financed, highly organised, single-minded interests rabidly seeking governmental favours and overwhelming the practices of representative government and public administration with a sea of cash”.

Nothing appears to make any difference! Eat your fancy bread. Watch the nice screen-circus. Enjoy those diverting little games. Totalitarian Beast tried the technique one pill at a time, pausing to see if it had been too strong, or if the conscience of the world could swallow. The world kept on swallowing, including those who recognised the implications of the gradual progression. Things worsened, but people struggled to react properly, or convince others they too should be worried. The broader pattern of constant societal change that totalitarianism imposed had a profound effect on individual agency, resulting in a kind of personal inertia, even when one had an inkling of what was being set in motion.

People have become increasingly puzzled by the Mass Personal Inertia. Drip....drip...drip... towards tyranny. Unscrupulous, evil, powerful, distracting lies, dismissal, occasional dismay, one pill at a time, delivered in simpleton’s Poshlost-Prolefeed (Ref. 4) whilst providing Juvenal’s usual time-honoured digitised easy-delivery fast-life "Panem et Circenses” (Bread & Circuses, Ref. 5).

It is not going to succeed. It cannot. Not this time. But it might. It’s up to The Proles [99.9%] and how hard they can resist, slowly change and ultimately stop these attempts.

References

1. Arendt, Hannah (1976) [1951, New York: Schocken]. The Origins of Totalitarianism [Elemente und Ursprünge totaler Herrschaft] (Revised Ed.). Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. ISBN 978-0-547-54315-4.