AHC: Make World Pro-Totalitarianism

Deimos

Banned
Probably too small a POD but do not make the popular understanding of Rousseau's anthropological model the most popular one coming out of the enlightenment but that of Hobbes.
 

nooblet

Banned
Our institutions are already, perhaps not totalitarian, but definitely authoritarian.

Again, look at 'schools,' you must stay in your seat, you must ask for permission to go to the bathroom, and sometimes that permission is denied. I mean, how much more authoritarian can you get ! ? :cool:

Authoritarianism is the ocean we swim through and we usually don't see it. (and fair warning, challenging institutions on these grounds usually gets you doghoused, punished, punished for a while even after you're no longer questioning. Even for someone with some real social skills and backed up by supportive family and friends, it's a real question of how challenging the typical institution is going to have any kind of favorable outcome for any of the people involved, the person challenging, institution, bystanders, etc)

I think the real challenge is to write a mirror image book where things are not authoritarian.

I would argue the opposite - American (and Western society in general) is totalitarian without being overtly authoritarian. It is very easy to point at superficial markers in other societies, such as the veneration of a Great Leader, and say that because America doesn't buy into the Great Leader, it can't possibly be totalitarian.

The school environment is not so much oppressive due to direct authoritarian measures - i.e. guards regularly beating students into compliance - but from soft pressures and a total control over the development and life path of the child once they are entered into the system. From an early age, a child entering the school system is regimented into their expected place in life, while they are told they are "free" and that they should be grateful they don't live in a place like Russia where the government decides what job you will have... even though in America the same exact thing happens. (I got this one very early, when the Soviet Union was still a thing.) The appearance of freedom, while enabling soft controls to make sure that freedom is directed towards the correct things, is a very effective means to make totalitarianism work on a wide scale, probably more effective than outright autocracies which have all sorts of inefficiencies and visible cracks to exploit.
 
The problem is that in the Western world over the past 150 years, democracy has had really good outcomes compared with any form of despotism, totalitarianism especially. So you'd have to really change the outcomes of each system in order to change its view the world over.

There are a few problems with this. Democracy, after all, is much better at information management than any kind of despotism, which has been seen by some as the root of its successes.

There are early PODs, like always having democracy turn out like Revolutionary France, which could fit the OP, but they seem to ignore the root cause of the problem in my opinion- totalitarianism, which is a 20th Century phenomenon, could be butterflied away. I think the best bet is a much more chaotic Interwar Period and worse Depression, proving to almost all nations across the world that democracy has failed, radical change is needed, and everyone needs to band together and work hard for the survival of the race(or nation, or class, really, it all turns out much the same).
 
Eh, not majoritarianism. Totalitarianism in the 20th century, rather, reflected,

A. Dictatorship being more explicitly based on ideology rather than blood, as it was in the past, and,

B. Attempts to totally mobilize a society for the totalitarian goals.

I don't disagree with your two key defining elements, but there certainly was a majoritarian element in 20th century totalitarianism (Naziism and Communism, especially) that is generally missing from old-style authoritarianism, which rarely claimed to have popular validation. These were mass popular movements that either claimed to reflect the will of the vast majority of "the people", and at least in the case of Nazism probably did at first. This claim was a major element used to persecute and destroy other political groups or social institutions that did not share the regimes' values or goals. With the legal checks and balances provided by modern US, British, or western European-style representative democracy, majority rule works, because the political and social rights of the minority are also recognized. However, when these western values do not exist, majority rule can lead to "dictatorships of the people" and from there the jump to totalitarianism is easy.
 
Nooblet and GeographyDude do you realize how petty your comparisons of public school environments to totalitarian or authoritarian regimes sound? Do students in public schools run the risk of execution for arguing with a teacher? Does the school put you in prison if you don't want to play on the football team or be in the school play? Are innocent students routinely "beaten up" by guards? Really?

I think if I were a gulag or holocaust survivor, I'd find these comparisons rather offensive.
 

nooblet

Banned
Nooblet and GeographyDude do you realize how petty your comparisons of public school environments to totalitarian or authoritarian regimes sound? Do students in public schools run the risk of execution for arguing with a teacher? Does the school put you in prison if you don't want to play on the football team or be in the school play? Are innocent students routinely "beaten up" by guards? Really?

I think if I were a gulag or holocaust survivor, I'd find these comparisons rather offensive.

Nope. Totalitarianism does not have to involve brutal oppression, and that is actually a very bad way to run a totalitarian state in general. Do you think the average Russian under Stalin was brutalized like someone in the gulag, or one of the kulaks?

One of the most effective propaganda techniques in America is forming an association of totalitarian ideology with "mean" things like gulags, concentration camps, and veneration of a central leader like (explicitly) fascist regimes. Never mind that the US has examples of the first two, albeit versions that are whitewashed in the history books and practiced on a lesser scale. America doesn't have widespread gulags like the Soviet Union because it is not expedient for its leadership to do so, not because America is morally superior - every society that believes in totalitarianism will use the methods suited for their situation.

In Stalin's Russia, a relatively shaky regime used brutal methods to crush opposition against elements that, by and large, could remember life before the Soviet system; further the Soviet system was a radical departure from the Tsarist regime, whereas the American system was less of a radical departure from the constitutional monarchy of Britain - in America there was no social upheaval as the elite of the colonies became (more or less) the elite of the new united states, and the majority of Americans were apathetic towards the crown and the republic. As long as Americans could go about their business they were fine with whatever regime was in place; it would have been monumentally stupid for the Founding Fathers to start bloody purges of royalists and subversive elements (not that there weren't early violations), nor did anyone of that time have the capacity to do what 20th century dictators did. By the time America was in the 20th century and especially after the second world war, the American system was firmly locked in place; you would be hard pressed to find anyone who could mount a coherent resistance to the political system, and the people who had power in America were more secure in their position than Stalin could ever hope to be. If Russia had a history of civil society that by the 20th century had been thoroughly gamed and controlled, Stalin would have used different measures to consolidate his power - he was a brutal tyrant far beyond any American head of state, but he would have exercised a form of tyranny more palatable to Americans. This is why you don't hear much about how the Soviet Union used mental institutions as punishment to railroad dissidents and other undesirables; that measure is one that Americans by and large accept. The particulars of how Americans use mental hygiene for social engineering were slightly different, but the fundamental principle was that someone deemed invalid was fair game, and that was (and is) agreed upon by most of the supposed "civilized" world - save for a few who bear the brunt of such treatment, but they have no voice and are mocked even when their life circumstances are clearly deplorable and inexcusable by ANY standard of human decency.

Notions like this are why many western socities STILL apologize and can't understand that the Nazis were monsters through and through, because they were biased by their kinship with the German nation and secretly sympathized (and still sympathize) with Nazi race-science. Even with Hitler engaged in full-throated denunciations of democracy and openly endorsed the worst of fascism, the press in most of the world bent over backwards to act like it was no big deal, right up until the Germans declared war on the world.

It goes back to what I was saying about totalitarian societies; it is easy to look at superficial markers of totalitarianism, and use that to disconnect from the reality that their own ideology, belief systems, actions and attitudes towards others (both within and outside of the society) demand total control and a religious appeal to nature to retain the political order. It is an example of what Orwell called "blackwhite" - American totalitarian values are considered "good" while other systems are considered "bad", without really trying to understand the history of either society or why both turn out the way they did. It is as if the history of the Russian Revolution were reduced to "Lenin and Stalin killed millions for the lulz" - or the American Revolution was reduced to "a bunch of rich white guys were pissed because they had to pay meager taxes to the Crown", or even "Hitler took over Germany and cast a spell on the otherwise innocent German people" (though it can be concluded that the Nazi leadership was through and through as sadistic as they are portrayed). It is a way of reducing a complex situation to something which absolves any responsibility or any realistic comparison to what actually happens. It is also a common thought process in totalitarian societies like, say, the one we (or most of us) live in.
 
soft pressures and a total control over the development and life path of the child once they are entered into the system. From an early age, a child entering the school system is regimented into their expected place in life, while they are told they are "free" and that they should be grateful they don't live in a place like Russia where the government decides what job you will have...
Look at special ed, which is supposed to be a positive thing instead becomes tracking and second-class citizenship, which is very difficult to get promoted out of.

Look at the emphasis on formality in writing, and I have argued (unproductively) on this subject with college professors, that the mere formality of the writing covers up a wide range of highly questionable governmental and corporate policy.

And look at how schools, say, handle dyslexia. Before it was understood the child was defined as "bad" or "not trying." Schools seem to have a very hard time understanding that a person can be good at some things but not others. And . . . I'll try and end on an optimistic note. We have come some ways from the days around 1915 in Pennsylvania when they tried to pressure my grandfather to write with his right hand instead of his left. So progress is possible!
 

nooblet

Banned
Look at special ed, which is supposed to be a positive thing instead becomes tracking and second-class citizenship, which is very difficult to get promoted out of.

Look at the emphasis on formality in writing, and I have argued (unproductively) on this subject with college professors, that the mere formality of the writing covers up a wide range of highly questionable governmental and corporate policy.

And look at how schools, say, handle dyslexia. Before it was understood the child was defined as "bad" or "not trying." Schools seem to have a very hard time understanding that a person can be good at some things but not others. And . . . I'll try and end on an optimistic note. We have come some ways from the days around 1915 in Pennsylvania when they tried to pressure my grandfather to write with his right hand instead of his left. So progress is possible!

The point I am trying to make is not that school is totalitarian - though in practice regimented education is essential to a truly totalitarian state. The point that I am making is that the core of totalitarianism as a belief system is an ideological and philosophical one, and not a matter of what form the government takes. A dictatorship need not be totalitarian, nor does a monarchy where the regent holds absolute power. If that dictatorship or monarchy is legitimized by a philosophical framework that justifies the existence of that dictatorship or monarchy as the natural order of the universe or ordained by God (in accordance with generally accepted principles about the nature of said God, as in Christianity or Islam), then it is the ideology justifying that dictator/monarch's position that is totalitarian. Who happens to sit in the big chair is irrelevant, even if it is multiple people or (in theory) the entire body politic.

Even a belief in universal liberal democracy as the natural order of man is, itself, a totalitarian tenet - and the baggage that goes with it usually shows underlying racism and imperialism behind the actions of those who think in that matter. There is no natural order of things that gives a shit about humanity, and until something convinces me otherwise I cannot believe there is a God who gives a shit about humanity or thinks we are chosen, or any such thing like that. I might be wrong about the last part (though I HIGHLY doubt it), but I am undoubtedly correct about the first one.

Even a postmodern view of human nature (the Nietzsche shit) is inherently totalitarian; I can explain why but I think that, since that viewpoint is dogma in this society, it should be self-evident to those who think about it and the world they live in for more than a few minutes. In the absence or any God or quasi-scientific justification for the ruling elite, postmodern thinkers have simply inserted "because we can" as their justification, and appeal to nothing but power as their only justification. In many ways this is worse than the scientific or religious justifications, because the latter is bound (at least formally) by some bare minimum universal guidelines, and the latter is bound by a universal process (at least in theory; in practice, intellectuals will piss about how the rest of the world is stupid, and it effectively becomes "because we can" with a thin veneer of legitimacy).

Stalin did not kill lots of people just because he was a totalitarian - he killed lots of people so he could purge political rivals and engage in class warfare. Hitler and the Nazis killed lots of people because their totalitarian belief system explicitly exhorted them to do so, not because totalitarian systems naturally engage in genocide based on racist pseudo-science (that is perhaps an oversimplification of the German rationale for supporting Nazism, but at its core Nazism like all forms of eugenism is inherently genocidal and brutal for its own sake, just as eugenist ideology in liberal societies is inherently genocidal and brutal - eugenism as a system is totalitarian in the most obvious fashion, so any society in which eugenism is accepted as policy, or adhered to implicitly by the vast majority of people in that society, is inherently totalitarian.)
 
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