Rod DreherThe American Conservative
Bo Winegard Independent Scholar
MARCH 8TH, 2021 (pairagraph.com)
When I first began hearing that emigres from Communist countries see America inching towards totalitarianism, I didn’t take it seriously. Totalitarianism was Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which the state controlled everyone through the infliction of pain and terror. Whatever our problems in America, we don’t have that, or anything close to it.It turns out that my definition of totalitarianism, formed during my Cold War youth, was too narrow. Orwell gave us one totalitarian model, based on the Soviet reality. Aldous Huxley gave us a rival version in his novel Brave New World. Huxley’s totalitarian state controlled the masses not through pain and terror, but by manipulating their pleasure and comfort. The people of Brave New World were happy to surrender their political liberties in exchange for guarantees of sex, drugs, and entertainment. This “pink police state” is the form of totalitarianism coming to the United States.
“Totalitarianism” is a term coined by Mussolini to describe a society in which the state controls all aspects of life. He defined it like this: “Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State.” Under authoritarianism, a single party or leader monopolizes all political power, but leaves it at that. Totalitarianism also monopolizes political power, but regards everything as political. And, as Orwell wrote, totalitarians not only want you to obey Big Brother, but to love him as well.
Huxley gives us a society that is totally controlled through technology, and by convincing people to love their slavery. They have the drug soma to keep them blissed out, and all the sex and bodily comforts they desire. When John the Savage, a non-conformist who lives in the wild, confronts Mustapha Mond, one of the World Controllers, Mond has no intention of torturing him into submission, as Orwell’s O’Brien does to Winston Smith. Rather, Mond can’t understand why the Savage would refuse to live in a society that offers “Christianity without tears” — life in heaven without having to die.
The Savage, raised on Shakespeare, knows that there’s no meaning or depth or joy to human life without suffering. “You’re claiming the right to be unhappy,” Mond tells him. Yes, that’s exactly it, says the Savage. Says Mond, with a shrug, “You’re welcome.”
Mond knows that people won’t exchange comfort and pleasure for freedom, which requires accepting unhappiness. Are we not there, or close to it? In Hungary, a young woman told me it was hard to discuss her ordinary struggles as a wife and mother with her friends, because none could see the value in it. They arranged their lives to avoid suffering at all, and thought she should too.
When college students demand that authorities silence and punish those whose words make them anxious, this is a sign of Huxleyan soft totalitarianism. A professor told me a few years back that it’s hard to teach Brave New World today, because students think Huxley’s dystopia is paradise. No wonder so many Americans can’t see the threat in front of us.
Winegard’s response:
Social evil is generally not the result of power-hungry sadists who actively want to inflict gratuitous suffering, abridge freedom, and dominate others arbitrarily. It is, instead, the result of zealous moral idealists who actively want to protect people and to create a better, more morally righteous world. Thus increased sympathy for victims and decreased tolerance for pain can lead, paradoxically, to a kind of soft-totalitarianism that is closer to Orwell’s vision than Huxley’s. But we arrive at 1984, as it were, by the following the logic of Brave New World.Consider, for example, suppression of academic freedom and debate. Modern progressives are especially sensitive to threats to perceived victims groups, e.g., sexual and racial minorities. They therefore want to protect them from risks of violence and harm. This desire is, of course, laudable. It is great that we care about other people; and it is great that we want to protect them from possible danger.However, as our society has become more affluent and pacific, our tolerance of pain has declined. We have medicine to eliminate our aches and pains. Pills to alleviate our mental anguish. We find intolerable things our ancestors would have taken for granted such as rising at dawn to work for 12 hours in a field.And as our tolerance of discomfort has declined, our concept of threat has expanded. Ideas that cause mental distress are now seen not only as a challenge to be debated, but as a threat to the mental health of vulnerable college students and minority groups. And threatening ideas, like physical violence, need to be suppressed if not eliminated. We thus begin to create a bureaucracy, a “Big Brother,” whose function is to seek out wrongthink, to remove it from the public sphere, and, if possible, to extirpate it from society altogether. What’s important about this is that the motivations that drive it are not evil. We err when we imagine a totalitarian society of cowering citizens who are intimidated into submission by a small coterie of callous and ruthless elites. That’s not how most forms of totalitarianism work. Instead, we should imagine a society mixed equally of true believers, cautious conformists, and uninterested spectators who are led by a small coterie of morally fervid and righteous elites.People come to love Big Brother, not primarily for fear of its power to punish, but because they identify with its goals or think it indecent publicly to contradict them. How and why, after all, would one object to trying to protect vulnerable people from potentially deleterious ideas? People thus fear not the sting of the torturer’s instruments, but the sting of their own conscience.After all, what kind of moral monster would insist on shouting that two plus two equals four if it might threaten the safety of constantly harassed and vulnerable minorities?