Tag: Technocracy and Totalitarianism

BURNING BOOKS IN A BRAVE NEW 1984 WORLD

“Those who don’t build must burn.” ― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

Nick Tyrone on Twitter: "This Venn diagram isn't possible. “1984” is set in an authoritarian future in which all pleasure is repressed; “Brave New World” in one where people are provided with

“One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them.” ― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“Being in a minority, even in a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.” ― George Orwell, 1984

The Venn diagram above perfectly captures the zeitgeist of our current dystopian world better than any academic drivel disguised as a scientific study or any regime media produced propaganda disguised as journalism. In fact, these three novels capture everything that has gone terribly wrong in our world, and I put the blame at the feet of totalitarian governments and an apathetic fearful populace who went along because it was the easiest path to follow.

These three novels, considered among the top 100 novels ever written, were penned between 1931 and 1953, during three distinct periods, which are reflected in the themes and story lines of their dystopian worlds. They were supposed to be works of fiction, providing warnings of what could happen if we made the wrong choices and trusted the wrong people. Sadly, they became user manuals for today’s authoritarian dictators in how to control, condition and cow a population of indoctrinated sheep, as displayed during the covid pandemic exercise.

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The Negation of the Real

Via Sovereign Nations

If you want to impose a totalitarian system, you have a problem on your hands: reality. The real is in your way and will eventually veto your project. Far sooner, people who can perceive reality will step in and prevent you from taking society over a cliff. Therefore, the only way to install a totalitarian system is to negate the real in the minds of those over whom you would rule. This is accomplished by creating an interpretive frame that deliberately causes people to misunderstand reality, sometimes called a “second reality” or “pseudoreality,” or even a “hyperreality,” which loses all contact with reality through its images and constructions.

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Technocracy and Totalitarianism

Guest Post by Aaron Kheriaty

technocracy and totalitarianism

What follows is an essay adapted from my new book The New Abnormal: The Rise of the Biomedical Security State, originally published in The American Mind.

The Italian philosopher Augusto Del Noce, who came of age in the 1930s and observed with horror the emergence of Mussolini’s Fascist regime in his native country, warned that “the widespread notion that the age of totalitarianisms ended with Hitlerism and Stalinism is completely mistaken.” He explained:

The essential element of totalitarianism, in brief, lies in the refusal to recognize the difference between “brute reality” and “human reality,” so that it becomes possible to describe man, non-metaphorically, as a “raw material” or as a form of “capital.” Today this view, which used to be typical of Communist totalitarianism, has been taken up by its Western alternative, the technological society.

By technological society, Del Noce did not mean a society characterized by scientific or technological progress, but a society characterized by a view of rationality as purely instrumental. Human reason, on this view, is unable to grasp ideas that go beyond brute empirical facts: we are incapable of discovering transcendent truths. Reason is merely a pragmatic tool, a useful instrument for accomplishing our purposes, but nothing more. Totalitarian ideologies deny that all human beings participate in a shared rationality. We therefore cannot really talk to one another: it is impossible to deliberate or debate civilly in a shared pursuit of truth. Reasoned persuasion has no place. Totalitarian regimes always monopolize what counts as “rational” and therefore what one is permitted to say publicly.

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