Roger’s Rules

March 19th, 2008 3:20 am

Mass man and totalitarianism: or, déjà vu all over again

What year is it? A friend suggested that, politically, it was round about 1936. The signs are all there, the writing is on the wall, but we seem too distracted from distraction by distraction (as T.S. Eliot put it in Four Quartets) to heed the warnings.

A few do. In his latest column, “Strategic Intention and Mass Man,” J. R. Nyquist, has a thoughtful and deeply troubling piece on the culpable weakness of the masses and the resurgence of Soviet-style aggression by Russia under Putin (forget the recent election: Russia is still ruled by Vladimir Putin). The tenor of the piece is already clear from its epigraph:

“I looked into Putin’s eyes, and I saw three things, a ‘K’ a ‘G’ and a ‘B,’”
– John McCain

Mr. Nyquist draws some revealing and admonitory parallels between the mass men of the past, who proved such pliable fodder for the totalitarian ambitions of the twentieth century, and the mass men of today, that “susceptible” creature who “is fundamentally ignorant, though remarkably “well informed.” Mass man’s inertia accepts the dictates of bureaucracy. He has no “great idea” or “faith” to guard him against expedient compromise, or participation in genocide.”

The decadence of culture is part of the story. “Once upon a time,” Nyquist writes,

we had a civilization. We had standards. We had notions of objectivity. We had a culture that wasn’t low-minded. We looked back to great men as we looked forward to our posterity. Art was beautiful and meaningful. Politics was evolving away from tyranny. Economics was about liberty and responsibility. What do we have today? We have Britney Spears and Jerry Springer. Our standards are seriously eroded. Subjectivity has cynically declared that objectivity is impossible. Everything high-minded has fallen to neglect.

But more important, and even more disastrous, the emergence of “mass man” has something to do with the emergence of totalitarianism (which claimed roughly 100 million lives in the last century). And it is safe to say that totalitarianism is going to claim even more lives in the future. But people don’t want to wake up. They don’t want to acknowledge that totalitarianism is something real and ongoing. It grows in the soil of mass culture. It leads to destruction and mass murder because every totalitarian construct is based on lies, sustained by crime and driven by the politicization of personal disappointment and envy. It is normal history when one country invades another, when a cavalry commander or Indian chief commits an atrocity. Men have done terrible things to one another throughout history. But to make terror and murder into a system signifies a new type of regime.

The mass man fails to see the evils of totalitarianism; he fails to see the tendency of Mr. Hitler; he fails to see the letters “K-G-B” behind Putin; he denies the Holocaust; he doesn’t care if Iran deploys nuclear missiles; he doesn’t think Russia or China will ever start a global war. The philistinism of the mass man is found in his readiness to believe totalitarian propaganda. Such is a propaganda that blames the intended victim.

What year is yet? I said 1936. That was a moment when decisive action might still have made a difference. Do we have the wit and character to act today? I wonder. I wonder, too, if I didn’t mistake the year: perhaps it is closer to 1938.

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8 Comments

1. Stephen Rittenberg:

Superb. Thanks. No Churchill to rouse us now–instead an Obama urging us to hold hands and praise ourselves for being more sensitive and understanding than our ancestors.

Mar 19, 2008 - 8:52 am 2. Richard Whalen:

“And I am dumb to tell the hanging man How of my clay is made the hangman’s lime.”

I wholly agree with Mr. Kimball and Mr. Nyquist. And though I may fit the description of the mass man a little to tightly, in fact, I reject the facile shelter of egalitarian brotherhood.

Certainly the reason I come to sites like these and read essays beyond my education stems not from a pretension of thinking myself a peer, but to intellectually arm myself for the future. I require elites not sneer at them. Most people working in the traditional professions including; Medical, law, the military and education are or should be such elites, why else should I bother with them? My very life depends on elites!

Should I be disturbed at the coarseness and ghettoizing of speech, dress and style I witness from my peers? Or is Reverend Wright’s anti-American rants becoming merely common currency in the ever evolving dialectic?

“… Paul Johnson, the British historian, who wrote: “Anti-Americanism is the prevailing disease of intellectuals today.” What he should have said, but failed to clarify, was that today’s “intellectuals” are frauds; they are mass men,”

One only needs to read how Journalism has fallen to the depths of propaganda to affirm his insight.

The Internet may be a sort of Pandora’s box stoking rather than merely providing the tender for a new totalitarianism, is it 1938 again? Ironically I happen to live in a craftsman house built in 1938. Though I surround myself with philosophy, literature and art I still find myself (from habit) harnessed to stupidity of the television.

This I agree: My generation is the mass man, mass-produced and mass processed through an ever-expanding bureaucracy of conformity, masquerading as social justice and egalitarian.

But this is why I bother to read Mr. Kimball or Mr. Nyquist; in order to remake myself. To develop from a mass man to becoming un-dependent and eventually a freely independent thinking man, though time seemingly is fading into a dark future I am still (by a little) mass man but with a satellite feed.

“And I am dumb to tell a weather’s wind How time has ticked a heaven round the stars.”
Dylan Thomas

Mar 19, 2008 - 1:52 pm 3. Gabriel:

My dear, this sounds like paranoid hysteria to my ears. However thinking deeper one might find truth behind these apparently preposterous claims of totalitarism. It’s an universal truth, well pointed by John Grey – the one you cited lambasting atheism, wrongfully in parts I might add – in his book, Straw Dogs, that totalitarian regimes will never cease to exist as long mankind is still around. History would be, under these terms, nothing more than a cycle, where periods of opression are followed of periods of freedom and so on. Looking at history as a whole, this seems just right.

I don’t, nevertheless, have the temerity to call the end of Western Civilization as something soon to come. Nor do I have the temerity, or even foolishness, to call for immediate action, since this will only create room for more disasters. One must assess the current world situation with great care and deal, very smartly, with it. Yet, there’s no one who can do it, no group, no nation. Whatever it is on the track to happen, will happen.

Mar 19, 2008 - 3:04 pm 4. Maggie's Farm:

Friday Morning Links

The oceans are coolingThe assault on free speech in Canada. h/t, Coyote I had to look up The Incorporation Doctrine, but I am not sure that I fully understand itWhy does the GOP write off minorities?Paper bags – moral or immoral? NeoneoObama’s speech: A B

Mar 21, 2008 - 4:44 am 5. Irish Cicero:

If you acccept, as I do, that men have souls, why is there no dread for the Dread that is upon us? What deadens us?

Mar 21, 2008 - 1:43 pm 6. Irish Cicero:

I posted a response on my blog.

http://libertypeaklodge.typepad.com/headquarters/2008/03/good-friday-ref.html

Thank you.

Mar 21, 2008 - 7:05 pm 7. Shriber:

“The mass man fails to see the evils of totalitarianism; he fails to see the tendency of Mr. Hitler; he fails to see the letters “K-G-B” behind Putin;”

This is also and indictment of President Bush who said that he looked into Putin’s eyes and he saw “a good man.”

Here is part of the quote:

“I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straight forward and trustworthy and we had a very good dialogue.

“I was able to get a sense of his soul.

Bush too is a product of our putrid and self destructive mass culture.

Mar 22, 2008 - 8:35 am 8. David Saussy:

Thomas Mann said “past isn’t dead…”? I have been under the impression that Faulkner said this…

Mar 24, 2008 - 9:35 am