A blog post about the meaninglessness of the other labels, and how this is the only important one.
[Update Saturday morning]
Sorry, didn’t mean to post this, it was supposed to be a draft as a reminder to write a post. Have fun in comments.
14 thoughts on “Totalitarianism”
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Hey Rand, we’d love to read this one. Can you include the link? 😉
Totalitarianism?
Totaltitaniumism: An essay on the evolution of the SpaceX Falcon 9 Grid Fin.
That’s a blog post that almost writes itself, isn’t it?
Communist. Nazi. World Government. Fascist. Caliphate. Theocracy. Bureaucracy. Woke. What do these words have in common?
Totalitarianism. The labels, in the end, are irrelevant. They all mean that some small group of people dictate how the rest of us live (exempting themselves, of course), and damned be individual needs or wants or dreams for the future. A boot on a human neck, forever.
The existence of the United States is a direct repudiation of totalitarianism. That’s why they hate it and want it destroyed (i. e. “fundamentally transformed”).
I agree. Right now, all we have is a few telling the rest of how to live, who to support, and threatening violence if we don’t conform. I say nuts.
(Wiki article): Authoritarianism is a form of government characterized by strong central power and limited political freedoms.[1] Political scientists have created many typologies describing variations of authoritarian forms of government.[1] Authoritarian regimes may be either autocratic or oligarchic in nature and may be based upon the rule of a party or the military.[2][3]
Totalitarianism is a symptom of the disease in it’s most virulent form.
The total lack lack of a blog post in this blog post is totalitarian!
Seriously though, the way I’ve always looked at it is, there are different flavors of totalitarianism, many meant to obfuscate what it is; fascism, socialism, marxism, etc. But they are all essentially the same where it matters – they mean a loss of freedom, with the individual becoming the chattel of the State.
I do find it darkly amusing that those in the streets screeching about slavery that ended in this country in December of 1865, are agitating to have they themselves forced into a form of slavery every bit as vile.
Have fun in comments.
Can we run with scissors? (Asking for a friend)
“Everything within the blog, nothing outside the blog, nothing against the blog”.
All forms of centralized authority, no matter what causes they champion or from whenst they came, will always move towards de facto feudalism over time. No tyrant, no self-appointed committee, no elected body can muster the time and effort to concern themselves with the entirety of the minutia of their increasingly all-encompassing purview. The more power and authority they accumulate to their station, the more they must by necessity delegate decisions, both of great import and small, to well-trusted others. These others will invariably form a parasitic class of would-be nobility, regardless of whether or not their progeny will directly inherit their personal titles and positions in the government.
Throughout recorded history, governments have risen and fallen, but the inevitable slouch towards feudalism has remained. Only by sharply restricting the power and authority of a government, may any form of freedom or liberty survive, and only then for a brief epoch, and with great effort. Governments are always-encroaching maws, which, generation by generation, will exceed any limits or long-forgotten moralities imposed by their original founders until, fattened to the point of somnolence by their burgeoning noble classes, they become so decrepit as to risk collapse, either from without or within. Whether it is the invading army of a leaner, younger competitor whose nobility has not yet sucked its vitality dry, or squabbling amongst competing members of the newer generations of the nobility, each grasping for the power and authority (and its consummate wealth and fame) that they feel is their birthright, the outcome is, in a sense, identical.
This, then, is the true cycle of history. We lurch from tyranny to tyranny, exempted only by the brief interludes during which free men steal power away from tyrants, and somehow find a way to reject, at least for their generation, the siren’s song of absolute power and its quieter companion, absolute corruption. All those who love liberty must constantly educate their posterity of its import, and postpone as best they can the day when the last dam is breached which restrains the government’s grasp, ensuring the cycle will continue once more.
I’m more of a RaisinBranarian myself.
I wonder how many of the totalitarian states started with the intent to be so absolute and how many organically grew that way – evolving into an obsession with control and power.
Seems like a chicken-or-egg question to me, and there’s ample evidence the leaders in many cases started out wanting total control, and even held it out as their ultimate aim and objective, and that it alone would solve all the problems they had identified.
The followers were idiots useful to their leaders — as now.
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