Why Totalitarianism Rises (And How Not To Let It)
Or, When Good People Try So Hard to be Good They End Up Letting Bad Flourish
In this little book, I’m discussing reinventing and reimagining leadership for a troubled world. I believe it’s the single biggest in the problem in the world today — and you don’t have to look very hard, given the meteoric rise of extremism across the globe, to see why. So in this essay, I want to discuss what happens when leaders fail at the single greatest preventative task of leadership. Preventing totalitarianism.
The simplest kind of totalitarianism is fascism. Let’s define it simply. It isn’t merely a twentieth century thing — though we often think it is, because it was named then. It’s the collective will of a desperate people for a strongman to channel their anger and their rage at failed leaders into cathartic violence. It’s the black hole at the end of a declining society — and it’s happened throughout history.
Is Trumpism fascism? You’re probably reluctant, hesitant, maybe even a little afraid, to call it so. So let’s do a crude and rough fascism-lite checklist.
- Scapegoating and demonization of minorities, vulnerable people
- The rise of an authoritarian leader
- Who calls for total “solutions” to the “problems” of scapegoats
4. Brownshirts
5. Kristallnachts
6. Putsches
You know what happens after that, so we can stop there. The question is: how many of these boxes can we already tick? The facts are pretty hard to dispute: three. So: how many do we have to wait to be ticked to call it totalism, or fascism? All six? If that’s the case, then the word serves no purpose — for presumably the point of the term is to prevent, not just describe, the reality.
Perhaps you see the problem. It leaves you feeling uneasy, right? It should. Let me try and distill the uncomfortable lesson.
Totalitarianism rises not just by exploiting our prejudices, to be bad and terrible people — but most subtly, by exploiting our biases to be good and decent people.
It doesn’t sound like it should make, sense right? You probably think of totalism and fascism as things that rise because angry people are whipped into a frenzy by a hysterical demagogue. But the inconvenient truth is that’s only a small part — the proximate cause — of they rise. Historically, the larger part of the rise of totalism and fascism — their ultimate social cause — is because societies are hesitant, reluctant, and afraid to define, name, call all that totalistic, fascistic — and thus act to prevent it.
Historically, totalitarianism rises because societies are reluctant, hesitant, and afraid to call it what it is. Hannah Arendt, Viktor Frankl, and nearly every other great scholar of fascism made precisely this point, over and over again. MLK said it thus:
“The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people.”
And yet, here we are. Silent. Reluctant, hesitant, and afraid. So the question is: why does this happen over and over again in history?
Let me explain, with a little anecdote. I awoke this morning to a tweet from a respected New York Times columnist that said something like the following: we shouldn’t call Trumpism fascism, yet — because what if we’re wrong? Then we’ll look foolish. I read it for a moment, and then thought: this tweet explains better than I ever could exactly how totalism rises. I won’t link to it — because my point isn’t internet outrage, but understanding.
It’s history repeating itself. In the 1930s, that’s exactly what the New York Times said about German fascism in its now infamous coverage of Nazism. That it probably wasn’t a totalist movement, just a phase, a fad, a passing ripple. Then, as now, it simply refused to call fascism what it is.
To explain why, let’s unpack the tweet for a moment. The first thing the “what if we’re wrong? then we’ll look bad!” tweet reveals are three eternal tendencies of public figures: to prioritize looks over substance, reputation over reality, and being right over finding truth. In other words, pundits are inherently conservative when it comes to weighing issues. But that is because they are seeking to be good people, people who fit in, give other good people the benefit of the doubt — not bad people.
And that begins to answer our question: why are societies hesitant and reluctant to call it totalism? Because they’re unable to establish useful criteria for defining, naming, and identifying totalitarianism movements, like fascism. If you can’t name a thing, call it a thing, agree that it is a thing — then you can hardly overcome a thing. Establishing that criterion is a key task of leaders — thought leaders, political leaders, social leaders. Yet, societies commit three great errors of reasoning that allow totalism to flourish. Here’s how not to fall prey to them.
The precautionary principle for totalitarianism is not to give it the benefit of the doubt. The first bias towards good that leaves societies more vulnerable to totalitarianism is rationality. We feel obliged to give people the benefit of the doubt. Why? Because monsters are few and far between in history. So reasoning probabilistically, it’s downright unreasonable that a rising leader might in fact be a monster. “He’s not truly a fascist”, say the intellectuals. “Where is the evidence?”, ask the scholars. “Surely he’s just saying it to get attention — he doesn’t really mean it”, say the columnists.
But monsters are like black swans. We cannot apply naive probabilistic reasoning to them, because they aren’t normally distributed in the first place. They’re improbably rare — but also unexpectedly destructive. They rise improbably rarely — but the damage they wreak is disproportionately terrible, from world wars, to war crimes, to genocide, to atrocities. Therefore, we must ever be on our guard. Because the potential harm is so great, assuming someone is a monster when they sound, feel, and act like one is a sounder precautionary practice than assuming that they are not.
Failing to apply this precautionary principle, assuming that the harm a movement can do is limited, giving all rising social phenomena equal benefit of the doubt, is exactly how we end up making great mistakes, just like the New York Times did in their now infamous coverage of Hitler. But when we give demagogues the benefit of the doubt, when they assume the best of their motives, reasons, and actions, then a probabilistic bias has been exploited.
So if we’re going to establish a criterion for calling it totalitarianism, then we must apply a precautionary principle that actually works. Instead of assuming that it “can’t happen here”, we must assume that it can — and if it appears to be, because the destruction it can wreak is off the charts, it probably is.
The “data”, evidence, can’t prevent the rise of totalitarianism. Civilized societies must infer that totalitarianism exists to prevent it. The third bias for good that allows totalism to flourish is empiricism. Post modern society is single-mindedly empirical. Their leaders aren’t artists, but engineers of the social fabric. We don’t dream — we calculate.
Because civil society is single-mindedly empirical, we look, and we look for “evidence” to justify the claim. But the problem is that judging claims on evidence is inherently retrospective, backwards looking. If we are to wait until after someone has committed war crimes to call them a demagogue, or until after they carried out ethnic cleansing to call them a fascist, then there is no purpose to the very words “monster” and “fascist” themselves. They are merely empty vessels which serve no social purpose — for the very point of the terms is to prevent the reality. Thus, seeking confirmatory evidence is an unreasonable bias when it comes to totalitarianism. It suggests that we wait until after the monsters have risen to call them monsters…but by then it is too late.
We can and must also judge claims prospectively by their inherent ethics, if we are to make sense not just of their truth, but of their worth. The task of intellectuals when confronted with rising totalitarianism isn’t merely seeking evidence. It’s evaluating the claims of people who look, feel, and smell like totalitarians ethically — to infer whether they actually are. The evidence that we seek when the goal is preventing totalitarianism from rising can and most also be moral — not just material.
Let’s get back to the criterion. No, internet first-graders, I don’t mean that we should sentence people to prison for “believing the wrong things”. But I do mean that the most important job of intellectuals in times of decline is establishing a criterion for totalitarianism that’s more reasonable, nuanced, sophisticated, and useful than…”not until they open gulags”. That criterion can’t be merely materially evidential — it also has to be ethical and inferential.
Otherwise, here’s what happens. Demagogues, knowing post modern society’s preference for evidence-evaluation over ethics-evaluation, are able to exploit this bias. They are able to openly and publicly call for all manner of wrongs — from walls to ethnic cleansing to unpersoning — and the media, the intellectuals, the scholars, are left scratching their heads. Without the evidence, they cannot make the claim that he is wrong — but there is no evidence, yet, for the actions have not been undertaken. What the scholars and intellectuals and pundits have forgotten is this: there are two kinds of wrong — evidentially wrong, and ethically wrong. The result is that the demagogue is not recognized as a totalitarian until it is too late.
When Very Smart People agree on a thing, they’re all less likely to be able to admit they’re wrong. The third bias for good that the demagogue exploits is consensus. Meta-modern civil society is one in which the flow of ideas is controlled by a class of professional pundits, explainers, , gatekeepers of society’s collective mind, who exist in large part not to put discuss and debate truth — but to confirm to people what other gatekeepers believe. The intellectual leaders of civil society are too often conducting what Keynes called a beauty contest: the goal is not to choose the pageant winner, but to choose the contestant the other judges think is the pageant winner.
Thus, they dismiss radical ideas from outside their bubble as fantastic, utopian, incredible — literally unbelievable. For they believe such ideas will hold little sway with their peers. They are right — but that is exactly why they are wrong. Because the masses respond to those ideas for that very reason.
The bias for consensus is useful in times of stability. It allows people not to waste their time on questioning shared assumptions. But in times of trouble, stagnation, decline, upheaval, it becomes a great problem. Because it means no one wants to be the first to call it totalitarianism, and begin sketching out the consequences, outcomes, potential issues.
Someone has to be the first to pierce the bubble. But who’s going to risk the slings and arrows of their peers? They’ll suddenly be the odd man or woman out. But what we have to remember is this: when totalitarianism rises, the point isn’t seeking the validation of our peers. It’s risking the disapproval of them. And should we all be able to undertake that, then the costs of dissent will be lowered.
So intellectuals, scholars, and the rest of us, have to learn to ditch the consensus bias we’re prone to. When it comes to establishing a criterion for totalitarianism, the consensus bias is more harmful than helpful. It slows societies down, and prevents them from responding fast enough to a social virus that’s growing at epidemic speed.
And that’s the central challenge. To beat the spread of the epidemic, and be able to slow it down.
Remember when I observed that we’re reluctant, hesitant? Why do we hesitate? Here, I’ve offered you a tiny theory. Because we’re prone to biases for consensus, empiricism, and rationality. They bias us for good, in normal times. But in ages of decline and stagnation, turmoil and trouble, they limit and diminish our ability to be thinking, reasoning people. They leave us more vulnerable to totalism — not less — by making our criterion for it impossibly high.
That is precisely how totalitarianism flourishes. For by the time we finally say “the monsters are here!”, it is too late. They’re not just at the city gates, in the house of civilization, or beneath the very beds we slumber upon.
They’re us.
Umair
London
March 2016
