Monday 18 September 2017

Why is totalitarianism demanded by the masses?

Totalitarianism is the natural end-point for modern, mainstream secular Leftism; and now that 'everybody' in The West is on the Left and primarily secular (including self-identified 'right wingers' and 'Christians') - 'everybody' is united in demanding totalitarian thought control.

In suppressing dissenting voices, it is their own thoughts that crave to be controlled. When life is understood as nothing but subjective feelings, then the idea is for our-selves to be manipulated into having the best feelings: we want to be convinced by soothing propaganda, we want a pleasing alternative reality...

Indeed the alternative - of having to acknowledge that our cherished 'utilitarian' secular beliefs entail zero meaning, purpose, or real communication with anybody - is a conviction of despair. The answer to this existential despair is to have a delusional meaning of life coercively-imposed, such that the delusion becomes asif real.

Anything interfering with this desperate but urgent imperative, anything tending to shatter the conviction in virtual reality, is attacked - is hated, with a visceral power derived from terror.

(It is like the blind terror of an alcoholic at the prospect of being unable to get his drug - he will protect the supplier, he will support anything which ensures his supply. The modern dissenter is seen as someone who is trying to impose delirium tremens.)

Ultimately, the representative modern atheist Westerner lives in mortal fear of media withdrawal, because then there would be nothing but the void: to die alone in misery, despair and terror. Anything better than that!

So totalitarianism thought-control is welcomed: a Brave New World, a Matrix, to live in The Borg... And people just hope that the rulers are benign; or if not benign, then at least not actively-evil... And indeed modern Westerners do not regard purposive evil as a reality - except among those dissenters who threaten their alternative reality... so there is no problem there.

Whatever the multi-billionaire totalitarian globalists want; it cannot be as bad as life without illusions. So, totalitarian mind-control is demanded, welcomed, queued-up for, paid-for, boasted-of.

(Of course anybody, at any time, can turn towards reality - but only by acknowledging the reality of God the creator and our loving father; so obviously That is not going to be a problem...)


4 comments:

Ben said...

"The modern dissenter is seen as someone who is trying to impose delirium tremens"

What a great summary. I sense this as an instinctive insiderness to the resistance.

Michael Dyer said...

Jordan Peterson has an interesting point, he says that a great deal of human misbehavior is actually trying to reduce complexity. Without God or even some kind of organizing ethos, the world is too complex and dangerous a place for even the strongest to handle in full. We need something that reduces complexity, and that method can be any number of evil things like drunkenness or even totalitarianism. They provide simplicity.

Bruce Charlton said...

@Michael - While there is something in it; I don't think that is a deep or primary explanation, not from looking at the general trend of people's lives. At this point we really need to be getting at the root of things.

whitestone said...

The minimum working hypothesis. Huxley 1944. Illustrates quite brilliantly why people choose nihilism and depravity over belief and virtue.