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Video Description
When a society turns sick, most people try to escape in the wrong directions. This lecture from Academy of Ideas maps three ways out — and backs only one of them. There is the backward escape into drugs, screens, and passivity; the physical escape of simply moving away; and the forward escape of resistance and creation. Drawing on Arendt, Havel, and Meerloo, it shows that real freedom is built, not run from — through parallel structures, creative work, and the deep focus of flow. The warning is blunt: act early, before the little steps add up to a world you no longer recognize.
Full Video Transcript
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, reflecting on the Soviet Union’s descent into totalitarian rule in the mid-20th century, and all the things that could have been done to prevent it, wrote the following,
If, if, we didn’t love freedom enough, and even more, we had no awareness of the real situation, we hurried to submit. We submitted with pleasure. We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.
The 20th century clearly shows that totalitarianism is not a solution to any problem, but a social
ill of the most horrific kind. More innocent men, women, and children were killed by the
totalitarian regimes of the 20th century than by natural disasters, pandemics, or even the
two world wars. If, therefore, we are unfortunate enough to be living in a world flirting with
the sickness of totalitarianism, what can we do to escape? In this video, relying on
the insights of those who studied and lived under totalitarian rule, we are going to explore
what is called the forward escape from the control of the cruel and twisted minds of
would-be totalitarians. To understand what this form of escape entails,
we will contrast it with two other ways to escape from the hardships of living through
an attempted totalitarian takeover. The backward escape and the physical escape.
The backward escape entails dulling one’s awareness of the reality and precariousness
of one’s situation through the use of drugs and alcohol or by zoning out in front of screens
for hours on end.
The backward escape can provide short-term relief to feelings of anxiety, depression,
and boredom, but the more one relies on such activities the more one’s mental health
deteriorates.
Furthermore, the backward escape does nothing to prevent the rise of totalitarianism, as
it promotes docility, passivity, and apathy, all traits that make people more manipulable
and controllable, or as Dr. Joost Meerloo explained in his book on totalitarianism,
the cult of passivity and so-called relaxation is one of the most dangerous developments
of our times. Essentially, it represents a camouflage pattern, the double wish not to
see the dangers and challenges of life and not to be seen. Silent, lonely relaxation
with alcohol, sweets, or the television screen may soothe the mind into a passivity that
may gradually make it vulnerable to the seductive ideology of some feared enemy.
Denying the danger of totalitarianism through passivity may gradually surrender to its blandishments
those who were initially afraid of it.
An alternative to the backward escape is the physical escape, which is to relocate to a
place that offers more freedom.
This form of escape has many benefits, for given that we have one chance at life, why
Why not live somewhere absent the stifling control of corrupt and power-hungry politicians
and bureaucrats?
But there are problems with this form of escape.
Firstly, for many people, it is not practical to pack up and move to a new land.
Furthermore, if we live at a time when the rise of tyranny is a global phenomenon, the
practicality of the physical escape diminishes further, as the sought-after pockets of freedom
are few and far between.
What is more, if totalitarianism is permitted to proliferate, the places that are free now
may not remain so for long.
Running away, like escaping backward, is not the ideal solution to the rise of totalitarianism.
Instead, the solution is to escape forward into a new and better reality.
What does the forward escape entail?
To answer this question we need to dispel with the notion that totalitarianism can be
defeated through compliance.
Many people cede to the commands of would-be totalitarians because they believe that so
doing is the quickest means to return to some semblance of normality, but this is a cowardly
and ignorant way to act, for compliance only emboldens totalitarian regimes, a point emphasized
by the political philosopher Hannah Arendt in her book The Origins of Totalitarianism.
The most characteristic aspect of totalitarian terror is that it is let loose when all organized
opposition has died down and the totalitarian ruler knows that he no longer need be afraid.
Stalin started his gigantic purges not in 1928 when he conceded,
we have internal enemies, but in 1934 when all former opponents had confessed their errors,
and Stalin himself at the 17th party congress declared,
there is nothing more to prove and, it seems, no one to fight. Compliance is the food that feeds
totalitarians. Compliance is not and never will be the path back to some form of normality. Rather,
non-compliance and civil disobedience are essential to counter the rise of totalitarian rule.
But in addition to resistance, a forward escape into a reality absent the sickness of totalitarian
rule requires the construction of a parallel society. A parallel society serves two main
purposes. It offers pockets of freedom to those rejected by the totalitarian system
or who refuse to participate in it, and it forms the foundation for a new society that can grow
out of the ashes of the destruction wrought by the totalitarians, or as Vaclav Havel,
a dissident under the communist rule of Czechoslovakia, explains in his book The
Power of the Powerless, When those who have decided to live within the truth have been
denied any direct influence on the existing social structures, not to mention the opportunity to
participate in them, and when these people begin to create what I have called the independent life
of society, this independent life begins, of itself, to become structured in a certain way.
These parallel structures do not grow out of a theoretical vision of systemic change,
there are no political sects involved, but from the aims of life and the authentic needs
of real people. There are innumerable ways to contribute to the construction of a parallel
society. One can build technologies that promote freedom, or agoristic economic institutions that
further voluntary exchange. One can run a business that resists implementing unjust laws or mandates,
or one can create media or educational institutions that counter the lies and propaganda
of the state. Or one can create music, literature, or artwork that counters the staleness of
totalitarian culture. The parallel society is a decentralized and voluntary alternative to the
centralized and coercive control of the totalitarian society, and as Havel explains,
one of the most important tasks the dissident movements have set themselves
is to support and develop parallel social structures. What else are those initial
attempts at social self-organization than the efforts of a certain part of society
to rid itself of the self-sustaining aspects of totalitarianism and, thus, to extricate itself
radically from its involvement in the totalitarian system, and as he explains further,
it would be quite wrong to understand the parallel structures and the parallel society as a retreat
into a ghetto and as an act of isolation, addressing itself only to the welfare of those
who had decided on such a course. The ultimate phase of this process is the situation in which
the official structures simply begin withering away and dying off, to be replaced by new
structures that have evolved from below and are put together in a fundamentally different way.
The construction of a parallel society, however, is not merely a long-term solution to totalitarian
destruction, but also serves to counter the rise of totalitarian rule, for the act of building
parallel social structures reveals that not everyone will just roll over and submit to
total state control. And as was noted by Hannah Arendt, this helps keep the would-be totalitarians
in check. This process also counters the social atomization that comes with totalitarian rule
by promoting voluntary communal bonds between those who cherish freedom.
And as an added benefit for those who partake in this process, it can serve as a healthy vehicle
to escape the day-to-day feelings of anxiety, boredom, and depression that accompany living
in a world teetering with a descent into totalitarianism. For if we pick a goal to help
in the construction of the parallel society and work towards it in a disciplined and focused
manner, we give our life more meaning and we open up the possibility of attaining the peak
experiential states of Flow and Rausch. Flow is an optimal state of consciousness,
in which attention is so narrowly focused on an activity that a sense of time fades,
along with the troubles and concerns of day-to-day life. Rausch, on the other hand,
is the word Nietzsche used for a peak cognitive state similar to flow.
What is essential in Rausch, wrote Nietzsche, is the feeling of increased strength and fullness.
Rausch is an emergent byproduct of focused attempts to effectuate real-world change.
And when in Rausch, as in flow, we perform at our best,
or as John Richardson explains in Nietzsche’s New Darwinism,
In Roush, the organism feels its capacities at a peak and takes pleasure in this heightened
potency. These capacities are drives to work on the world, and in Roush one feels oneself
overfull with them, bursting to change things to fit oneself. Both Flow and Roush are healthy
ways to escape from the day-to-day miseries of living in a sick and corrupted society.
Unlike the numbing, experiential zones of the backward escape which weaken us in body and mind,
Flow and Roush strengthen us and increase our feelings of power. The more people who experience
Flow and Roush, the harder it is for those in power to herd a populace into the chains of
totalitarian servitude. And as Alexander Solzhenitsyn warned, no weapons, no matter
how powerful, can help the West until it overcomes its loss of willpower. To attempt the forward
escape by contributing to the creation of a parallel society and in the process attaining
the states of flow and roush comes with risks. And success is not guaranteed, but it is a far
better option than merely sitting passively by just hoping things will get better. Hope,
in reality, claimed Nietzsche, is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.
In place of mere hope, courageous action from as many people as possible is needed to prevent the
rise of totalitarian rule. And the sooner people act in defiance of would-be totalitarians,
the greater the chance of success. For the mistake that was made over and over again in
the totalitarian countries of the 20th century was that people didn’t act soon enough. Milton
Mayer, in his book They Thought They Were Free, interviews an individual who lived through Hitler’s
rule, and his words should serve as a warning for those who live in a world at risk of being
engulfed by the life-destroying machinery of totalitarian rule. You wait for one great
shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in
resisting somehow. But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds of thousands
will join with you, never comes. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come
immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes millions would have been sufficiently
shocked. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between comes all the hundreds
of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked
by the next. And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush
in upon you, and you see that everything, everything has changed. Now you live in a
world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves.
When everyone is transformed, no one is transformed.
Source: Academy of Ideas