Readings

No extra readings in this last learning unit. I think you had enough.

Introduction

Shoshana Zuboff distinguishes two types of absolute power: Totalitarianism and Intrumentarianism.

We have explained in the last learning unit the meaning of the second term: Instrumentarianism. 

Yet, since instrumentarianism is a form of totalitarianism, it is important to understand this political phenomenon and its historical dimensions and implications.

The most influential study of totalitarianism is Hannah Arendt Book:

The Origins of Totalitarianism. 

This entire learning unit, the last in our course, discusses the most essential ideas developed by the author in her book. The contents of the learning unit necessarily simplify the complexity and depth of the book (it has over 1,000 pages). For instance, I intentionally ignored the two first sections dedicated to the predecessors of totalitarian power: anti-semitism and imperialism. The learning unit concentrates on the study of the common characteristics of the two most destructive totalitarian regimes in the 20^th century: the German National-Socialism and the Soviet Communism.

Shoshana Zuboff acknowledges in Surveillance Capitalism, no wonder, that Hannah Arendt has been one of her inspirations for her academic and intellectual work.

Hannah Arendt

Although Jewish by origin, Hannah Arendt (born close to Hannover in 1906) belonged to a family of what they called in Germany “assimilierte Juden” (Assimilated Jews), meaning they were completely integrated in the German culture and had minimal contact with the Jewish religious community.

Arendt was a philosophy major, with concentration in German philosophy. She studied under Martin Heidegger, with whom he had an affair, and Karl Jaspers, probably the two most important names in German philosophy in the 20^th century.

Hannah Arendt was arrested in 1933 when the national socialist party came to power, but was able to escape to France, first to Paris and then to south France. Here, she was arrested again. 

After a second escape from the Nazis, Hannah Arendt emigrated to the U.S. in 1941, where she developed the most important part of her work.

The most important works, in addition ot the origins of totalitarianism,

Vita Activa (The human condition),

Truth and lies in politics,

Eichman in Jerusalem, a report of Adolph Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem after he was arrested by the Mossad in Argentina in 1960. Eichmann had been a Nazi bureaucrat responsible for the logistics of the Endlösung (the final solution – euphemism to refer to the eradication of the Jews ethnicity).

Totalitarianism and Human Rights

The Declaration of Human Rights in the 18^th century can be considered the most significant moment of the French Revolution. This declaration highlighted two important terms:

National state 

and

People’s sovereignty.

We dealt with both terms in the introductory learning units. So, it is not necessary to repeat the definition here.

Yet, it is necessary to remember that here are nations, people, without state.

Those people are unprotected, since they fall outside the umbrella of the rule of law that determines the protection of the individuals within the geo-political limits of the national state.

That is what happened with the Jews in Nazi Germany. They first of all became second class citizens, and finally, they were deprived from the citizenship status entirely.

Being put outside the limits of any protection they were sent to Konzentrantionslager – closed places for people without state, outside the law and without any claim the human rights.The same happens today with other nations without state (Kurds – Palestine – Christians in some Muslim countries – illegal immigrants in many developed countries).

Total Power and the Mass

Totalitarian regimes, as opposed to other authoritarian regimes, do not admit the existence of anything else. They are different from dictatorships or tyrannies in this regard. Authoritarian regimes monopolize political power, but they left some space for private liberties.

Totalitarianism destroys the sphere of privacy – they aspire to possess the entire existence of the people – nothing else can fill their lives.

According to Hannah Arendt, totalitarian leaders did not have any political goal, or ideological content, no real argument. Adolph Hitler or Joseph Stalin, the two main examples of totalitarian leaders, just needed people, as many people as possible, to be incorporated in their power system. They needed masses. And theses masses should follow the leader as a PersonenKult (cult of personality).

Masses and totalitarian leaders need and support each other.

As Arendt stated:

The mass without a leader is just a mob,

The leader without a mass is just a no-one.

Downfall of the Class Society

Hannah Arendt defines the concept “Mass” as a accumulation of people who are not active in public affairs.

Masses are unstructured and unorganized. Politically, they are irrelevant and uneducated – and thus, they become the perfect prey for propaganda.

Masses undermine the parliamentarian system from inside.

They use the democratic freedoms to fight those very same freedoms. Thus, the rise of populism and the spiral of political radicalization. The class society provided the national state with a social and political structure. Classes articulated the differences within the society – gave voices to those unequal parts.

The mass destroys the class identity and create an ocean of similar individuals with no connection to any segment of the society other than themselves. This is the ideal population for the totalitarian leader: Malleable people with no connection to any communal group, isolated in a faceless equality with any other member of the anonymous mass.

Totalitarianism and Propaganda

Propaganda is the most effective instrument of totalitarian power. Totalitarian propaganda instrumentally uses topics and issues, spread conspiracy theories, and dissolves the lines that separate truth and lies though a pseudo-scientific system. This system may appear to follow some logic, but this apparent logic proves false when confronted with the reality.

What safeguards this pseudo-logic based on fallacies is the instillment of an ideology. The ideological sediment constitutes the fallacy anchor used to connect with the masses. It is a common ground that does not need to necessarily be true, but that makes apparently obvious the conclusions derived from it.

In the case of the national socialism, the common ground is the racial superiority of the Arian population, which justifies anything that enhances this group, and suppresses all other groups.

In the case of the Soviet communism, the vilification of capitalist exploiters – and the moral superiority of the proletarian folks – also legitimized any action against classes labeled as oppressors.

The most surprising conclusion Hannah Arendt arrives to is that, in the totalitarian moment, the ideology is the independent variable, meaning, any ideology might serve the purpose of the totalitarian leader. 

Totalitarianism, Fear, Terror

The totalitarian movement is built around a significant threat for the collective/community. Any threat can work: the Jewish conspiration or the exploiting capitalism. The response of the state to this threat is a terror structure that helps support the regime.

In the most notorious cases of totalitarianism in the 20th Century, the effectiveness of the terror was based on the active collaboration of the population. The system of terror was based on the anonymous denunciation of the neighbors. Every public space became a menace. Even in the privacy of the own home, the neighbors would eavesdrop private conversations and report media consumption.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn told the story in The Gulag Archipelago of an inmate in Siberia who was arrested because a neighbor heard how he turned off the radio during one of the many broadcast speeches of Joseph Stalin.

When the totalitarian terror triumphs, the motto seems to be: Better a perpetrator than a victim.