The Psychology of Totalitarianism
I finished reading The Psychology of Totalitarianism by Matthias Desmet this week. This is a fascinating book and is in stiff competition with The Medieval Mind of CS Lewis by Jason Baxter for my book of the month. I am certain that Desmet’s reflections will help me with the writing project that I am engaged in and so I’d like to try and break down in this post some major themes of his book and give some reflections upon them.
To give a brief summary headline, it seems to me that The Psychology of Totalitarianism is crying out for a religious answer to complete the fascinating suggestions that it raises about science, politics and ideology.
The Two Different Sciences
We begin with the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution. Desmet argues that the throwing off of religious shackles and the pursuit of science was a good thing and that it was necessary for human progress. Man went from believing that knowledge was given to him by God to going out there and finding out about the world for himself. (I think Desmet’s narrative at this point is extremely simplistic and basically wrong in its criticism of Medieval Christianity and science but that is another story.) The ideals of the Scientific Revolution were wonderful insofar as man began to discover truths about the universe and about how to live better and more comfortable lives for the first time.
The benefits that we discovered were incalculable but this scientific knowledge was accompanied by the emergence of a new overall picture of the universe. Desmet refers to this as the “mechanistic” picture. That is that the universe began to be thought of as a machine with regular interlocking parts that could, at least in principle but very much in practice also, be understood comprehensively. This picture of the world as a machine was not metaphorical but was intended literally. The universe isn’t like a machine. The universe is a machine and thus can be understood totally. And, further to this, mankind has the ability to achieve this great act of comprehension.
We thus have two different types of science. The science of mechanistic materialism and the Great Science. The Great Science is a humbler type of science that in its open-mindedness and refusal of dogmatism continued to achieve mind-blowing discoveries about the universe. Latterly these involve areas such as quantum mechanics, chaos theory and the uncertainty principle (about which more below). But it wasn’t this type of science that took control of people’s imaginations. It was the other type, the mechanistic materialist version.
Mechanistic Science and Totalitarianism
And this is where Desmet’s theory starts to get interesting. Think about where that underlying picture of the universe leads. If the universe is like a machine and is in principle entirely explicable then this implies two things. Firstly, that scientists are very great because they have a godlike power to understand, explain and manipulate everything. And, secondly, that, like the universe, society can be comprehensively understood and controlled. If the universe is a machine then so is society and the ones who can best tell it how to run are the technicians. We need a technocracy for the machine.
People are part of the machine. And people have problems like fear, anxiety, isolation, disease and death. So how do we deal with those problems? The answer is: on a managerial and technical level. We need the experts, scientists and doctors to come in and to micromanage society so that we can cure these difficulties and be free from the unpleasant sensations that they create. And this is the essence of totalitarianism: the handing over of every part of human life and society to a managerial class that has power over everything.
There is more psychological subtlety here, such as the distinction between a dictatorship and totalitarianism. In a dictatorship, a more straightforward command and control approach is utilised: the dictator gives orders and, if those orders are not obeyed, people are punished with violence and imprisonment. But a totalitarian order generally relies upon the full psychological participation of its subjects. That is, totalitarianism is really like a kind of spell that is weaved throughout society such that everybody - leaders and subjects - are convinced of its underlying ideological thrust. This is achieved through an intense focus upon a particular object of anxiety and/or resentment. The obvious examples are those of the Jews in Nazi Germany and the bourgeoisie in Society Russia. But this was also true for the Covid-19 situation in which all other considerations, normally thought to be extremely important - democratic political principles, properly functioning economies, normal patterns of healthy sociality - were treated as though they were simply an irrelevance to the single threat of the virus upon which all attention was intensely focussed.1
That is how we have go to where we are: from the mechanistic picture of the universe to totalitarianism. And this is the deeply unhealthy and ultimately counterproductive way that modern people have decided to deal with the problems that they face such as isolation, free-floating anxiety, free-floating frustration and a sense of meaninglessness: by ceding control of their lives to scientific experts who they believe will be able to keep them safe and to fix all of their problems. The only thing it costs you is your freedom.
The Great Science…
Science didn't have to go this way. It could have gone in an entirely different direction. And one of the ironic things here is that, if science had gone in this different direction, it would truly have been following the evidence. For, as science progressed, particularly with certain discoveries of the twentieth century, it became clear just how inaccurate and reductive was the picture of the universe as a comprehensible, interlocking machine. We discovered that reality is simply far more mysterious than we had perhaps given it credit for.
Now, this is an area that I am learning about and so one will have to forgive the lack of depth here, but, as I understand it, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle essentially says that matter, when observed at a subatomic level, is affected by our observations, and that, these observations go not only for the present but work backwards in time causally. Our observations affect matter on a subatomic level for thousands of years in the past. This calls into question our very understanding how causality works.
Chaos Theory posits that certain systems which are, on the surface, utterly chaotic and unpredictable are really undergirded by aesthetically beautiful and sublime patterns which point towards a Platonic metaphysics. That is, they demonstrate that, underlying our observations of nature, are ‘an aesthetically magnificent order of universal forms’ (Desmet, p.156) or, as Heisenberg said, “The smallest units of matter are not objects in the ordinary sense; they are forms, ideas…”
…and what it might mean
And here’s where I get a bit lost. I find totally persuasive the argument that modern science really tells us that the world is not like a machine at all and that we should not proceed, either intellectually or politically, as though it is. The material world is a kind of surface phenomenon that often blinds but occasionally reveals the spiritual reality that undergirds it. Consciousness is ontologically prior to matter and therefore to the functioning of the brain. That is, our thoughts, though obviously related to our brains, are not reducible to our brains because (as Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle implies) observation determines matter. Study of the human brain will, at some point, be affected by the very consciousness that is studying it. Mindblowing. Proof if you needed it that materialism as a worldview is utterly defunct.
But Desmet goes to an odd place with this in my opinion. He does not consider a religious answer and makes gestures towards a Platonic metaphysics in terms of the Realm of the Forms. But, added to that, he tries to derive from these scientific observations a political and social ethic. Consider this:
If one focusses too much on the superficial appearances of life and loses touch with the underlying principles and figures, life will increasingly be experienced as meaningless chaos…
Ibid., p.157
Very true, so we need to go deeper than the material substrate to another place. He continues:
The same applies at a societal level: A society has primarily to stay connected with a number of principles and fundamental rights, such as the right to freedom of speech, the right to self-determination, and the right to freedom of religion or belief. If a society fails to respect these fundamental rights of the individual, if it allows fear to escalate to such an extent that every form of individuality, intimacy, privacy, and personal initiative is regarded as an intolerable threat to the “collective well-being,” it will decay into chaos and absurdity.
Ibid.
I find this extraordinary. I am completely in agreement with Desmet that the materialist picture of the world cannot give us coherent or binding ethics. But how does the observation of an orderly and sublime reality undergirding our physical world lead to the political principles which he outlines above? There is a lot of further talk in the book about a type of vibe given off by the universe:
The ultimate knowledge lies outside of man. It vibrates in all things. And man is able to receive it, by tuning his vibrations, like a string, to the frequency of things. And the more man is able to set aside prejudices and beliefs, the more purely he will vibrate with the things around him and receive new knowledge.
Ibid.
Hmmmm, I wrote the “vague” next to this in my copy. Come on, Matthias, you cannot get to these ethical principles from the scientific observations you mention. They speak to us of the truth that our material world is ontological and metaphysically secondary to a prior world of supernatural forms, but that is all you can say at this stage. You can’t jump from that to benign liberal democracy, respect for the individual, the putting away of prejudice and so on. For those things, it seems to me, you need religion. But that is another story…
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