Live Not By Lies, Part 2

I previously introduced Rod Dreher’s book, Live Not By Lies and his prediction of the coming New Totalitariansim. Drawing on the work of Hannah Arendt, the foremost scholar on totalitarianism, Dreher,  points to the following conditions which make us ripe for totalitarianism:

1.  Loneliness and Social Atomization.  According to Arendt, totalitarian movements are the “mass organization of atomized, isolated individuals.” Who can doubt that we who are atomized and isolated from one another?  By any measure, as shown by sociologist Robert Putnam in his book Bowling Alone, civil society has declined. Church attendance is down, clubs can’t find members, and friends and neighbors don’t get together for dinner parties. People are glued to their televisions, computers and smart phones. Social networks like Facebook give a false sense of connectedness, and do not provide the benefits of direct human contact and interaction. The result is that ordinary people feel more anxious, isolated, and vulnerable, and civic trust suffers.  All this makes people susceptible to totalitarian ideologies which promise solidarity and meaning.

2. Loss of Faith in Hierarchies and Institutions.  Dreher reports: “According to Gallup, Americans’ confidence in their institutions--political, media, religious, legal, medical, corporate--is at historic lows across the board.” At the same time, radical individualism has become more pervasive and people have stopped looking outside of themselves for authoritative sources of meaning and purpose.  This ultimately is unfulfilling  and leaves them vulnerable to the blandishments of totalitarian movements which promise certainty and purpose.

3. The Desire to Transgress and Destroy.  Arendt sums up the post-World War I generation of intellectuals who paved the way for totalitarianism:  “They read not Darwin but the Marquis de Sade.” In other words, they didn’t justify their wholesale rejection of western values, hierarchies, and institutions by appealing to respectable modes of thought; instead, as Dreher puts it, “They immersed themselves in what is basest in human nature and regarded doing so as acts of liberation.” This perfectly captures our present day intellectuals, especially considering their glorification of deviant sexuality and the denial of human nature.  In their Nietschean drive to exercise their will to power, they also shove aside “liberal principles like fair play, race neutrality, free speech, and free association...”

4. Propaganda and the Willingness to Believe Useful Lies.  Arendt said:

It is not hard for a totalitarian regime to keep people ignorant. Once you relinquish your freedom for the sake of “understood necessity,” for Party discipline, for conformity with the regime, for the greatness and glory of the Fatherland, or for any of the substitutes that are so convincingly offered, you cede your claim to the truth.   Slowly, drop by drop, your life begins to ooze a way just as surely as if you had slashed your wrists; you have voluntarily condemned yourself to helplessness.

Dreher cites as a present day example the monstrous rewriting of the history of slavery which is the “1619 Project” and the fact that so many otherwise intelligent people applaud it.

A more current example is the mantra that the COVID injections are “safe and effective.” Despite mountains of evidence to the contrary (more on this later), many still willingly surrender their freedom and heed the call to get their booster shots.

5. A Mania for Ideology. Dreher asks:  “Why are people so willing to believe demonstrable lies? The desperation alienated people have for a story that helps them make sense of their lives and tells them what to do explains it.  For a man desperate to believe, totalitarian ideology is more precious that life itself.”  Here one is reminded of Stalin’s “useful idiots,” who, after they served their revolutionary purpose, willingly went to their show trials and executions.

Here is a current example.  It is a lie that any scientific proposition is beyond debate. Such a notion is false on its face because all empirical claims are only contingently true and can be revised in light of new evidence.  Even aspects of well-established theories like Einstein’s theory of relativity are being questioned.  A component of the Progressive Religion is environmentalism, and a central dogma of that ideology is global warming (climate change). The global warming hypothesis (that human CO2 emissions are causing dangerous global warming) is a perfectly debatable scientific proposition, as all scientific claims are; yet many cling to it with religious fervor. Around the kitchen table I once engaged a relative from the West Coast in conversation about global warming.  When I expressed skepticism about the global warming hypothesis, she got really upset just as if I had questioned one of her core religious beliefs. She and her fellow co-religionists cheer on the suppression of fossil fuel production, including clean-burning natural gas, and willingly pay higher energy prices and suffer all the other consequences because they believe they are helping save the planet.

6. A Society That Values Loyalty More Than Expertise.  “Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intellect and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.”  Here one is reminded of Trofim Lysenko, the Stalinist biologist who led a political campaign against genetics and science-based agriculture in the mid-20th century, rejecting natural selection in favour of a form of Lamarckism, a long discredited theory.  According to Wikipedia, more than 3,000 mainstream biologists were dismissed or imprisoned, and numerous scientists were executed in the campaign to suppress opponents of Lysenkoism. The application of Lysenko’s pseudoscience caused the Soviet Union to suffer crop declines and chronic food shortages.

We see this pattern repeated today in many scientific disciplines.  In the area of public health, take Anthony Fauci as a prime example.  While he didn’t have the power to send dissidents to the gulag, he wielded tremendous power during his decades with the National Institute of Health and exercised it ruthlessly. He had a mania for developing a universal vaccine and for mass vaccination. Anyone who went along with his program got grants; dissidents did not get funded and often got fired or ostracized.  When the COVID outbreak occurred, he immediately promoted an experimental mRNA vaccine even though scientists in government and elsewhere knew, based on decades of research, that it would not be effective and likely would be unsafe by traditional standards of vaccine safety.

In the next column we will look at more evidence that we are ripe for a totalitarian takeover.  Then we will examine the ideology behind it all.