- Employing totalitarian principles
Description
Applying centralized control by an autocratic ruler or hierarchy or planning system regarded as infallible, and under which individual man is conceived as the servant of the state, an instrument or means and not an end.
Context
Claim
No governing system becomes totalitarian overnight. It must first pass through a stage of authoritarianism, where freedoms are slowly removed, as overlords issue pronouncements on what their subjects can no longer do. One of the first to go, perhaps the most important, is the freedom to express ourselves without constraint or censorship.
Fact-checkers have now been installed at every level of public and private communication, interfering with and eliminating “misinformation” that threatens the reigning political orthodoxy. Technology, which has largely been a force for good since the Industrial Revolution, has been transformed into a weapon to track the speech, actions, purchases, and movements of individuals.
"The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness" (Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism p. 382).