Tyranny by Numbers
Book review: ‘The Psychology of Totalitarianism’ — By Mattias Desmet; Translated into English by Els Vanbrabant;(Chelsea Green Publishing).
An abridged version of this article has been published by First Things magazine here:
In 2018, two years before the world as we knew it came to an end, a Polish academic study, Totalitarianism in the Postmodern Age, led by Catholic priest and scientist Piotr Mazurkiewicz, of the Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski University in Warsaw, anticipated the beginnings of a shift in the attitudes towards freedom among European young people.
The focus was on ‘postmodern’ totalitarianism — a ‘progression’ from the 20th century kind — what Pope John Paul II had described as an ‘open’ and ‘thinly disguised’ totalitarianism, a kind built, as Hannah Arendt had predicted, in cooperation with ‘the masses’.
The researchers were looking for signs of belief in the capacity of politics to deliver an ideal world: faith in radical human progress; the unfettered transformation of social values; antipathy towards the ‘old order’ and its guardians; signs of ‘anthropological palingenisis’ — ‘the will to radically change the real, existing man into a ‘new’ man, born out of the desire ‘that man himself should be able to create anything which is important to him, and above all — himself.’ The research canvassed young people from seven EU countries: Austria, the Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Slovakia. The survey was conducted in two stages — a series of focus groups in early 2016, and a quantitative analysis carried out in October 2017.
Almost half of those surveyed did not preclude the right of governments to suspend key democratic political freedoms, while one-third were sanguine about governments engaging in political manipulation, or even lying, regarding these as necessary instruments of social control. A similar proportion could identify values for which they would readily forego both freedom and democracy. Slightly more than half indicated their support for democracy, while one-third said they had no clearly formulated views. Young people from the ‘old’ EU — roughly two-thirds — indicated higher degrees of support for democracy. Approval of palingenetic practices — the ‘improvement’ of the human biological structure — was consistently above 50 percent, and in the eastern cohort reached levels of 80 percent, halting only before human-animal hybrids. Just half of those surveyed indicated that they might resist incursions upon their freedom, while one in five appeared to regard freedom as inessential.
