“I think,” wrote the brilliant Tocqueville in 1840, “that the species of oppression by which democratic nations are menaced is unlike anything that ever before existed in the world; our contemporaries will find no prototype of it in their memories. I seek in vain for an expression that will accurately convey the whole of the idea I have formed of it; the old words despotism and tyranny are inappropriate: the thing itself is new, and, since I cannot name it, I must attempt to define it.
“I seek to trace the novel features under which despotism may appear in the world. The first thing that strikes the observation is an innumerable multitude of men, all equal and alike, incessantly endeavouring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives. Each of them, living apart, is as a stranger to the fate of all the rest; his children and his private friends constitute to him the whole of mankind. As for the rest of his fellow citizens, he is close to them, but he does not see them; he touches them, but he does not feel them; he exists only in himself and for himself alone; and if his kindred still remain to him, he may be said at any rate to have lost his country.
“Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in a perpetual state of childhood: it is well content that people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances: what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?
“Thus it every day renders the exercise of the free agency of man less useful and less frequent; it circumscribes the will within a narrower range and gradually robs a man of all the uses of himself. The principle of equality has prepared men for these things; it has predisposed men to endure them as benefits.
“After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small, complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd.
“I have always thought that servitude of the regular, quiet, and gentle kind which I have just described might be combined more easily than is commonly believed with some of the outward forms of freedom, and that it might even establish itself under the wing of the sovereignty of the people.1
Here, in these paragraphs, lies one of the most astonishing prophecies to be found anywhere in political literature. It is nothing less than a picture, nearly a century in advance of the reality, of the totalitarian community. But it is more than a mere prophecy. It is an analysis of the nature of totalitarianism that has not been improved upon by even the most brilliant of contemporary students of the subject.
What makes Tocqueville's analysis immeasurably superior to all but a few others is that it does not seize upon the transparently horrible, the grotesque, the obviously irrational, as the essence of totalitarianism. It does not limit itself to brutalities which, however abhorrent and real in totalitarian society, are nevertheless practiced by totalitarian rulers only against minorities already disliked and discriminated against by majorities. It does not fix upon aspects that are but incidental or variable in the structure of totalitarianism.
The merit of Tocqueville's analysis is that it points directly to the heart of totalitarianism—the masses; the vast aggregates who are never tortured, flogged, or imprisoned, or humiliated; who instead are cajoled, flattered, stimulated by the rulers; but who are nonetheless relentlessly destroyed as human beings, ground down into mere shells of humanity. And the genius of his analysis lies in the view of totalitarianism as something not historically “abnormal” but as closely related to the very trends hailed as progressive in the nineteenth century.
Two
Nothing can come from analyses of totalitarianism based upon elements that are incidental, or that vary from one country to another. Totalitarianism has unfortunately become one of those omnibus words used to absorb, indiscriminately, every element of past and present that we regard as detestable. Because totalitarianism is the major evil of our century, there is a strong tendency to make it the summation of all manifestly evil aspects of the past and the embodiment of all lesser evils of the present. But, however gratifying to our moral sensibilities, this is a dangerous mode of analysis. We had better direct our attention to qualities that might be supposed to have deep and wide appeal to large aggregates of human beings, qualities that, however corrupt, have meaning and relevance and can come to be regarded by masses of people as a part of the very design of history. Totalitarianism is an affair of mass attitudes. Its success depends on incorporating into new structures of power those values with the widest appeal to a population. It cannot be reduced, in its fundamentals, to such manifestly abhorrent facts as racial extermination, capitalist enslavement, or military dominance.
Hideous as were the systematic killings and torturings of millions of Jews by the Nazis, there is still no justification for making anti-Semitism the essence of totalitarianism. The reality of Soviet Russia, more ruthless and more efficiently totalitarian in many ways than even Hitler's Germany, should make this fact evident. Racialism is not the essence. That racialism, as a doctrine, was closely associated with Nazism has nothing to do with the structural foundations of totalitarianism and everything to do with the fact that race happened to be an evocative piece of imagery in Germany. Race may be the central image held up before the masses in a totalitarian country, but the image might as well be the proletariat, the fatherland, or suffering humanity.
We must recognize that there is no single intellectual image intrinsic to the totalitarian design. There is no single spiritual or cultural value inherently incapable of being made into the central image of a totalitarian society. It can as well be racial equality as inequality, godly piety as atheism, labor as capital, Christian brotherhood as the toiling masses. What is central is not the specific image held up to the masses but, rather, the sterilization and destruction of all other images and the subordination of all human relationships to the central power that contains this image.
Nor are poverty and economic distress, as such, the crucial factors leading to the rise of totalitarianism. Such analyses too are undiscriminating efforts to make the larger evil simply the sum of lesser evils. Poverty may, in certain circumstances, be a powerful basis of appeal for the totalitarian leader. It may be used as a piece of concrete symbolism for all the real and imaginary deprivations and frustrations of a population. But mere poverty itself does not automatically impell men to the acceptance of totalitarian power. What is decisive is the social context, the sensations of disinheritance and exclusion from rightful membership in a social and moral order. These may or may not accompany poverty.
Nor can the effective source of totalitarianism be confined to any one class or section of the population. For a long time, Marxism had the regrettable effect of convincing even well-informed observers that all the massive changes which took place in Germany after 1933 were simply “reactionary” efforts of a group of men known as capitalists to maintain an existing economy. Because in its early phases some highly placed industrialists contributed financially to the Nazi Party, and learned too late that rootless men always betray, the legend arose that totalitarianism is indistinguishable from predatory efforts of capitalists.
But we must recognize that totalitarianism can as easily be the work of industrial managers, who are themselves revolting against the capitalists, or of labor leaders, scientists, church leaders, or any group of intellectuals who may find themselves strategically placed to accomplish through revolution or bureaucracy the transition from free society to totalitarianism.
Least of all can totalitarianism—in whatever form it has taken, Nazi or Fascist included—be regarded seriously as a “reactionary” movement. Totalitarianism may not be revolutionary in the sense the word possessed in the nineteenth century, but in none of its forms can it be placed in the conservative category of reaction. To describe totalitarianism as simply the effort of a minority to maintain, through force, existing institutions of society misses grotesquely the sweeping dislocations and atomizations actually involved in such a movement as Nazism. Far from being, as it is sometimes absurdly argued, a lineal product of nineteenth-century Conservatism, totalitarianism is, in fact, the very opposite of it.
Nor can totalitarianism be reduced to the operation of force and terror. That these exist, and horribly, in every totalitarian country is beside the point. The essence of totalitarianism lies in its relation to the masses, and to the masses the leaders never bring the satanic arts of the torture chamber and the exterminations of the concentration camp. The totalitarian order will use force and terror, where necessary, to destroy organized minorities— refractory labor unions, churches, ethnic groups—but to the masses of individuals who are left when these social relationships are destroyed, a totally different approach is employed. It is an approach based upon the arts of psychological manipulation—cajolery, flattery, bribery, mass identification with new images, and all the modern techniques of indoctrination.
We merely delude ourselves if we suppose that there is always necessary conflict between totalitarian governments and the desires and aspirations of the masses. Here the recent words of Hannah Arendt are illuminating. “In view of the unparalleled misery which totalitarian regimes have meant to their people—horror to many and unhappiness to all—it is painful to realize that they are always preceded by mass movements and that they ‘command and rest upon mass support’ up to the end. Hitler's rise to power was legal in terms of majority rule and neither he nor Stalin could have maintained the leadership of large populations, survived so many interior and exterior crises, and braved the numerous dangers of the relentless intra-party struggles, if they had not had the confidence of the masses.”2
The totalitarian leader is never loath to identify himself with the “will and wisdom” of the masses. No intellectual defense against totalitarianism could be more futile than that which sees the States of Hitler and Stalin as operating in open contempt and hatred of the people. Such States may plead with, flatter, and persuade, but they never openly insult the people. It was this dependence upon popular support that permitted Mussolini to call his Fascism “an organized, centralized, authoritarian democracy,” and Hitler to refer to the Third Reich as “Teutonic democracy based upon the free choice of the leader.” We do not have to be reminded of the ceaseless efforts of the Soviet leaders to identify their policies and actions with the tradition of democracy in the West and of their incessant attempts to maintain popular support of these policies.
There are two other misconceptions, greater than any of the foregoing, each of which precludes an understanding of totalitarianism. The first consists of the view of totalitarianism as some sort of vast irrationality, a kind of collective derangement. Here we are victims of the supine optimism that has characterized so much of Western thought during the past two centuries. We insist upon making the irrational and the evil interpenetrating essences of one another. Because totalitarianism is manifestly evil we suppose that it is also fundamentally irrational. And because we have thus proved it to be irrational we comfort ourselves with the belief that it must be destroyed by its own departure from reason.
The total State is evil, but we merely delude ourselves if we do not recognize in it elements of almost overpowering rationality. In terms of basic organization it is at least as rational as the huge industrial corporation, the mass political party, or the mammoth bureaucracies of all modern governments. Indeed the total State would be inconceivable without a background, in some degree, composed of these and related elements. We might as well conceive of selling the Rotary Creed to savages on the banks of the Amazon as disseminating Nazi or Communist creeds to populations unfamiliar with the basic and overt manifestations of economic and political rationalism.
The total State is rational in that it recognizes in human personality certain basic needs for security and recognition and strives through every art and technique to satisfy those needs in calculated political terms. It is rational in that it seeks to eliminate from culture all of those ceremonial, ritualistic, or symbolic features inherited from the past that constitute by their existence obstructions to the achievement of a perfect mobilization of popular will. New ceremonies and symbols will be created by totalitarian rulers, but these will be made to fit as closely into the total design of political power as manipulative intelligence can contrive. Old complexities of language and syntax will be removed, where necessary, in the interests of a more rational structure of communication readily assimilable by all members of the population; ancient legal procedures will be abolished or streamlined in the interests of a more rational and remorseless legal code; superfluous or irrelevant forms of recreation will be outlawed, subtly or forcibly as circumstances may require, and replaced by new forms harmonious with the purposes of the State. Horrible as were the Nazi concentration and extermination camps, in moral terms, we cannot miss the essential rationality of their operation. They were rational not merely in the ruthless efficiency of their techniques but in their calculated separation of victim and overseer alike from all the emotional and spiritual aspects of personality.
To start out with the assumption that totalitarianism is irrational, and hence doomed to self-destruction, is to start out with an extremely unintelligent view of a form of society that has used all the rational arts of modern public administration, economic management, and social psychology to maintain itself and to make its identity ever more emphatic in the minds of its people.
Equally fatal to our understanding of totalitarianism is the assumption, drawn from the philosophy of Progress, that this form of society represents some kind of historical abnormality or deflection from the appointed course of history. Here also we are in the presence of the typical confusion between the morally good and the historically inevitable. Because we, for so long, saw in political freedom, rights, and justice the basic elements not merely of moral goodness but also of historical necessity, there are many who persist in regarding such movements as Nazism and Soviet Communism as deviations from the normal development of civilization.
Related to this view are the efforts to place totalitarianism in the category of primitivism, of antique tribalism. Such efforts are a part of the larger perspective of moral philosophy that makes all evil a mere reversion to the past, as though there were some inevitable link between time and moral states. The total State, it is said, is nothing more than a reversion to the infancy of civilization. It is the product of certain dark forces, buried beneath the superego man has acquired through centuries of moral progress, now manifesting themselves in Nazism and Communism. This view may be gratifying to sensibilities nourished by the idea of Progress, but it is as delusive as the idea that totalitarianism is a vast collective irrationality. To explain all evil as simply a reversion to the past is, as Reinhold Niebuhr once observed, like describing individual insanity as simply a reversion to childhood.
What is most dangerous in this whole view is the supposition that totalitarianism is a kind of monstrous accident, an interruption of the normal, a deflection that must be set right by the operation of the so-called laws of historical progress. But if there are any laws of unilinear progress, we have not discovered them, and there is no more justification in purely historical terms for regarding totalitarianism as an abnormal development than there is for so regarding democracy, or liberalism.
Three
There are two central elements of totalitarianism: the first is the existence of the masses; the second is the ideology, in its most extreme form, of the political community. Neither can be fully described apart from its relation to the other, for the two exist always, in modern society, in sensitive interaction with each other. What works toward the creation of the masses works also toward the establishment of the omnicompetent, absolute State. And everything that augments the power and influence of the State in its relation to the individual serves also to increase the scope of the masses.
The masses are fundamental to the establishment of totalitarian society. On this point all serious students of the subject, from Peter Drucker to Hannah Arendt are agreed.
“Masses,” writes Dr. Arendt, “are not held together by consciousness of common interest, and they lack that specific class articulateness which is expressed in determined, limited, obtainable goals. The term masses applies only where we deal with people who either because of sheer numbers, or indifference, or a combination of both, cannot be integrated into any organization based on common interest, into political parties, or municipal governments, or professional organizations, or trade unions.”3
The essence of the masses, however, does not lie in the mere fact of numbers. It is not the quantitative but the qualitative aspect that is essential. A population may be vast, as is that of India, and yet, by reason of the stability of its social organization, be far removed from the condition of massdom. What is crucial in the formation of the masses is the atomization of all social and cultural relationships within which human beings gain their normal sense of membership in society. The mass is an aggregate of individuals who are insecure, basically lonely, and ground down, either through decree or historical circumstance, into mere particles of social dust. Within the mass all ordinary relationships and authorities seem devoid of institutional function and psychological meaning. Worse, such relationships and authorities come to seem positively hostile; in them the individual can find not security but despair. “The despair of the masses,” concludes Peter Drucker, “is the key to the understanding of fascism. No ‘revolt of the mob,’ no ‘triumphs of unscrupulous propaganda,’ but stark despair caused by the breakdown of the old order and the absence of a new one.”4
When the masses, in considerable number, already exist, as the consequence of historical forces, half the work of the totalitarian leader has been done for him. What remains but to complete, where necessary, the work of history, and to grind down into atomic particles all remaining evidences of association and social authority? What remains, then, but to rescue the masses from their loneliness, their hopelessness and despair, by leading them into the Promised Land of the absolute, redemptive State? The process is not too difficult, or even too violent, providing the masses have already been created in significant size by processes that have destroyed or diminished the social relationships and cultural values by which human beings normally live and in which they gain not merely their sense of order but their desire for freedom.
But where the masses do not already exist in great numbers, and where, through the accident of quick seizure of power, the totalitarian mentality comes into ascendancy, then it becomes necessary to create the masses: to do through the most ruthless force and in the shortest possible time the work that has been done in other areas by the operation of past processes.
Here is where the most shocking acts of totalitarianism become manifest—not in its attitude toward the already existing masses, but toward those human beings, still closely related by village, church, family, or labor union, and whose very relationships separate them from the indispensable condition of massdom. Such relationships must be ruthlessly destroyed. If they cannot be destroyed easily and inexpensively by propaganda and intimidation, they must be destroyed by all the techniques of the torture chamber, by enforced separation of loved ones, by the systematic obliteration of legal identities, by killing, and by the removal of large segments of a population to labor camps.
The violence and the horrors of Soviet Russia, in many ways greater perhaps even than those of Nazi Germany, have arisen from the fact that in Russia, down to the beginnings of the First World War, the masses scarcely existed. The ancient relationships of class, family, village, and association were nearly as strong as they had been in medieval times. Only in small areas of Russia were these relationships dissolving and the masses beginning to emerge.
The political inertia of the large majority of the Russian people under the Czars, the relative impotence of postwar government, and the general state of disorganization in the cities made it not too difficult for the disciplined Communists to capture power in 1917. But the consolidation of that power was quite a different problem. The realization of what Marx had called “the vast association of the whole nation” called for drastic steps—for the rapid industrialization of rural areas, for eradication of political opposition, and for the extreme centralization of power which alone could make these and other steps possible.
But, of far greater import, this realization also called for a change in the very structure of the people, its values, incentives, motivations, and allegiances. The new Communism could not thrive on popular values and relationships inherited through the ages. If the classless society was to be created, it was necessary to destroy not only old classes but old associations of any type. It was necessary, as Stalin saw the problem, to accomplish in a short time the atomization and dislocation that had been proceeding in Western countries for generations.5
Hence, beginning in the nineteen-twenties, the destruction of all traditional associations, the liquidation of old statuses. Hence also the conversion of professional and occupational associations into administrative arms of the government. The hopes of older Russian intellectuals, who had supposed that socialism in Russia might be founded upon the communal institutions of the peasantry, supplemented by the emerging workers’ organizations in the cities, were proved fatuous. For the new rulers of Russia realized that the kind of power requisite to the establishment of the Marxian order could not long exist if any competing associations and authorities were allowed to remain. The vast association of the nation, which Marx had prophesied, could come into being only through the most absolute and extensive central political power. And, for the establishment and maintenance of this power, the creation of the undifferentiated, unattached, atomized mass was indispensable.
Four
We may regard totalitarianism as a process of the annihilation of individuality, but, in more fundamental terms, it is the annihilation, first, of those social relationships within which individuality develops. It is not the extermination of individuals that is ultimately desired by totalitarian rulers, for individuals in the largest number are needed by the new order. What is desired is the extermination of those social relationships which, by their autonomous existence, must always constitute a barrier to the achievement of the absolute political community.
The individual alone is powerless. Individual will and memory, apart from the reinforcement of associative tradition, are weak and ephemeral. How well the totalitarian rulers know this. Even constitutional guarantees and organic laws dim to popular vision when the social and cultural identities of persons become atomized, when the reality of freedom and order in the small areas of society becomes obscure.
The prime object of totalitarian government thus becomes the incessant destruction of all evidences of spontaneous, autonomous association. For, with this social atomization, must go also a diminution of intensity and a final flickering out of political values that interpose themselves between freedom and despotism.
To destroy or diminish the reality of the smaller areas of society, to abolish or restrict the range of cultural alternatives offered individuals by economic endeavor, religion, and kinship, is to destroy in time the roots of the will to resist despotism in its large forms. In its negative aspects totalitarianism is thus a ceaseless process of cultural nihilism. How else can the individual be separated from the traditions and values which, if allowed to remain intact, would remind him constantly of his cultural past? A sense of the past is far more basic to the maintenance of freedom than hope for the future. The former is concrete and real; the latter is necessarily amorphous and more easily guided by those who can manipulate human actions and beliefs. Hence the relentless effort by totalitarian governments to destroy memory. And hence the ingenious techniques for abolishing the social allegiances within which individual memory is given strength and power of resistance.
Totalitarianism is thus made possible only through the obliteration of all the intermediate layers of value and association that commonly nourish personality and serve to protect it from external power and caprice. Totalitarianism has been well described as the ultimate invasion of human privacy. But this invasion of privacy is possible only after the social contexts of privacy—family, church, association—have been atomized. The political enslavement of man requires the emancipation of man from all the authorities and memberships (obstructions to popular will, as the Nazis and Communists describe them) that serve, in one degree or another, to insulate the individual from external political power.
The destruction of the independent labor unions in Nazi Germany was followed by the prohibition of independent economic organizations of every kind. It was not the fact of labor that was central; it was the social fact of union. All autonomous organizations were destroyed and made illegal: professions, service clubs, voluntary mutual aid groups, fraternal associations, even philatelist and musical societies. Such organizations were regarded, and correctly, by the totalitarian government as potential sources of future resistance, if only because in them people were brought together for purposes, however innocent, that did not reflect those of the central government. As organizations they interposed themselves between the people as a society and the people as the masses.
Despite the fact that the early Nazis used the symbolism of family and religion for its possible sentimental appeal, the actual realities of family and religion were as remorselessly attacked by the government and Party as were the labor unions.6 The shrewd totalitarian mentality knows well the powers of intimate kinship and religious devotion for keeping alive in a population values and incentives which might well, in the future, serve as the basis of resistance. Thus to emancipate each member, and especially the younger members, from the family was an absolute necessity. And this planned spiritual alienation from kinship was accomplished, not only through the negative processes of spying and informing but through the sapping of the functional foundations of family membership and through the substitution of new and attractive political roles for each of the social roles embodied in the family structure. The techniques varied. But what was essential was the atomization of the family and of every other type of grouping that intervened between the people as society and the people as a mindless, soulless, traditionless mass. What the totalitarian must have for the realization of his design is a spiritual and cultural vacuum.
Five
Totalitarianism is an ideology of nihilism. But nihilism is not enough. No powerful social movement can be explained in negative terms alone. There is always the positive goal and absorptive association for which all the destructive and desolative actions are but a preparation, a clearing of the way. We should miss the essence of the total State if we did not see in it elements that are profoundly affirmative. The extraordinary accomplishments of totalitarianism in the twentieth century would be inexplicable were it not for the immense, burning appeal it exerts upon masses of individuals who have lost, or had taken away, their accustomed roots of membership and belief.
The atomization of old values and associations does not leave for long an associational vacuum. The genius of totalitarian leadership lies in its profound awareness that human personality cannot tolerate moral isolation. It lies, further, in its knowledge that absolute and relentless power will be acceptable only when it comes to seem the only available form of community and membership.
Here we have the clue to that fatal affinity of power and individual loneliness. Early in his career Hitler sensed this affinity and wrote in his Mein Kampf: “The mass meeting is necessary if only for the reason that in it the individual who in becoming an adherent of a new movement feels lonely and is easily seized with the fear of being alone, receives for the first time the picture of a greater community, something that has a strengthening effect upon most people.” Knowing the basic psychological truth that life apart from some sense of membership in a larger order is intolerable for most people, the leaders of the total State thus direct their energies not just to the destruction of the old order but to the manufacture of the new.
This new order is the absolute, the total, political community. As a community it is made absolute by the removal of all forms of membership and identification which might, by their existence, compete with the new order. It is, further, made absolute by the insistence that all thought, belief, worship, and membership be within the structure of the State. What gives historical identity to the totalitarian State is not the absolutism of one man or of a clique or a class; rather, it is the absolute extension of the structure of the administrative State into the social and psychological realm previously occupied by a plurality of associations. Totalitarianism involves the demolishment of autonomous social ties in a population, but it involves, no less, their replacement by new ones, each deriving its meaning and sanction from the central structure of the State.
The total State is monolithic. It is not convincing to argue, as have some of even the best students, that the power of the Party in the total State, paralleling at every point the powers of the formal bureaucracy, is proof of the contrary. In the first place, the totalitarian Party is regarded as but a necessary transitional step in the attainment of a formal governmental structure that will be, ultimately, free of any distractive allegiance, Party included. The Party may hold heavy powers over the actual bureaucracy, but its essential function is catalytic. It is designed to bring not only the people as a whole but the bureaucracy itself into line with the basic purposes of totalitarian society. In the second place, with all allowance for the so-called “dual state” created by the powers of the Party, what is crucial is the fact that the Party is dedicated to the same ends which are sovereign over the whole population and the official bureaucracy. The Party may be outside the formal sphere of governmental administration, but it is never outside the range of ends that are absolute and exclusive in the whole society.
Nor is any other form of association. The monolithic cast of the totalitarian State arises from the sterilization or destruction of all groups and statuses that, in any way, rival or detract from the allegiance of the masses to State.
It is characteristic of the total State, as Peter Drucker has pointed out, that the distinction between ordinary civil society and the army is obliterated. The natural diversity of society is swept away, and the centralization and omnicompetence native to the war band become the organizing principles of human life. We have already noted the power of war, in the twentieth century, to inspire a sense of moral community. This power is exploited to the full in totalitarian society. Every decision is converted into a military decision, dependent for its meaning upon the strategies and tactics of war. Every difficulty, every obstacle, is translated by totalitarian leadership into the imagery of war against evil, of defense against aggression. Every significant deviation from official policy—in art and in politics, in science and economy—is ruthlessly exterminated in the name of unity and preparedness. All relationships are conceived eventually in the likeness of those of the garrison.
To convert the whole of society into the ordered regularity of the army may seem a fair estimate of the objectives of Communist and Nazi totalitarianism. But, basically, there is little choice between these objectives and those that seek to convert society into the ordered regularity of the factory, the bureau, or the asylum. We must not be led astray by the analogy of the army. It is not war, anymore than it is race or economic class, that is central. What is central is simply the absolute substitution of the State for all the diversified associations of which society is normally composed.
In the totalitarian order the political tie becomes the all-in-all. It needs the masses as the masses need it. It integrates even where it dissolves, unifies where it separates, inspires where it suffocates. The rulers of the total community devise their own symbolism to replace the symbolism that has been destroyed in the creation of the masses.
The communal likeness of power is indispensable, for power that seems remote and inaccessible will be, no matter how ruthlessly it is imposed, unavailing and ineffectual. At every stage the power of the government must seem to proceed from the basic will of the people. The government thus chooses to bend, soften, and corrode the will to resistance in preference to forcible and brutal breaking of the will. For in the latter lie dread possibilities of overt resistance which might serve to dramatize opposition and create the potent symbolism of martyrdom.
New meanings must therefore be created for popular assimilation. Even new “memories” must be fabricated to replace the memories which, by their continual reminder of a past form of society, would ceaselessly militate against the new form. New conceptions of good and evil, of truth and falsehood, of freedom and tyranny, of the sacred and the secular, must be established in the popular mind to replace those lost or destroyed. History, art, science, and morality, all of these must be redesigned, placed in a new context, in order to make of a power a seamless web of certainty and conformity. Totalitarian power is insupportable unless it is clothed in the garments of deep spiritual belief.
But the spiritual transformation of a people, the creation of new meanings and symbols, cannot proceed apart from the creation of new social contexts of belief and meaning. Here is where the real genius of the totalitarian order becomes manifest.
The atomization of old groups and associations is accompanied by the establishment of new forms of association, each designed to meet the needs and to carry on the functions that were embedded in the old forms of social grouping. To these new associations, each based upon some clear and positive function, inevitably go the allegiances of the masses. In these groups, reaching down to the most primary levels of relationship, lies escape from the intolerable emptiness and demonic nature of mass society. Such groups, in time, come to seem the very difference between membership and isolation, between hope and despair, between existence and non-existence.
From them come, for constantly widening aggregates, the anesthetic release from sensations of alienation, hostility, and irrationality. These associations are not only the context of personal identification and belonging; they are also the indispensable contexts of totalitarian indoctrination.
As old cultural values and spiritual meanings become dim and unremembered through the destruction or erosion of social relationships that once made them vivid, so, in the totalitarian order which replaces the old, new meanings and values are given root and solidity in new associations and memberships. With new social status comes in time a new set of allegiances, new values, even new perceptions.
Powerful and unprecedented as it is, totalitarian domination of the individual will is not a mysterious process, not a form of sorcery based upon some vast and unknowable irrationalism. It arises and proceeds rationally and relentlessly through the creation of new functions, statuses, and allegiances, which by conferring community, makes the manipulation of the human will scarcely more than an exercise in scientific social psychology.
The superficial evidences of the old political structure may be left intact. There may well be a parliament or legislature. Old civil service positions, old titles of office may be left undisturbed. There may be periodic elections or plebiscites, and the terminology of freedom may be broadcast unabatedly. There may be left even the appearance of individual freedom, provided it is only individual freedom. All of this is unimportant, always subject to guidance and control, if the primary social contexts of belief and opinion are properly organized and managed. What is central is the creation of a network of functions and loyalties reaching down into the most intimate recesses of human life where ideas and beliefs will germinate and develop.
All the rational skills of modern social manipulation, borrowed from every quarter of modern, large-scale economic and political society, go into the process of reassimilation. New organizations based upon place, work, and interest are created. The same force that seeks constantly to destroy the social substance of the old family is concerned with the establishment of new organizations designed to assimilate each sex and each age group of the family. Labor unions are either remade into agencies of the State, or new labor organizations are created to replace the old. New professional, scientific, and artistic groups are created—even new associations for the varied hobbies of a people.
As the totalitarian psychologist well knows, within these new formal associations based upon clear function and meaning, there will inevitably arise over a period of time the vastly more important network of new informal relationships, new interpersonal allegiances and affections, and with them a new sense of personal status, which will reach like a chain from the lowliest individual to the highest center of government.
But the new groups, associations, and formal statuses are without exception agencies of the State itself. They are plural only in number, not in ultimate allegiance or purpose. What we must recognize is that each association is but a social and psychological extension of the central administration of the State. Each exists as a primary context of the political repersonalization of man that follows the nihilistic process of social depersonalization. Each is the instrument, ultimately, of the central government, the psychological setting that alone makes possible the massive remaking of the human consciousness. All such groups, with their profound properties of status, are the means of implementing whatever image—race, proletariat, or mankind—surmounts the structure of the absolute, monolithic, political community.
Nothing could be more delusive than the supposition that the totalitarian political order is without roots in the allegiances of vast numbers of human beings, that it is a flimsy structure at best. The amazing evidences of militant, collective power and of fanatical will to resist revealed by the Germans during the Second World War should demonstrate irrefutably that, even within the mere six years which intervened between the Nazi rise to power and the outbreak of the war, the successes of mass manipulation had been considerable. From these we might well ponder the undoubtedly greater successes of the Russian rulers in their three decades of almost uninterrupted creation of the will-less, cultureless masses and the assimilation of these masses into cohesive primary groups, each an agency of central governmental policy, each the seedbed of popular allegiance.
The monolithic reality of totalitarianism is revealed when, through military defeat, there is complete disorganization of the central government. For, from this central disorganization proceeds the inevitable collapse of all those forms of intermediate society which were dependent on central power and which were the contexts of human life. Then the masses are left nakedly revealed, stripped of the memberships, statuses, and associations created for them by the totalitarian rulers.
Twice in the twentieth century Germany has been defeated by enemy powers, but the consequences of the second defeat have been vastly different from the consequences of the first. The collapse of the central government in 1918 was scarcely more than just that. The internal private governments of Germany—business associations, labor unions, churches, municipal administrations, and the like—even though some of their effectiveness had been damaged by the war effort, were still capable of exercising independently a measurable stabilizing influence upon the German people. But at the end of the Second World War Germany was, in huge areas, a social as well as a physical rubble. Twelve years of Nazism, the extermination of autonomous social functions and memberships, the incorporation of the masses into organizations each of which was a division of the central government—all of this left, when military defeat had destroyed that central government, scarcely more than an aggregate of atomic human particles, hopeless, will-less, and ground down into chronic despair.
This is the true horror of totalitarianism. The absolute political community, centralized and omnicompetent, founded upon the atomized masses, must ceaselessly destroy all those autonomies and immunities that are in normal society the indispensable sources of the capacity for freedom and organization. Total political centralization can lead only to social and cultural death.