The Power of Truth
How Story / Art Creates and Defeats Totalitarian Creep
“If you design your action well, you can force your target into a situation where they have no good options: where they’re “damned if they do, and damned if they don’t.” This is known as a decision dilemma.” - BEAUTIFUL TROUBLE
“There is absolutely no such thing in the world as love or hatred without reason or cause. As for the so-called love of humanity, there has been no such all-inclusive love since humanity was divided into classes. All the ruling classes of the past were fond of advocating it, and so were many so-called sages and wise men, but nobody has ever really practiced it, because it is impossible in class society. There will be genuine love of humanity--after classes are eliminated all over the world. Classes have split society into many antagonistic groupings; there will be love of all humanity when classes are eliminated, but not now. We cannot love enemies, we cannot love social evils, our aim is to destroy them. This is common sense; can it be that some of our writers and artists still do not understand this?” - AT THE YENAN FORUM ON LITERATURE AND ART May 1942, Mao
(Originally published in thread form on X @ooana)
In order to defeat an enemy we must first be able to understand what it actually is, and what it isn’t.
I think there are insights into our current situation which can be very useful from
a particular essay titled Power of the Powerless by Playwrite, dissident and statesman, Vaclav Havel.
I’ve quoted later parts of it often, but now I want to focus on the earlier sections where he explains why what they experienced and what I believe we are also experiencing, isn’t a dictatorship or even really communism or fascism, but rather something else. Something unique to modernity, something fueled by ideology, but also requiring a very different tactic
I’ll be quoting from it and also trying to, later in this article, summarize its nature. I do encourage you to find the time to read the entire thing. His mind is very missed.
Here is a link to the essay.
"The Power of the Powerless" - Vaclav HavelHannah Arendt Center Newshttps://hac.bard.edu/amor-mundi/the-power-of-the-powerless-vaclav-havel-2011-12-23
The key to understanding what we face I believe is understanding the nature of ideology and the way it actually, unique to the circumstance described by Havel but also warned by Havel, relates to power in what he called a “post totalitarian system.” He did not mean after a totalitarian period.
Angelo Codevilla before he died a few years ago also wrote an essay in American Mind which I’m
reminded of whenever I read the Havel piece. I’ll be sharing portions of the Codevilla Essay as well titled “Revolution 2020.” I encourage you to read both sooner rather than later.
https://americanmind.org/salvo/revolution-2020/
Codevilla wrote:
“Progressivism’s foundational proposition—that the American way of life suffers from excessive freedom and insufficient latitude for experts to lead each into doing what is best for all—is the intellectual basis of the oligarchy’s ever-increasing size, wealth, and power. The theme that the USA was ill-conceived in 1776-89 and must be re-conceived has resounded from Woodrow Wilson’s Congressional Government (1885) to the campaigns of Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy, Barack Obama, and Joseph Biden: “listen to the scientists!” The criticism’s main point has been constant: America’s original conception validated the people’s right to live as they please, and made it hard to marshal them for Progressive purposes.
But the Progressive critique adds a moral basis: the American people’s indulgence of their preferences—private ease and comfort, focus on families, religious observance, patriotism—has made for every secular sin imaginable: racism, sexism, greed, etc. Because most Americans are racist, sexist, un-appreciative of real virtue or refinement (these are somehow rolled together), because these Americans resist knuckling under to their betters, America is a sick society that needs to be punished and to have its noxious freedoms reformed.
Hence, the revolution that created the American oligarchy—illiterate contemporary Marxists notwithstanding—has nothing in common with Karl Marx’s original democratic (in the Aristotelian sense) conception “from below” (e.g. his 1875 Critique of the Gotha Programme) other than “overthrowing the pillars of the house.” Ours is the Party-centered oligarchic revolution from above that Lenin outlined in What Is to Be Done? (1902). This Leninism is the template of the Soviet and every other Communist regime, bar none. In our revolution, too, everything—always and everywhere—is about the Party.”
Note that last sentence. We were warned about the danger of Party very early on in America’s Founding. In fact we were warned before our first election.
In Washington’s Farewell Address it was written…
I believe that this concept of Party and the way it grows to become far more dangerous than helpful in a purely elective government as predicted in that speech has a very interesting, parallel and useful toward its defeat quality, which requires a historical understanding of Party since the 1917 Revolution. We see this in America with the dawn of Wilsonian Progressivism. Codevilla wrote “The moral class critique from above was always implicit. It largely stayed in the background of the campaigns for social improvement into which Progressives have led the American people ever since the 1930s, and especially since the 1960s. The ruling class chided Americans for insufficient commitment to education, to well-being for the poor and disadvantaged, to a healthy natural environment, and to public health, as well as for oppressing women, and, above all, for racism. The campaigns for remedying these conditions have been based on propositions advanced by the most highly-credentialed persons in America—experts certified by the U.S. government, whom the media treated as truth-telling scientists, their opponents as enemies of the people.”
He continued “But each and all of these campaigns produced mostly the ostensible objectives’ opposites while increasing the numbers of the oligarchy’s members and their wealth and power, endowing them with socio-political clienteles as well as with levers for manipulating them. As its members’ powers grew, they developed a taste for disdaining independent Americans and acquired whips for punishing them.”
Now it is, at first sight, a simple fight between two groups, one could even call this a class struggle, but Havel in 1977 discovered something which I believe is a key to understanding where we are. But first, we need to explore a bit more what Party means from the point of view of Marxism or, as I believe it would be better to call it, Liberation Theology. My sense is that we are not actually simply facing two different political ideas battling it out but rather one Religious idea masquerading as economic, philosophical and political, while I truth it is in fact a religious ideology with a method of absorbing all which opposes it into itself via the power of narrative. That is the Great Narrative and it has a structure. It also has a singular author. That author is Party.
More accurately it would be The Party Spirit or even Will.
Under the Soviet’s this term was Partiinost'. It is a transliteration of the Russian term. In Chinese, it is translated as Dangxing (Chinese: 党性). It can be variously translated as party-mindedness, partisanship, or party spirit.
It is one of the philosophical pillars of the Great Narrative which was, and still is, Socrealism or Socialist Realism.
These pillars are:
Klassovost (Class-mindedness or consciousness.)
Narodnsot (People/folk-mindedness or orientation toward the masses)
Ideinost (Idea-mindedness), emphasising that ideas should reflect those of the Party, as well as motivating people for a certain aim.
And of course
Partiinost (Party-mindedness) meaning that every expression was considered political, and the foundation of all knowledge is the Party.
Party is the only purveyor of ideology. And ideology supersedes all, all knowledge all history all wisdom. Morality is not determined by amalgamated wisdom, Torah, The Gospels or from within the human spirit. There is no human spirit. There is only Partiinost; Party Spirit.
And that Spirit has a singular goal, unified and in total and it is determined by Party, not a parent, not a teacher and certainly not any internal choice. The human being is not, according to this principle, capable of making such decisions. It echoes in an interesting way what Codevilla wrote in 2020, but I intend to reframe it…
“the logic that drives each turn of our revolutionary spiral is Progressive Americans’ inherently insatiable desire to exercise their superiority over those they deem inferior.” Its force, I observed, “comes not from the substance of the Progressives’ demands,” but rather “from that which moves, changes, and multiplies their demands without end. That is the Progressives’ affirmation of superior worth, to be pursued by exercising dominance: superior identity affirmed via the inferior’s humiliation.” Affirmation of one’s own superiority by punishing inferiors is an addictive pleasure. It requires ever stronger, purer doses of infliction, and is inherently beyond satisfaction.
In short, the Progressive ruling class’s intensifying efforts to oppress those they imagine to be their inferiors is not reversible. It is far less a choice of policy than it is the consequence of its awakening to its own identity—awakening to the powers and privileges to which they imagine their superior worth entitles them. It is awakening to its deep resentment—indeed, to hate—for whoever does not submit preemptively.”
What he recognizes as a quality of the Progressiveness I think he, and most people fail to recognize as The Spirit of Party in general or
Partiinost' or Dangxing.
More of a priest guild - Party is the soul purveyor of Ideology. And ideology is what assures Party it has an existence.
Ideology rather than principle is how decisions are made and how power is transferred from one person to the next. Ultimately all principle, all morals, all ethics and all identity becomes subordinated to ideology. To Ideinost.
It is essential to understand the power dynamic here. Party cannot exist without ideology and ideology cannot exist without party.
This dialectical is like a black hole which sucks in everything and everyone around it because it exists only to exist. It makes decisions based only on what will serve its existence and as it grows in power it permits into its “praxis” only those so long as they will serve it.
We have not yet entered complete transformation into a social totality in which there is no escape from the singularity of Ideinost watched by the guards of Partiinost and in truth, since it is so unnatural I do not believe it is actually any more possible that the foolish idea that you can ever reach the horizon line. However….
The consistent belief that it IS possible whether it is right or wrong is what makes this so dangerous.
This, in short is what in Power of the Powerless Vaclav Havel calls The Post Totalitarian Society….
Vaclav explains brilliantly and we would be wise to listen to him how this is distinctively different than a Dictatorship no matter how much it may seem to resemble one. In fact that resemblance is merely another form of Totalitarian Creep obscuring itself and hiding itself behind its primary ally; ideology.
In Power of the Powerless he writes; “Our system is most frequently characterized as a dictatorship or, more precisely, as the dictatorship of a political bureaucracy over a society which has undergone economic and social leveling. I am afraid that the term "dictatorship," regardless of how intelligible it may otherwise be, tends to obscure rather than clarify the real nature of power in this system.”
He explains that the qualities that define and make up the dictatorial system itself are
1. a small group of people take over the government of a given country by force
2. their power is wielded openly, using the direct instruments of power at their disposal
3. they are easily distinguished socially from the majority over whom they rule
4. it is temporary, ephemeral, lacking historical roots
5. Its existence seems to be bound up with the lives of those who established it.
6. It is usually local in extent and significance.
7. Its power derives ultimately from the numbers and the armed might of its soldiers and police.
8. The threat to its existence is the that someone better equipped might appear and overthrow it.
This may appear to be, to a great degree, our situation.
It is not.
He explains first some simple but important realities which made up the Soviet Union, but I believe strongly are not only alive and well today but have altered form only superficially. What they share in their apparent belief system is superficially important compared to what they share in a suprapersonal way. They share Party Spirit and Ideology and are completely ruled by it.
The regime itself does not dictate things ideologically, but rather what is unique to the totality of Totalitarianism is that Ideology in fact rules it.
Here first are the basic differences Vaclav elaborated which we can all very much relate to:
1. our system is not limited in a local, geographical sense; rather, it holds sway over many geographical regions and nations. We see institutions which have grown in order to sustain and maintain said system…from the WHO to the WEF to the UN and GMOs.
2. although it quite naturally exhibits a number of local and historical variations, the range of these variations is fundamentally circumscribed by a single, unifying framework. Ideologically these shift; sustainability, DEI, ESG, Currency, etc etc but none of these are ultimately ever considered more valued than the continuity of the System itself.
3. Despite there no longer being a Soviet bloc, we see clearly the attempt to conform with the same “principles” and structure and nearly everywhere if not everywhere has been penetrated by a network of manipulatory instruments designed to assure its own survival.
4. There IS a historical foundation that is lacking in classical dictatorships. Or perhaps more accurately, and I am shifting slightly from Havel here, this foundation is in fact not so much rooted in history as rooted in a redefining of History.
Lastly what we must fully comprehend here is that unlike dictatorships or even oppressive regimes prior to modernity this is not simply a set of ideas or ideals. It is, in fact a religion. Even if most aren’t aware of it and even if segments of its adherents differ slightly in their deity or form of worship it is the RELATIONSHIP with their God(s) that is the key to understanding both the nature of what Vaclav called the post totalitarian system, and what I call Totalitarian Creep. That key is essential to understanding its greatest weakness as well and its very odd, unnatural, irrational and anti-human behavior.
It is difficult to describe this religion without utilizing another one in juxtaposition. This is because this new religion which has been creeping along human society for millennia received a kind of super fuel with the onset of industrialization and mechanization.
It is of no surprise that the system itself seems to reject the very fuel that allowed it to rapidly grow and pervade everything. This is one clue to understanding the very weakness that will ultimately destroy it, or cause it to destroy itself.
The question is only, how long will it take and what damage will be left and what will be left of human life or life at all when that moment comes?
I often imagine Jonestown as a microcosm of Totalitarian Creep, although there are other examples. Much like Jonestown, this system is in fact ultimately fated to destroy its host. It is a mistake to try and apply natural rules to something this unnaturally willing to place all survival as subordinate to it. Ideology is the purveyor of, temple of and only essential value in this system. What it worships is Purpose.
Imagine for a moment what comes to mind when you ask yourself or are asked “what is the opposite of life?”
Many people will say death.
I would argue this is incorrect.
The opposite of life is a machine.
In mythology and stories we have seen often the warnings of what happens when mechanization goes too far.
Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein
Terminator Series
Battle Star Galactica
The Jewish Mystical Idea of the Golem
Golem from Lord of the Rings adapted from above
And so on and so on…
A key quality of Totalitarian Creep is mechanization and therefore trivialization of Life; its opposite and its greatest threat.
Totalitarian Creep “commands an incomparably more precise, logically structured, generally comprehensible and, in essence, extremely flexible ideology that, in its elaborateness and completeness” (Havel Power of the Powerless) is more a religion than any dictatorship or any system of rule we are familiar with including what we traditionally call “fascism.”
Remember Jonestown? The microcosm here is unmistakeable.
Especially when one realizes that each and every member of the “Temple” were both pillars of and enslaved by it. Just as we are.
That smaller and now this new Totalitarian Temple “offers a ready answer to any question whatsoever; it can scarcely be accepted only in part, and accepting it has profound implications for human life. In an era when metaphysical and existential certainties are in a state of crisis, when people are being uprooted and alienated and are losing their sense of what this world means, this ideology inevitably has a certain hypnotic charm. To wandering humankind it offers an immediately available home: all one has to do is accept it, and suddenly everything becomes clear once more, life takes on new meaning, and all mysteries, unanswered questions, anxiety, and loneliness vanish.”(Havel)
He continues. “Of course, one pays dearly for this low-rent home: the price is abdication of one’ s own reason, conscience, and responsibility, for an essential aspect of this ideology is the consignment of reason and conscience to a higher authority. The principle involved here is that the center of power is identical with the center of truth.”
Truth in this context requires a definition, because it is not truth in the sense which we have all, for now and mostly, come to define it. It is truth that has a very insular definition, it is an illusion. Mind you a very consistent and tenacious one, which in fact becomes far more important that actual truth itself. It is Ideinost which can only be determined by Partiinost- as Washington warned, the warmth of the spirit of Party has begun its total consumption, or one might say total capture of the means of production.
What makes this new Totalitarian Temple so dangerous is, much like when Jonestown moved from the Bay Area down to its isolation in the Forrests and became itself, the landscape that surrounds us is in total. Escape requires something very unusual and has little to do with the overthrow of those who appear to lead it. Of course there are two escape paths. Each path is based entirely on how one relates to Truth.
The spirit of Party is much like a supernatural spirit, however it is in fact Suprapersonal. This spirit is within every human being. In some faiths it’s described symbolically as one form of our soul or perhaps even temptation. But that’s irrelevant. It’s part of the human condition which was so widely explained in Washington’s farewell address as well as in the writings of Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton and even later, Emerson.
We see it again in Jung and of course all the way back to Aristotle and in a form which I personally would argue set the stage for its igniting and potential to consume; Plato.
What matters, I believe in this particular situation though is an understanding again that YOU, each of us, everyone is involved.
This is the most important thing, I believe, is required to understand totalitarian creep distinctly from a Dictatorship of any kind and also its most oppressive but weakest point of its foundation.
Let’s return to this concept of a Great Narrative for a moment.
I asked a while back what story were we telling when the dancing nurses were telling us who was and who was not essential and what was necessary to participate “socially” and “happily.” Remember?
Here’s a quick reminder…with a twist of satire since I don’t want to thrust anyone back into that menticide (rape of the mind.)
We’ve heard a lot about mass formation. I think we’ve been given only a narrow view - a view which is faulty primarily because it mechanizes the masses and describes reality as if every person is at the mercy of the forward march of the “the masses”, delusional as they may be…
This resignation and sort of need to duck for cover as “history” marches over us in its own way places Purpose as an idol. It makes each of us feel powerless against a frantic activity occurring all around us, amplified by the very mechanization which built the illusion to begin with.
It’s the Koolaid.
It’s Frankenstein’s monster.
How often do we hear today that this new Industrial Revolution will change everything and we are powerless to stop it? That we must submit, be absorbed, adapt or essentially become inessential or worse.
What story are we being told?
Let me remind “ Of course, one pays dearly for this low-rent home: the price is abdication of one’ s own reason, conscience, and responsibility, for an essential aspect of this ideology is the consignment of reason and conscience to a higher authority. The principle involved here is that the center of power is identical with the center of truth.” Wrote Havel.
Again. Truth has a different definition within totalitarian creep.
Truth is only whatever the regime needs to glorify and sustain itself.
Truth is subordinated to something higher, that higher thing is not based on anything established by the means human beings are accustom to. The demoralization caused by a mechanized march toward something which seems to be ruled by anonymous flunkies and soulless automatons is of course deeply crushing to the spirit, but not to the spirit of Party or to Ideology which seems to take on different standards from moment to moment and commands its apparent leadership with a kind of psychotic set of orders, seemingly contradictory and seemingly in opposition to the principles it claimed moments before.
Let me remind you. This is a mechanized religion. Or rather a religion structured to only sustain itself, worshiping its Purpose which has at its core a false premise. That all history, all life, everything that has ever been and ever will be has existed in order to fulfill ITS purpose. Which, nihilistically and like Jonestown is Purposeless. Everything is a utility to sustain a belief in Purpose - it is purely a mechanized way of looking at everything and all.
The opposite of life.
Why does this system seem to require and use the immature and the young? Well…remember your own adolescence. A child brought up in an ideal family will have a sense of self not because they are rewarded simply for being good. Their sense of self is self evident, not based on their effectiveness as a tool for something that is desired purely from outside themselves. When that happens we call it emotional abuse.
Havel writes; “Ideology is a specious way of relating to the world. It offers human beings the illusion of an identity, of dignity, and of morality while making it easier for them to part with them. As the repository of something suprapersonal and objective, it enables people to deceive their conscience and conceal their true position and their inglorious modus vivendi, both from the world and from themselves. It is a very pragmatic but, at the same time, an apparently dignified way of legitimizing what is above, below, and on either side. It is directed toward people and toward God. It is a veil behind which human beings can hide their own fallen existence, their trivialization, and their adaptation to the status quo.“
Totalitarian creep, in its mechanized view of existence and in its need to sustain its own existence views everything and everyone only as a tool- something that solidifies or assures that existence or is a threat to it.
It is, in its own way, very very immature as well.
What Vaclav calls the Post - Totalitarian system I’m calling totalitarian creep because it has not yet fully imbedded itself. Even if this doesn’t reach thousands or even tens of thousands or tens people I am able to write about this and someone else may see it despite any censorship or limitation.
In a post totalitarian system that would be near impossible. The creep, also, I believe exists and may always to some degree or another. We have a great deal of it to wade through now. But for how long really is, I believe, up to each of us.
What choices do we have? Well…Vaclav says that the powerless are in fact able to access a power which those in power (as it appears) do not have. In fact we have seen recently how even those in power do have access to it.
He elaborates how actual Truth plays a roll that is enormous, unique and also uniquely threatening to this system.
He says…
“Between the aims of the post-totalitarian system and the aims of life there is a yawning abyss: while life, in its essence, moves toward plurality, diversity, independent self-constitution, aud self organization, in short, toward the fulfillment of its own freedom, the posttotalitarian system demands conformity, uniformity, and discipline. While life ever strives to create new and improbable structures, the posttotalitarian system contrives to force life into its most probable states. The aims of the system reveal its most essential characteristic to be introversion, a movement toward being ever more completely and unreservedly itself, which means that the radius of its influence is continually widening as well. This system serves people only to the extent necessary to ensure that people will serve it. Anything beyond this, that is to say, anything which leads people to overstep their predetermined roles is regarded by the system as an attack upon itself. And in this respect it is correct: every instance of such transgression is a genuine denial of the system. It can be said, therefore, that the inner aim of the post-totalitarian system is not mere preservation of power in the hands of a ruling clique, as appears to be the case at first sight. Rather, the social phenomenon of self-preservation is subordinated to something higher, to a kind of blind automatism which drives the system. No matter what position individuals hold in the hierarchy of power, they are not considered by the system to be worth anything in themselves, but only as things intended to fuel and serve this automatism. For this reason, an individual's desire for power is admissible only in so far as its direction coincides with the direction of the automatism of the system….
He then reinforces how and why each of us are both part of and enslaved by it before he explains what disintegrates it - and we had a glimpse of that very thing only a few days ago and then the expected reaction by the system to what it perceives (rightly) as an attack on itself.
I encourage you to read the entire essay but here is a key point. Perhaps the key point now.
“Ideology, in creating a bridge of excuses between the system and the individual, spans the abyss between the aims of the system and the aims of life. It pretends that the requirements of the system derive from the requirements of life. It is a world of appearances trying to pass for reality.”
That, is socrealism or socialist realism or perhaps we can call it The Great Narrative or The New Normal.
Whatever we call it. It’s a lie. And it’s also the structure of the Testaments of this New Temple/Religion. It is the Gospel of Liberation Theology and the formula repeated over and over by its priest class; also, much like the Aztec priests were, enslaved to the worship of Purpose (and willing to sacrifice their own, themselves and anything to that Purpose.)
It is new. It is a symptom of modernity but it is derived from something very old and often obscured because it reveals its inherent quality; the mechanized ethics of human beings.
The hero of this dark gospel is simple and so is the structure. “The hero is Toil and the Toiler is unthinkable outside the collective.”
That was Gorky’s phrase, one of the founders of Stalinist Socialist Realism, adopted by Mao, Hitler and birthed much earlier and described by Russian actual realist writers and artists as the death of the author, destroying of art and by its True Believers as a means to “engineer human souls.”
Vaclav goes on “The post-totalitarian system touches people at every step, but it does so with its ideological gloves on. This is why life in the system is so thoroughly permeated with hypocrisy and lies: government by bureaucracy is called popular government; the working class is enslaved in the name of the working class; the complete degradation of the individual is presented as his ultimate liberation; depriving people of information is called making it available; the use of power to manipulate is called the public control of power, and the arbitrary abuse of power is called observing the legal code; the repression of culture is called its development; the expansion of imperial influence is presented as support for the oppressed; the lack of free expression becomes the highest form of freedom; farcical elections become the highest form of democracy; banning independent thought becomes the most scientific of world views; military occupation becomes fraternal assistance. Because the regime is captive to its own lies, it must falsify everything. It falsifies the past. It falsifies the present, and it falsifies the future. It falsifies statistics. It pretends not to possess an omnipotent and unprincipled police apparatus. It pretends to respect human rights. It pretends to persecute no one. It pretends to fear nothing. It pretends to pretend nothing.”
…Individuals need not believe all these mystifications, but they must behave as though they did, or they must at least tolerate them in silence, or get along well with those who work with them. For this reason, however, they must live within a lie. They need not accept the lie. It is enough for them to have accepted their life with it and in it. For by this very fact, individuals confirm the system, fulfill the system, make the system, are the system.”
You are essential. That is truth. You are even essential for the continuation of that which you feel powerless against. That is true. That is what mechanization attempts to, through its illusions, tell you is unthinkable. Make it seem unthinkable. Until it becomes, consciously or not, unthinkable. Leaving you wandering in the desert forgetting that you were born liberated, making you ever more and more, like it. Enslaved to Purpose, worshiping Purpose and mechanized toward that Great Promise of the Great Narrative.
The leap forward is figuratively and literally really a great step backward, but why this self destructive pattern if the system demands of you only what will preserve it? Because you are a utility. You don’t have Purpose. Your purpose is its purpose.
Quite immature indeed.
This new Hero is in fact what liberation theology’s ultimate paradox is; the new man paradox. This Hero as Toil is not part of human nature, it is, in reality the false consciousness it claims to wish to liberate you from.
“Industry was also one of the main areas of focus and grand change. ‘Gosplan’ was created as an organisation in charge of setting productivity goals for all other industries, and monitoring the progress of their work. Any worker who was deemed to be holding back the progress was detained or sent off to labour camps. Although production rate was immensely raised by thousands of present, the quality of people’s lives degraded, as fear of arrests was forcing the workers to labour for over fourteen hours a day. Paperwork was frequently falsified when an industrial unit had no hope of meeting their set output levels. In reality, people were not wholly interested in expanding the heavy industry when there was not even enough food, and their real preoccupations such as arrests, hunger and acquisition of goods were never portrayed in Socialist Realist literature, which focused on exactly the opposite – creating the ‘socialist hero’ who expands the industry and has no personal needs.”.
This paradox is what it’s founded on. Its entire foundation is rooted in lies. This is why truth is so powerful and why socrealism is so pervasive but not at all reality. This is why dissidents of before and those who censor now focus so much on truth, misinformation, malformation. The mechanization and confusion around truth is inherent to the totalitarian Creep as it creeps.arts.brighton.ac.uk/projects/brigh…
“If ideology was originally a bridge between the system and the individual as an individual, then the moment he steps on to this bridge it becomes at the same time a bridge between the system and the individual as a component of the system. That is, if ideology originally facilitated (by acting outwardly) the constitution of power by serving as a psychological excuse, then from the moment that excuse is accepted, it constitutes power inwardly, becoming an active component of that power. It begins to function as the principal instrument of ritual communication within the system of power.
The whole power structure (and we have already discussed its physical articulation) could not exist at all if there were not a certain metaphysical order binding all its components together, interconnecting them and subordinating them to a uniform method of accountability, supplying the combined operation of all these components with rules of the game, that is, with certain regulations, limitations, and legalities. This metaphysical order is fundamental to, and standard throughout, the entire power structure; it integrates its communication system and makes possible the internal exchange and transfer of information and instructions. It is rather like a collection of traffic signals and directional signs, giving the process shape and structure. This metaphysical order guarantees the inner coherence of the totalitarian power structure. It is the glue holding it together, its binding principle, the instrument of its discipline. Without this glue the structure as a totalitarian structure would vanish; it would disintegrate into individual atoms chaotically colliding with one another in their unregulated particular interests and inclinations. The entire pyramid of totalitarian power, deprived of the element that binds it together, would collapse in upon itself, as it were, in a kind of material implosion.”
We saw such an explosion a few days ago. That explosion could have gone very differently but a literal explosive moment was in fact, an explosion of truth and therefore no matter how it unfolded a threat to the system.
The story of the Hero in that moment became not one of the mechanized by of the human; unmistakably human.
Naturally, as human beings are inherently creators and naturally will respond to truth’s self evident nature we saw a response even within the products of industry a rejection of the very mechanization that had seemed to overtake our storytelling, storytellers and stories.
The response was as immediate as the any naturally occurring one and rooted in an older lineage than socrealism can access and therefore usually attempts to obliterate.
For example.
Or more remarkably…
Let’s for a moment stop and compare this to those dancing nurses again. Note how it feels. Just note it.
Ask yourself this. Is it true that “the hero is Toil and the Toiler is unthinkable outside the collective?”
If you say yes, you have a very brutal and very mechanized view of the world.
Vaclav, who was in fact a playwright btw wrote “As the interpretation of reality by the power structure, ideology is always subordinated ultimately to the interests of the structure. Therefore, it has a natural tendency to disengage itself from reality, to create a world of appearances, to become ritual. In societies where there is public competition for power and therefore public control of that power, there also exists quite naturally public control of the way that power legitimates itself ideologically. Consequently, in such conditions there are always certain correctives that effectively prevent ideology from abandoning reality altogether. Under totalitarianism, however, these correctives disappear, and thus there is nothing to prevent ideology from becoming more and more removed from reality, gradually turning into what it has already become in the post-totalitarian system: a world of appearances, a mere ritual, a formalized language deprived of semantic contact with reality and transformed into a system of ritual signs that replace reality with pseudo-reality.”
Was this a ritual? Void of content. An empty phrase? Or was it something else?
Even if the system had conspired into that moment - however it may have and whatever may have been the Purpose, this moment was a rejection of the system itself. It came from what Vaclav calls the Hidden Sphere.
This hidden sphere rejects entirely in a moment of Truth, in a moment of Living Not By Lies by obliterating the foundation of the totalitarian unnatural order.
“Yet, as we have seen, ideology becomes at the same time an increasingly important component of power, a pillar providing it with both excusatory legitimacy and an inner coherence. As this aspect grows in importance, and as it gradually loses touch with reality, it acquires a peculiar but very real strength. It becomes reality itself, albeit a reality altogether self-contained, one that on certain levels (chiefly inside the power structure) may have even greater weight than reality as such. Increasingly, the virtuosity of the ritual becomes more important than the reality hidden behind it. The significance of phenomena no longer derives from the phenomena themselves, but from their locus as concepts in the ideological context. Reality does not shape theory, but rather the reverse. Thus power gradually draws closer to ideology than it does to reality; it draws its strength from theory and becomes entirely dependent on it. This inevitably leads, of course, to a paradoxical result: rather than theory, or rather ideology, serving power, power begins to serve ideology. It is as though ideology had appropriated power from power, as though it had become dictator itself. It then appears that theory itself, ritual itself, ideology itself, makes decisions that affect people, and not the other way around.”
This was a person choosing something rather than the illusionary nature that is so common in totalitarian creep; rhetorical illusion of no choices at all.
This was not some empty slogan we have grown so use to in the landscape of totalitarian creep that hides behind the illusion of a dictatorship.
“The automatic operation of a power structure thus dehumanized and made anonymous is a feature of the fundamental automatism of this system. It would seem that it is precisely the dictates of this automatism which select people lacking individual will for the power structure, that it is precisely the dictate of the empty phrase which summons to power people who use empty phrases as the best guarantee that the automatism of the post-totalitarian system will continue.
This was not some mechanized ritual. “experience has taught us again and again that this automatism is far more powerful than the will of any individual; and should someone possess a more independent will, he must conceal it behind a ritually anonymous mask in order to have an opportunity to enter the power hierarchy at all. And when the individual finally gains a place there and tries to make his will felt within it, that automatism, with its enormous inertia, will triumph sooner or later, and either the individual will be ejected by the power structure like a foreign organism, or he will be compelled to resign his individuality gradually, once again blending with the automatism and becoming its servant, almost indistinguishable from those who preceded him and those who will follow.”
“It can be said, therefore, that ideology, as that instrument of internal communication which assures the power structure of inner cohesion is, in the posttalitarian system, something that transcends the physical aspects of power, something that dominates it to a considerable degree and, therefore, tends to assure its continuity as well. It is one of the pillars of the system's external stability. This pillar, however, is built on a very unstable foundation. It is built on lies. It works only as long as people are willing to live within the lie.”
This is why Truth is so powerful. And why dissidents succeeded before by rejection of any idea that any system or within it could successfully defeat it. The only way to win is to not play the game, change it, live not by lies.
“It can be said, therefore, that ideology, as that instrument of internal communication which assures the power structure of inner cohesion is, in the posttalitarian system, something that transcends the physical aspects of power, something that dominates it to a considerable degree and, therefore, tends to assure its continuity as well. It is one of the pillars of the system's external stability. This pillar, however, is built on a very unstable foundation. It is built on lies. It works only as long as people are willing to live within the lie.”
This hidden sphere is accessible to anyone but denied to the regime.
“as long as appearance is not confronted with reality, it does not seem to be appearance. As long as living a lie is not confronted with living the truth, the perspective needed to expose its mendacity is lacking. As soon as the alternative appears, however, it threatens the very existence of appearance and living a lie in terms of what they are, both their essence and their all-inclusiveness. And at the same time, it is utterly unimportant how large a space this alternative occupies: its power does not consist in its physical attributes but in the light it casts on those pillars of the system and on its unstable foundations. After all, the greengrocer was a threat to the system not because of any physical or actual power he had, but because his action went beyond itself, because it illuminated its surroundings and, of course, because of the incalculable consequences of that illumination. In the post-totalitarian system, therefore, living within the truth has more than a mere existential dimension (returning humanity to its inherent nature), or a noetic dimension (revealing reality as it is), or a moral dimension (setting an example for others). It also has an unambiguous political dimension. If the main pillar of the system is living a lie, then it is not surprising that the fundamental threat to it is living the truth. This is why it must be suppressed more severely than anything else.
In the post-totalitarian system, truth in the widest sense of the word has a very special import, one unknown in other contexts. In this system, truth plays a far greater (and, above all, a far different) role as a factor of power, or as an outright political force. How does the power of truth operate? How does truth as a factor of power work? How can its power-as power-be realized?”
Live
Not
By
Lies.
Fight.