The ice cold logic of totalitarianism

If only the Nazis could have embraced contradiction. After they accepted the premise of Master Race and inferior peoples, it followed that for one to extinguish the other was the right thing to do. It was logically consistent. In the same vein, if Americans could simply accept the idea that Muslims, even though being violent people following a false religion, were nonetheless rather harmless, we could let them live too, maybe even self-govern. It’s not logical, but it would sure makes our lives (and theirs) better if only because we are not running around massacring people.

I’m still digging into Hannah Arendt’s essay, Ideology and Terror, 1953. This is unusual for me in that I am trying to understand her premise and follow through on it to see if it is useful in understanding of how the world really works. I should admit that I am smitten by her. She witnessed first-hand the Nazi regime and its effects on the military and intellectual classes. She fled, while those who did not either gave in and participated or perished. She tried, and without use of bad humans, to explain what had happened there.

This inevitably leads to the conclusion that Hitler and Stalin were just actors on a stage that still stands and where the same play goes on as long as has Agatha Christie’s Mousetrap.

She has stepped up now to examine the role of ideology in totalitarian societies.

Ideologies — isms which to the satisfaction of their adherents can explain everything and every occurrence by deducing it from a single premise — are a very recent phenomenon and, for many decades, played a negligible role in political life. Only with the wisdom of hindsight can we discover in them certain elements which have made them so disturbingly useful for totalitarian rule. Not before Hitler and Stalin were the great political potentialities of the ideologies discovered. …

Ideologies … combine the scientific approach with results of philosophical relevance and pretend to be scientific philosophy. The “ideas” of isms—race in racism, God in deism, etc. — never form the subject matter of the ideologies and the suffix – logy never indicates simply a body of “scientific” statements.

An ideology is quite literally what its name indicates: it is the logic of an idea. Its subject matter is history, to which the “idea” is applied; the result of this application is not a body of statements about something that is, but the unfolding of a process which is in constant change. The ideology treats the course of events as though it followed the same “law” as the logical exposition of its “idea.” Ideologies pretend to know the mysteries of the whole historical process — the secrets of the past, the intricacies of the present, the uncertainties of the future — because of the logic inherent in their respective ideas.

Ideologies are never interested in the miracle of being. They are historical, concerned with becoming and perishing, with the rise and fall of cultures, even if they try to explain history by some “law of nature.” The word “race” in racism does not signify any genuine curiosity about the human races as a field for scientific exploration, but is the “idea” by which the movement of history is explained as one consistent process.

Ideologies, in other words, are human constructs that force human logic on the natural world. This allows the both the dark and light of the human being to manifest on society, in the case of Stalin and Hitler, who never contributed a useful thought to any ‘ism,’ to follow through by visiting extreme violence on the proletariat and the Jews. Of course there is a bright side, as religious impulses contribute to fostering kindness and charity. But for totalitarians, ideology is essential for moving forward.

To an ideology, history does not appear in the light of an idea … but as something which can be calculated by it. What fits the “idea” into this new role is its own “logic,” that is a movement which is the consequence of the “idea” itself and needs no outside factor to set it into motion. Racism is the belief that there is a motion inherent in the very idea of race …

Arendt locks on to racism as an examples of ideology run amok. Once the idea is in place, all that follows is logical.

As soon as logic as a movement of thought — and not as a necessary control of thinking — is applied to an idea, this idea is transformed into a premise. Ideological world explanations performed this operation long before it became so eminently fruitful for totalitarian reasoning. The purely negative coercion of logic, the prohibition of contradictions, became “productive” so that a whole line of thought could be initiated, and forced upon the mind, by drawing conclusions in the manner of mere argumentation. This argumentative process could be interrupted neither by a new idea (which would have been another premise with a different set of consequences) nor by a new experience. Ideologies always assume that one idea is sufficient to explain everything in the development from the premise, and that no experience can teach anything because everything is comprehended in this consistent process of logical deduction. The danger in exchanging the necessary insecurity of philosophical thought for the total explanation of an ideology and its Weltanschauung [worldview], is not even so much the risk of falling for some usually vulgar, always uncritical assumption as of exchanging the freedom inherent in man’s capacity to think for the strait jacket of logic with which man can force himself almost as violently as he is forced by some outside power.

At this point she has given us the critical defect in thought that leads to totalitarianism (and the lamb that follows, terrorism). An idea converts thought into an inductive rather than deductive process. Syllogisms and identification of fallacies are used only to support the idea, and not to flesh it out. The power of authority prevents the intellectual class from deviating from the idea (those who deviate had better hide, or in the case of Arendt, flee), so they set about reinforcing it. Meanwhile, the military class carries it out.

I step forward in history to observe the same phenomenon at work with the ideology called “Americanism,” or the inherent superiority of the American form of government and way of life. Since Americans are a superior society, it only follows that others must be jealous of our success, and so want to destroy us. Our only response can be to destroy the threat they pose. All the while the intellectual class is busy fleshing out the science of our economics and our notions of “freedom*.” These ideals, perfect economics and “freedom” are both embodied in “capitalism.” The military class is always busy attacking other countries to install and instill our ideology. Since it must be forced on them from above, we merely breed other totalitarian states.

Equally important, when others are infected with anti-American ideas, they are considered diseased and must be exterminated. Ergo, the killing spree that this country has been on since 1948, or August of 1945, to be more precise.

Tomorrow I’ll try to finish with her essay, and then will get back to my more mundane blogging with notes concerning the Kardashian sisters and the inevitable decline of Anistonism, now replaced by [Michelle] Gellarism. From there, we will delve further down into the intense philosophical debate around Testerism vs Rehbergism, or the meaning of a choice of clowns. .
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*As used in our society, the word “freedom” is a prostitute hiding behind a virgin.