Michael D O'Brien:
"As Aristotle points out in his classic Politics, democracies degenerate into oligarchies, and we in the O-so-enlightened twenty-first century are merely following the long established pattern of decay. This process can be reversed, but it will take effort and courage. Unless there is a renewal of far-seeing thought in our elected representatives, the new “same-sex marriage” bill will indeed pass into law, bringing about negative consequences for generations to come. If it passes, it will be due to the government’s policy of maintaining the surface appearance of democracy while undermining its principles.
Is it so far-fetched to consider the possibility that we are in a downward slide toward totalitarianism? Few people would go so far as to maintain that we are living in the early phase of an Orwellian 1984 or alternatively a softer form of totalitarian government such as Huxley’s Brave New World, yet the elements of State-enforced social reconstruction are now in operation. We should also consider the fact that in just over one generation we have been shifted from a society in which homosexual acts were a crime under the then existing law, to a society in which homosexual acts have become a government-protected and fostered activity, while voicing criticism of it “publicly” has become the crime. Call it by any name you like, but this is Thought Crime. As Orwell predicted, we have arrived at a situation in which “some of us are more equal than others.”
“Crime” is an ambiguous word. Governments of widely differing worldviews use it to restrain anti-social elements in their societies. But the heroism of one nation can be the pathology of another. Regardless of its political philosophy, in every country someone decides who is or is not an anti-social element, determines which of us is “an enemy of the people.” So which will we choose, here in this brave new social experiment we have created in Canada? And by what lights and criteria shall we choose? Who will judge our judges? Who will restore to us the tools of discernment if the spectrum of thought has been blanked out in this or that zone, journalism fettered, literature now circumspect (books, after all, are public forums). Where is it all going? Is it back to normal now, business as usual? Or is there another wave coming, propelled by the success of its predecessors? Each of these questions needs sober reflection, but we will be handicapped in our assessment if we have little understanding of how totalitarian regimes develop.
Signs and Elements of Impending Oppression
Let’s go a little deeper than the usual Political Science 101 thought-bite on human affairs. Indeed let’s look simultaneously deeper and higher—as high as a cosmic perspective perhaps. This could be helpful, because ranging from the proliferating social engineering class to the cynical new criminal classes (I mean thieves and murderers), modern man has pretty much lost his vision of the hierarchical universe. Gone is the sense of the moral absolutes, gone is accountability to any authority outside of whatever political correctness is the current fashion, gone the principle inherent in Western civilization that the honest citizen is an equal partner in a federation of free beings, all under the mantle of exterior transcendent absolutes that protect the human community from the subjectivity of aggressive social movements. That mantle has been discarded in the public forum. We should ask ourselves what will go next. The philosopher Peter Kreeft once wrote that a people who abandon moral absolutes will inevitably be ruled by a police state. “We choose,” he said, “either conscience or cops.”
The word totalitarianism usually generates impressions of dictatorial systems which brutally crush civic freedoms and negate the humanity of their subjects in an effort to achieve complete control. Images of barbed wire, jack-boots and thought-control are conjured up in our minds. 20th century literature has given us some powerful works of fiction which suggest a variety of possible totalitarian futures: one thinks immediately of Orwell and Huxley. But the societies they described were very different from each other. Indeed, as in fiction, actual tyrant states can assume many masks. What should be discerned are the elements common to those governments that oppress their peoples.
Common to all of them is the absolutising of the power of the State or systems controlled by the State. In order to succeed in this, totalitarian governments must invariably strive to do away with genuine absolutes and to establish false absolutes in their place. Genuine absolutes are fundamental, ultimate, unqualified truths, independent of the ebb and flow of cultures, fashions, myths and prejudices. Human nature (never perfect) more or less thrives upon such absolutes. Upon such absolutes healthy societies are built, and though these societies are never perfect they are generally beneficial to their peoples. An example of genuine moral absolutes is the Ten Commandments. An example of false absolutes can be found in Marx’s ideology, where the theory of dialectic is posited as the mechanism which determines human history––an abstraction that has resulted in many millions of violent deaths.
The absolute ruler always attempts to destroy diversity in the name of unity. What he really means by the word “unity” is uniformity, sameness. He cannot remain content with a pacified populace, because there always lurks beneath the surface of even the passive a potential for dissent, the threat of revolt against his power. Thus the pacified must be re-educated, so that at the core of their thinking no virus of resistance remains. The totalitarian begins with a seemingly benign re-education, but as he extends his grasp into more and more aspects of human life he gradually becomes hostile to everything outside of his own will. As his power becomes near absolute it grows increasingly negative, because by its very nature it must oppose what cannot be extinguished in the human person. It must seek at some point to destroy the inviolability of conscience and the inner impulse to genuine creativity which depends for its well-being on freedom from manipulation.
The individual tyrant rarely looks like a monster in the beginning. He usually appears as a saviour of his people, though once he has attained power he will eventually show his hand––at root he merely wishes to accumulate as much power as possible in order to obtain an absolute security or glory for himself, and to enjoy it at any cost. This kind of tyrant is not difficult to identify, given enough time. When he runs out of gasoline or bullets or wheat the people cast him off, because he is a monster who looks like a monster. He has blown his cover. There is little depth to such men, for they exemplify “the banality of evil,” to borrow Hanna Arendt’s phrase.
Beware of Deadly Idealists
More difficult to identify is the idealistic tyrant who expands his power in a sincere effort to protect what he considers to be the good of his subjects. He will reduce crime, balance the budget, bring order and a measure of material plenty to the nation. He will surely labour to make a better citizen of the raw material of his subjects. There can be a reassuring sense of security in all this—in the beginning. We feel so much safer in a milieu of dependable public services and an ordered economy, though we would, perhaps, remain uneasy about trading away certain freedoms in exchange for them. But it is precisely the elimination of personal responsibility which is the new totalitarian’s ultimate goal, for this is what he sees as our fatal flaw.
It must be understood that the highly motivated idealist is not merely interested in improving the exterior forms of society. Ultimately, he wishes to reform us to the core, to save us from ourselves. Of course, he will find that basic human nature is rather difficult to remold, and as time goes on he will need to continuously expand his power until his control approaches the level of totality. If he is clever at it and fills up the world with beautiful rhetoric, and takes care not to grossly infringe upon our pleasurable rights, and if, at the same time, he takes upon his own shoulders our unpleasant rights, the ones which demand effort and sacrifice, then he may get away with it. This is never more possible than in a historical period of extreme stress. In such a climate the lifting of our responsibilities is not felt as deprivation; it feels, rather, like relief from intolerable tensions. Somebody at last is doing something about the human condition! A sick society is getting therapy! A cancer patient puts himself into the hands of his doctor, so why shouldn’t a “dysfunctional” people entrust itself to its sociopolitical physicians?
Somewhere during the therapy there is a decisive transfer of power and responsibility. When this happens on a massive scale something is seriously amiss. There may not be brown-shirts and jackboots marching in the streets. No public book-burnings. No grotesque executions. In some cases there may even be no visible dictator, only a system or a social philosophy which permeates and controls everything. Indeed, the world may appear to be perfectly normal. The philosopher Josef Pieper points out that this is the most dangerous form of totalitarianism of all, almost impossible to throw off, because it never appears to be what, in fact, it is.
In his prescient book, The Judgment of the Nations, historian Christopher Dawson warns:
“Thus, the situation that Christians have to face today has more in common with that described by the author of the Apocalypse than with the age of St. Augustine. The world is strong and it has evil masters. But these masters are not vicious autocrats like Nero and Domitian. They are the engineers of the mechanism of world power: a mechanism that is more formidable than anything the ancient world knew, because it is not confined to external means, like the despotisms of the past, but uses all the resources of modern psychology to make the human soul the motor of its dynamic purpose.”
Writing in the late 1940’s, Dawson was describing the shape of a possible future, a global non-violent totalitarianism that is the most serious of all tyrannies because in it evil has become depersonalised, separated from individual appetite and passion, and “exalted into a sphere in which all moral values are confused and transformed.” “The great terrorists” he points out, “have not been immoral men, but rigid puritans who did evil coldly, by principle.”
In his memoirs, Inside the Third Reich, Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect and armaments minister, wrote about the state of mind of the German people as Hitler rose to power. He says that most Germans disliked the sinister side of Hitler’s policies, but in a spirit of optimism they assumed that he would leave behind his more unpleasant policies once he attained the dignity of high office. They overlooked his errors because they thought his form of law and order would be a lesser evil than the social disruption they were suffering during the nineteen twenties and early thirties. By succumbing to the “lesser evil” argument, they brought upon the world an evil of epic proportions."
