The Current COVID-19 Crisis: A New Step in the Direction of a Globalized Totalitarianism?

Restrictions on our liberty to come and go, to meet with our friends and family, and even to take care of our elderly relatives, school closures, suspension of the economy with mass unemployment, obligation to get all aspects of our lives (work, education, relationships, etc.) on the internet, potential mass testing and electronic tracking, etc. Do all those measures sound democratic to you? Do they not have the potential to gravely undermine democratic institutions?

It is my opinion that they do and that all those measures might just be one more step in the direction of a novel form of totalitarianism which implementation incrementally started at least 40 to 60 years ago with the so-called liberalization of moral values at the end of the 1960s.

In fact, as Hannah Arendt put it in “The Origins of Totalitarianism”, “it has frequently been pointed out that totalitarian movements use and abuse democratic freedoms in order to abolish them.[1]”

But, what is totalitarianism anyways?

According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, it is a “form of government that permits no individual freedom and that seeks to subordinate all aspects of individual life to the authority of the state.[2]”

How does it get to do that?

Relying on the examples of totalitarian regimes in the 20th century, political thinkers such as H. Arendt, Cl. Lefort, L. Strauss and others pointed out that in order to fully seize power, totalitarian regimes first need to:

·        Isolate citizens from one another so that they lose all capacity to self-organize as well as common sense;

·        Progressively suspend access to critical thinking by undermining culture and educational institutions, and supplementing them with some sorts of ideological propaganda in order to indoctrinate citizens;

·        Promote a prophetic supposedly scientifically-based ideology in order to offer a vision of the future with the potential to terrorize citizens from within so as to mobilize them massively around their political objectives.

According to H. Arendt, the ultimate goal of totalitarian domination is not to restrict freedom but rather to abolish it altogether, “even eliminating human spontaneity[3]”, and hence assuming “total control” over the individuals.

So, what has the current situation got to do with totalitarianism?

First of all, over the last decades, extended families and traditional communities have progressively been destroyed by the deliquescence of moral values, but also by rampant urbanization, massive liberalization of the economy, etc., and this while the social safety net was progressively being destroyed in the name of economic efficiency. This has left many people isolated and very vulnerable.

Secondly, universal public education – which is key to enabling citizens to effectively take part in democratic life – has been under severe attack. If fact, it has seen its programs trimmed, its funding reduced. It has been taken by storm by novel and revolutionary pedagogical methods supposedly meant to improve it, and that only resulted in the degradation of its contents. All that only resulted in turning “public education” into a mere system to train good technicians for the economic system, but deprived of the critical thinking skills required to actually question it and exercise their civic duties.

All those elements contributed to creating the one most critical element for the suspension of democratic freedoms and the implementation of a totalitarian regime: a mass of isolated and disempowered citizens.

From there on, what was missing, was an ideology to terrorize and mobilize those people in order to easily bring them to accept the complete suspension of democratic institutions. 

Since globalization and economic liberalization have failed to play that role because they were too obviously biased in favour of an economic oligarchy, other ideologies had to be invented that would actually call more on people’s imagination and terrorize them with the idea of a bleak future.

That’s when, environmentalism – which until then had been perceived as a leftist threat to the power of the corporatocracy – has been turned into a novel tool to mobilize and control people. That’s where the doom’s day ideology of climate change came up.

Climate change, in the way it is presented by several activists, has everything to do with a totalitarian ideology. It is prophetic, apparently scientifically-based. It has the ability to strike imagination and to terrorize the people from within with the idea that they have no future. It brings them to leave school, hence opening the way to a complete de-schooling of a whole generation and this with the benediction of their parents and school authorities. Complete de-schooling is certainly the dream of any totalitarian regime as uneducated people are way easier to manipulate. It also brings people to accept their plight of becoming each day poorer, in the name of “voluntary simplicity”, as well as to become more isolated by giving up on having kids.

And now, in the midst of all that, you suddenly have this COVID-19 sanitary emergency coming out, which is providing governments with the opportunity to force people to practice “social distancing” hence isolating people even more, giving them a good reason to completely close down schools and companies, provoking the loss of jobs and hence further impoverishment of thousands of people, including small landlords who are now at risk of losing their assets if renters cannot pay their rent, leading to the potential bankrupt of many small businesses,... and forcing us to put all our lives online from work and education, to relationships and leisure!

In other words, this crisis is further isolating and disempowering middle classes, while potentially giving unlimited power to the economic oligarchy.

In fact, in a visionary statement, H. Arends had stated that “the police [of totalitarian regimes] now dream that one look at a gigantic map on the office wall should suffice at any given moment to establish who is related to whom (...). And if this map really did exist not even memory would stand in the way of the totalitarian claim to domination, such a map might make it possible to obliterate people completely as if they had never existed.[4]”

And nowadays, with the internet, and other novel technologies, including artificial intelligence, this map is no longer a dream. It can and certainly does exist, giving the people who control those technologies an unprecedented capacity to dominate the rest of humanity... totally!

So, you might answer that governments are actually being very friendly and caring these days, putting in place programs to help and support the most vulnerable, temporarily suspending their reimbursements, putting in place assistance programs, etc.

There is potentially a multiple trap behind this apparent willingness to help and support the most vulnerable.

One is economic: who will pay for all those measures? Won’t they further screw public budgets at a time when they have already been impacted by years, if not decades of mismanagement, and when the economic crisis is reducing tax incomes?

Another one is basically political, since as Plato rightfully put it more than 2000 years ago in the Republic, “At first, in the early days of his power, [the tyrant] is full of smiles, and he salutes every one whom he meets; --he to be called a tyrant, who is making promises in public and also in private! liberating debtors, and distributing land to the people and his followers, and wanting to be so kind and good to every one! (...) But when he has disposed of foreign enemies by conquest or treaty, and there is nothing to fear from them, then he is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader. Has he not also another object, which is that they may be impoverished by payment of taxes, and thus compelled to devote themselves to their daily wants and therefore less likely to conspire against him? (...) And if any of them are suspected by him of having notions of freedom, and of resistance to his authority, he will have a good pretext for destroying them by placing them at the mercy of the enemy; and for all these reasons the tyrant must be always getting up a war.[5]”

In other words, humanity has not changed in 2000 years. What does have change is our technological knowledge. It is providing a tyrant or a tyrannical group of people with an unprecedented capacity to dominate their fellow humans totally as never before!

So, in the face of recent history and of current events, I think we have real reasons to be worried about the unfolding events, and that we certainly have a duty to stand up to the totalitarian tendencies of a globalized corporatocracy which is obviously planning to make globalization work only for itself. It is our responsibility to ourselves, and in front of History, a sign of faithfulness to the fights for freedom led by our ancestors and to future generations if they are to live well and sustainably in a free world!

Clara H. Whyte is an ecological economist and political scientist with over 20 years working on the ecological transition. She is a convinced environmentalist and a believer that nature and ecology are here to sustain life, and not to destroy it and banish it in the name of doom ideologies.

[1] Arendt H. (1994).- The Origins of Totalitarianism, Harcourt, San Diego: USA, New edition with added prefaces, xliii, 527 pages, p. 312.

[2] https://www.britannica.com/topic/totalitarianism

[3] Arendt H., Op. Cit., p. 405.

[4] Ibid., p. 434.

[5] Plato’s Republic, Translated by Benjamin Jowett, Book VIII, https://classics.mit.edu/Plato/republic.9.viii.html