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by Academy of Ideas
September
07, 2021
from
AcademyOfIdeas Website
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, reflecting on the Soviet Union's
descent into totalitarian rule in the mid-20th century,
and all the things that could have been done to prevent it, wrote
the following:
"If...if... We didn't
love freedom enough. And even more - we had no awareness of the
real situation... we hurried to submit. We submitted with
pleasure!...
We purely and simply
deserved everything that happened afterward."
Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn
The
Gulag Archipelago
The 20th
century clearly shows that totalitarianism is not a solution to any
problem, but a social ill of the most horrific kind.
More innocent men, women,
and children were killed by the totalitarian regimes of the 20th
century than by natural disasters, pandemics or even the two world
wars.
If, therefore, we are
unfortunate enough to be living in a world flirting with the
sickness of totalitarianism, what can we do to escape?
In this far below video,
relying on the insights of those who studied, and lived under
totalitarian rule, we are going to explore what is called,
a forward escape from
the control of the cruel and twisted minds of would-be
totalitarians...
To understand what this
form of escape entails we will contrast it with two other ways to
escape from the hardships of living through an attempted
totalitarian takeover - the backward escape and the physical escape.
The backward escape,
entails dulling one's awareness of the reality and precariousness of
one's situation through the use of drugs and alcohol or by zoning
out in front of screens for hours on end.
The backward escape can
provide short-term relief to feelings of anxiety, depression and
boredom, but the more one relies on such activities the more one's
mental health deteriorates.
Furthermore, the backward
escape does nothing to prevent the rise of totalitarianism as it
promotes docility, passivity, and apathy, all traits that make
people more manipulable and controllable, or Dr. Joost Meerloo
wrote in his book on totalitarianism:
"The cult of
passivity and so-called relaxation is one of most dangerous
developments of our times.
Essentially, it
represents a camouflage pattern, the double wish not to see the
dangers and challenges of life and not to be seen...
Silent, lonely
relaxation with alcohol, sweets, [or] the television screen...
may soothe the mind into a passivity that may gradually make it
vulnerable to the seductive ideology of some feared enemy.
Denying the danger of
totalitarianism through passivity, may gradually surrender to
its blandishments those who were initially afraid of it.
Joost
Meerloo
The Rape of the
Mind
An alternative to
backward escape, is the physical escape which is to relocate to a
place that offers more freedom.
This form of escape has
many benefits, for given that we have one chance at life,
why not live
somewhere absent the stifling control of corrupt and
power-hungry politicians and bureaucrats?
But there are problems
with this form of escape.
Firstly, for many
people it is not practical to pack up and move to a new land.
Furthermore, if we
live at a time when
the rise of tyranny is a global phenomenon
the practicality of the physical escape diminishes further, as
the sought after pockets of freedom are few and far between.
What is more, if
totalitarianism is permitted to proliferate the places
that are free now, may not remain so for long.
Running away, like
escaping backward, is not the ideal solution to the rise of
totalitarianism, instead the solution is to escape forward
into a new and better reality.
What does the forward escape entail?
To answer this question
we need to dispel with the notion that totalitarianism can be
defeated through compliance.
Many people cede to the
commands of would-be totalitarians because they believe that so
doing is the quickest means to return to some semblance of
normality...
But this is a cowardly
and ignorant way to act.
For compliance only
emboldens totalitarian regimes, a point emphasized by the political
philosopher Hannah Arendt in her book
The Origins of Totalitarianism:
"...the most
characteristic aspect of totalitarian terror [is that] it is let
loose when all organized opposition has died down and the
totalitarian ruler knows that he no longer need be afraid...
Stalin started his
gigantic purges not in 1928 when he conceded, "We have internal
enemies,"... but in 1934 when all former opponents had
"confessed their errors," and Stalin himself, at the Seventeenth
Party Congress... declared "...there is nothing more to prove
and, it seems, no one to fight"."
Hannah
Arendt
The Origins of
Totalitarianism
Compliance is the food
that feeds totalitarians. Compliance is not, and never will be, the
path back to some form of normality.
Rather non-compliance and
civil disobedience are essential to counter the rise of totalitarian
rule. But in addition to resistance, a forward escape into a reality
absent the sickness of totalitarian rule requires the construction
of a parallel society.
A parallel society serves
two main purposes: it offers pockets of freedom to those rejected by
the totalitarian system, or who refuse to participate in it, and it
forms the foundation for a new society that can grow out of the
ashes of the destruction wrought by the totalitarians.
Or as Václav Havel,
a dissident under the communist rule of Czechoslovakia, explains in
his book The Power of the Powerless:
"When those who have
decided to live within the truth have been denied any direct
influence on the existing social structures, not to mention the
opportunity to participate in them, and when these people begin
to create what I have called the independent life of society,
this independent life begins, of itself, to become structured in
a certain way.
...[these] parallel structures do not grow... out of a
theoretical vision of systemic change (there are no political
sects involved), but from the aims of life and the authentic
needs of real people."
Václav Havel
The
Power of the Powerless
There are innumerable ways to contribute to the construction of
a
parallel society.
One can build
technologies that promote freedom or agoristic economic
institutions that further voluntary exchange.
One can run a
business that resists implementing unjust laws or mandates, or
one can create media or educational institutions that counter
the lies and propaganda of the state.
Or one can create
music, literature or artwork that counters the staleness of
totalitarian culture.
The parallel society is a
decentralized and voluntary alternative to the centralized and
coercive control of the totalitarian society and as Havel explains:
"One of the most
important tasks the 'dissident movements' have set themselves is
to support and develop [parallel social structures]...
What else are those
initial attempts at social self organization than the efforts of
a certain part of society to... rid itself of the
self-sustaining aspects of totalitarianism and, thus, to
extricate itself radically from its involvement in the
[totalitarian] system?"
Václav Havel
The
Power of the Powerless
And as he explains
further:
"...it would be quite
wrong to understand the parallel structures and the parallel
[society] as a retreat into a ghetto and as an act of isolation,
addressing itself only to the welfare of those who had decided
on such a course...
The ultimate phase of
this process is the situation in which the official
structures... simply begin withering away and dying off, to be
replaced by new structures that have evolved from 'below' and
are put together in a fundamentally different way."
Václav Havel
Living in Truth
The construction of a parallel society, however, is
not merely a long-term solution to totalitarian destruction, but
also serves to counter the rise of totalitarian rule.
For the act of building
parallel social structures reveals that not everyone will just roll
over and submit to total state control and as was noted by Hannah
Arendt, this helps keep the would-be totalitarians in check.
This process also
counters the social atomization that comes with totalitarian rule by
promoting voluntary communal bonds between those who cherish
freedom.
And as an added benefit,
for those who partake in this process, it can serve as a healthy
vehicle to escape the day-to-day feelings of anxiety, boredom and
depression that accompany living in a world teetering with a descent
into totalitarianism.
For if we pick a goal to
help in the construction of the parallel society, and work towards
it in a disciplined and focused manner, we give our life more
meaning and we open up the possibility of attaining the peak
experiential states of flow and Rausch (ecstasy).
Flow is an optimal state of consciousness,
"in which attention
is so narrowly focused on an activity that a sense of time
fades, along with the troubles and concerns of day-to-day life."
Natasha Dow Schüll
Addiction by Design
Rausch, on the
other hand, is the word Nietzsche used for a peak cognitive
state similar to flow:
"What is
essential in Rausch
is the feeling
of increased strength and fullness."
Nietzsche
Twilight of the
Idols
Rausch is an emergent by-product of focused attempts to
effectuate real-world change and when in Rausch, as in flow,
we perform at our best, or as John Richardson explains in
Nietzsche's New Darwinism:
"In Rausch the
organism feels its capacities at a peak, and takes pleasure in
this heightened potency.
These capacities are
drives to work on the world, and in Rausch one feels oneself
"overfull" with them, bursting to change things to fit oneself."
John
Richardson
Nietzsche's New
Darwinism
Both flow and Rausch
are healthy ways to escape from the day-to-day miseries of living in
a sick and corrupted society.
Unlike the numbing
experiential zones of the backward escape which weaken us in body
and mind, flow and Rausch strengthen us and increase our feelings of
power.
The more people who
experience flow and Rausch the harder it is for those in
power to herd a populace into the chains of totalitarian servitude
and as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn warned:
"No weapons, no
matter how powerful, can help the West until it overcomes its
loss of willpower."
Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn
A World Split Apart
To attempt the forward
escape by contributing to the creation of a parallel society and in
the process attaining the states of flow and Rausch comes
with risks, and success is not guaranteed, but it is a far better
option than merely sitting passively by just hoping things will get
better.
"Hope in
reality is the worst of all evils
because it
prolongs the torments of man"
Nietzsche
Human all too
Human
In place of mere hope, courageous action from as many people as
possible is needed to prevent the rise of totalitarian rule.
And the sooner people act
in defiance of would-be totalitarians, the greater the chance of
success.
For the mistake that was
made over and over again in the totalitarian countries of the 20th
century was that people didn't act soon enough. Milton Mayer,
in his book They Thought They Were Free, interviews an
individual who lived through Hitler's rule and his words
should serve as a warning for those who live in a world at risk of
being engulfed by
the life-destroying machinery of totalitarian
rule:
"You wait for one
great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock
comes, will join with you in resisting somehow...
But the one great
shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join
with you, never comes...
If the last and worst
act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and
smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently
shocked...
But of course this
isn't the way it happens. In between comes all the hundreds of
little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing
you not to be shocked by the next...
And one day, too
late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all
rush in upon you... and you see that everything - everything -
has changed...
Now you live in a
world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not
even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is
transformed..."
Milton Mayer
They Thought They
Were Free
Video
How to Escape from a Sick Society...
by
FAlzinar
September 22, 2012
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