Adonide

   When one speaks of totalitarianism, thought runs immediately to a form of implacable domination that has historically been embodied in the figure of a single dictator.

Hitler the Fuhrer, Mussolini the Duce, Franco the Caudillo, Stalin the Little Father, Ceausescu the Leader, Mao the Great Helmsman, Pinochet the generalissimo: all are examples of dictators from a not too distant past that is nevertheless considered difficult to repeat. In the course of the past few years we have been experiencing the end of the era of individual dictatorship as this form of power receives nearly unanimous condemnation. And if in a few parts of the world, regimes still survive that are led by strongmen, the tendency to replace them with modern democracies is taking hold without much dispute. The Fuhrer, the Duce and their like have had to give up their place to somewhat disembodied, cold systems of domination, without surprise, from which the human element is almost completely banished.

But a dictatorship—a totalitarian system—does not necessarily have to be led by a single individual to be considered such. One can consider any regime in which power is concentrated absolutely into the hands of a group of people who, thus, come to have control over all aspects of everyone’s existence to be such. From this one can deduce that the most important element in a totalitarian system is not so much who holds the power as how it is exercised. It does not matter what reasons such a system adopts to justify absolute control whether racial purity or the development of markets. It isn’t even particularly important whether control is secured violently through the presence of tanks in the street or gently by means of media anesthesia. It is the inexorable application of this control to all aspects of life that counts, the fact that it leaves no loophole, it gives no possibility of escape.

Thus, democracy itself is also a form of dictatorship—certainly less obvious, but not for this less effective, quite the contrary—that must impose its values in every field on all individuals and social classes for its own self-preservation. From this perspective, many consider it the most perfect totalizing system. The main reason that it has succeeded in replacing the old and obsolete forms of power is that it is not merely one of the various forms power can assume; democracy corresponds to the very essence of capitalism, to the normal functioning of market society in its expansion. Within the marketplace, social classes don’t exist; there are only “free and equal” consumers. This “freedom” and “equality” covers a basic role in the gathering of consensus, that consensus which represents the highest virtue of the democratic system in the eyes of its supporters.

In fact, the classic totalitarian regimes are based on an exercise of violence that is, paradoxically, a profound sign of weakness. The conditions of life that are imposed are intolerable—everyone knows this—and it is up to the forces for the maintenance of order to materially obstruct the realization of a different life, the possibility of which still remains as the conscious aspiration of the majority of people. On the other hand, in democratic systems the very possibility of a different life is to be eradicated. To maintain order, the democratic state does not take out its cudgels except under very specific circumstances; rather it uses the organs of information. These don’t leave bruises on the skin, but preventatively nullify all awareness, extinguish every desire, placate every tension; the individual dissolves and her alienation from the world becomes irreconcilable.

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Freedom is simply self-determination. It is the choice each individual makes concerning his existence and the world in which she lives. But a choice in a situation in which there is nothing to choose, because conditions determined by others limit the situation, is a choice only in name. Thus, a regime that represses challenges with blood is denounced as totalitarian; it hinders different choices. But what can one say about a regime in which no significant social tumult ever breaks out, a regime that has nothing to hinder because it does not even provide for the possibility of different choices. As someone has said, “ The most perfect police state has no need for police.” A decisive aspect of the totalitarian form—the single party—can express itself completely now even within the western political systems. Contemporary political analysts themselves are forced to admit that when one takes the economic bonds and the increasingly clear agreement on the principles of the market economy between the left and the right into account, the discourse and the programs of the great parties overlap more and more. Instead of presenting objectives that obviously differ from one another, developed through the use of opinion polls, the great governing parties have reached the point where they no longer divide on specific objectives… These considerations no longer succeed in rousing amazement, expressing a situation that has in fact become familiar. Among the apologists for the totalitarianism of the market, this familiarity loses all shame and becomes inescapable. In his last book celebrating global capitalism, journalist Thomas Friedman—columnist for the New York Times, winner of two Pulitzer Prizes—does not hide his satisfaction in establishing that political choice has been reduced to Pepsi against Coca Cola—slight nuances of taste, slight political variants, but never any deviation from the respected assumption of the rules of gold, those of the main street, the multiplicity of parties, which has been proclaimed as a sure sign of democratic health because it supposedly guarantees the possibility of choice, thence of “freedom”, is seen ever more clearly for what it is: a competition between identical things.

Today more than ever before, politics is action as an end in itself, particularly in its parliamentary form in which the shuffling of people and things serves no other purpose than that of disguising not only the uselessness of the work, but also its essential unity. The numerous political parties that throng into the parliament today are the “natural” heirs of the different factions that battled inside the old single dictatorial party. As in the case of the factions, the various parties share the same vision of the world, the same values, the same methods. Only the details differentiate them.

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Totalitarianism has met with almost universal condemnation everywhere, and yet every day we can see how democracy is just another form of totalitarianism. And one of the worst. A modern democracy is rarely shaken by revolt. Democracy has taken hold as the political system most impermeable to the risk of revolt. Even if such a revolt managed to emerge, it would have difficulty fueling the passions of individuals since it no longer has a role in the collective imagination. And this still doesn’t take into account that even in such a hopeful case, the wrath generated would not find anyone against which to direct itself, precisely because in democratic systems power is not embodied in a human being, but is represented by an entire social system.

It goes without saying that the parliamentary and union institutions never furnish the governed individuals with adequate means for making their claims, while dissatisfaction—even when generalized—leads in the best of cases to the formation of some current of opposition. When there is not a figure in a position to polarize the totality of the opposition against itself in an enduring manner—precisely when there is no dictator—in a situation where a governing functionary becomes the object of a widespread challenge, the normal interplay of institutions can even act to eliminate him in order to mollify at least a part of the discontent. The lack of a king whose head can be cut off, of a strong authoritarian figure capable of drawing popular hatred onto itself, in other words of someone to whom we can attribute the responsibility for the exercise of power, constitutes the genuine great bulwark in defense of democratic totalitarianism. In the old and caricatured dictatorships, power had the moustache of Hitler or the jaw of Mussolini, and it could be seen goose-stepping in the street or wearing the black shirt. But today in the modern democracies, who is power? And the aim of the question is not to identify the particular people who exercise power, which is still possible on some level, but to attribute the responsibility for the existence that we lead to them.

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Over and over again it is said that today there is a single social system managed by people who are mere cogs in a machine, petty functionaries who cover most administrative roles. The very concept of responsibility comes to lose all meaning. Responsibility is the possibility of foreseeing the effects of one’s behavior and changing this on the basis of such foresightedness. But the cog in a machine has no foresight; it has no need of foresight; it can never do anything but spin. Therefore, it is no longer possible to attribute the fault for an action to anyone, even if the action was most aberrant.

Let’s look at an example taken from the realm of what is commonly called “judicial errors”. Consider a man who has been sentenced to prison for life but actually did not commit the crime of which he was accused. He is placed under investigation, arrested, incarcerated, tried, sentenced and kept segregated for the rest of his life. Who is responsible for all this? In the old totalitarian systems, the response was much too simple. Everyone would have seen the unfortunate fellow dragged away, condemned and locked up by the hired thugs of the dictator who would have been considered responsible for the injustice perpetrated. In modern democracies, on the other hand, no one is held responsible. The police officer who arrested him is not responsible since he was limited to carrying out orders from someone else. Nor can we blame the prosecutor although he asks for the sentence, because he does not decree it; this is done by someone else. Even the judges are not at fault since they have to make a decision on the basis of evidence presented to them by someone else and then apply the provisions of a penal code compiled by someone else. Finally, one cannot blame the guard, who as the last link in this chain, is certain to have a clean conscience unlike someone else. Yet that man finds himself there in prison, and it is his body that is enclosed behind bars, not that of someone else. Thus, in the dictatorships that once existed the fact that power was embodied in one man made him responsible along with his underlings, but in modern democracy the distribution of power through out the social apparatus removes responsibility from everyone without distinction.

This exists as a social reality that is quite tangible, concrete and above all tragic. It is able to grind up human life without anyone being blamed. And if this happens when human responsibility is indisputable, we can imagine what would happen when other factors can be planned.

Here is another example. Numerous “experts” have had to agree that the origins of the huge storms that periodically strike the coasts of the United States and eastern Asia are undoubtedly found in climactic changes brought about by human activity. On the other hand, in the face of the series of earthquakes that shook the entire planet in the summer of 1999, the experts thought it good to reassure public opinion that in this case at least the responsibility lies elsewhere, in the unfathomable workings of nature. This may be true, but whatever they say about the causes, they fail to consider the effects of these cataclysms. If seismic tremors escape human control, we are facing a natural fact in which we are unable to intervene and to which we can only submit; but when these tremors destroy the modern cities of Greece causing deaths and injuries while leaving the acropoli intact, then we are facing a social question. To build houses, apartments, entire cities, using building techniques and city planning projects intended to bring the highest level of economic profit and social control without considering even the most elementary safety precautions cannot be considered among the inborn human characteristics.

In the end, who is responsible for the thousands of deaths on the job? Who is at fault for poisoning nature? Who do we hold accountable for the wars, the massacres, the deaths of millions of people? Is it possible to exit from this dense fog?

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In a famous essay entitled “Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship”, which took a polemic that arose from the trial of Nazi Adolf Eichmann as its starting point, Hannah Arendt recalled that the principle argument of the defense was that Eichmann had been a mere cog, but regardless of whether the defendant is incidentally a functionary, he is in fact accused because a functionary remains a human individual. In order to clear the field of a confusionism that could only serve self-interest, the writer invites one to consider the functioning of wheels and cogs as a global support to a collective undertaking, rather than to speak in the customary manner of obedience to leaders. In this light one would never have to ask those who collaborated and obeyed “why did you obey?” but “why did you give support?” If these observations don’t minimally shake up the conscience of anyone who finds themselves reading them today, naturally it is because they refer to persons who served a dictatorship of the classical type. Under Nazism—Hannah Arendt tells us—all those who collaborated with the regime were equally responsible. When power is embodied in one man, the Man himself is responsible for it as well as the “black shirt”, as the partisans who shot the adolescent “black shirts” without posing themselves too many ethical questions well knew. On the other hand, when power has no name or surname, no single person is more responsible than any other. Thus, the very people who justify the shooting of a 16-year-old “black shirt” are horrified, at the same time, by the violent death of a personage of the democratic state. But were these young “black shirts” of yesterday actually more responsible than the president of the United States for rendering our existence intolerable? We can’t get rid of the thought that personal responsibility persists not only under the Nazi dictatorship but under the democratic one as well. It doesn’t nullify the responsibility of its functionaries. If it dilutes this responsibility, it does do to disguise it, to render it impalpable, invisible to our eyes. In the threadbare dialogue with which dominant thought has entertained itself for decades now, Responsibility is said to have gone through the same shipwreck that is supposed to have made History, Meaning, Reality sink forever. All one needs to do is stop listening to this chattering for a moment and here is what one would see: these alleged shipwrecks that never were such reappearing.

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All discourse that sets out to compare human life to the functioning of a machine, in that unrelenting process of making the individual disappear, omits one thing: individuals are not cogs, they are human beings. They were human animals under the Nazi dictatorship and are such under that of the democratic state as well. The difference between a cog—which is a mere piece of metal—and a human being should be evident. A person is always in a position to discern and choose. If this is not so now, if one has indeed become a mere cog, this would be further confirmation of the totalizing and totalitarian reality in which we find ourselves unable to live, and of the urgent necessity of its overthrow. In any case, the social system in which we live is not an inherent aspect of the world; it is a historical project. We are not free to decide whether or not we are born into it, but we can decide whether and how to live with it. From the moment we accept taking on one of its roles, participating in its administration, we accept the responsibilities implicit in this. Being easily interchangeable particles of a very complex system does not free us from our responsibilities, because we could have chosen to refuse that system. Thus, even in this case one cannot excuse herself by saying that he only obeyed, that she only followed the current, that he only did what everyone else did. Because before obeying, before following the current, before imitating others, a human being poses herself, must pose himself, a question: would I consider it appropriate to do this? And then she must answer himself. Just like the Germans of whom Hannah Arendt spoke—we too are in the situation of having to choose whether to give our support or at least our consent to this social organization or not. Once again choice comes into play. In the myth of Er, Plato makes the destiny of each person depend on the choice each one makes of their model for life: “There was nothing necessarily preordained in life because each person had to change according to the choice she made.” Now, we can choose to give our contribution to the maintenance of this world. Or else we can choose to withhold it. In either case, we make a choice for which we alone are responsible, not someone else. If it is true that “the original choice is always present in each subsequent choice”, then we must also know how to accept the consequences of our actions. All of us, no one excluded.