15. Annihilation lust
Politics is the royal road to despair. Despair, when it goes deep enough, erupts into rage. And this rage burns our hearts to cinders.
Over the past three millennia of recorded history, human politics in mass society has been a tale of rulers exploiting the people they ruled. We have many names for this—dictatorship, despotism, demagoguery, tyranny, autocracy, plutocracy—but the result is always the same: mass suffering accompanied by mass despair.
It wasn’t always so. Back in prehistory, in our small bands, during the heyday of human cooperation, our politics was about mutual benefit. It nurtured us and sustained us.
In those days, politics wasn’t an occasional pastime. We didn’t just engage during an election—there were no elections. We didn’t have just a few representatives managing society on our behalf—everyone contributed to the welfare of the group all day every day. We took care of our community so it could take care of us.
In our current century, though, great numbers of people find politics so hateful they turn their backs on it, wanting nothing to do with it.
But politics is how we do our collective moral decision-making. We need it to work for us. It’s how we take care of each other. Or not. It’s how we work together. Or not. It’s how we save ourselves. Or not. If we fail at our politics, our species will fail.
What’s the remedy? We look to democracy to be our political salvation. We brag about it, how it’s the best form of government ever. We brag about ourselves, how we in America are the best at democracy, which makes us the best of the best, the City on the Hill, a light unto the world.
This self-flattering narrative is comforting and comfortably distracting. But if we let the facts speak for themselves we get a different story.
The fact is that democracy can’t save us because it can’t beat our operating system. From his reading of history, John Adams, one of our Founding Fathers, despite risking his life for democracy, did not believe it to be sustainable. In a letter to his wife, Abigail, he wrote:
Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide. It is in vain to say that democracy is less vain, less proud, less selfish, less ambitious, or less avaricious than aristocracy or monarchy. It is not true, in fact, and nowhere appears in history. Those passions are the same in all men, under all forms of simple government, and when unchecked, produce the same effects of fraud, violence, and cruelty.
And he continues:
When clear prospects are opened before vanity, pride, avarice, or ambition, of their easy gratification, it is hard for the most considerate philosophers and the most conscientious moralists to resist the temptation.
Then he concludes, “Individuals have conquered themselves. Nations and large bodies of men, never.”
Not only is democracy remarkably difficult to sustain in mass society, it’s remarkably difficult to achieve in the first place. We call ourselves a democracy, but we haven’t ever been one, not even at the most basic level of the dictionary definition, which is that, first, everyone gets to vote and, second, the majority rules.
There’s never been a time in our history when everyone got to vote. The facts tell us this so very painfully. In our early days, instead of making native people citizens and giving them the vote, we slaughtered them. The people we kidnapped from Africa were not given the vote once they set foot on our democratic shores. Instead we held them in bondage.
Who did get to vote? The Constitution left that up to the states and the states gave the franchise to adult white males with property. There were some variations. For example, for thirty years New Jersey allowed women of property to vote, then in 1807, took that right away.
So from its birth, our country has been an oligarchy, which means the rule of the many by the few.
Following the Civil War, the Fifteenth Amendment gave Black men the right to vote. They got to exercise that right for a few years, and some were elected to office, even to Congress, but this new freedom was soon taken away. States designed obstructions like poll taxes and literacy tests to put a stop to the wave of new voters. But the main instrument of suppression was terror. For long decades, Black people who tried to register to vote were threatened, beaten, burned out of their homes, or lynched.
And the facts tell us that the suppression of voting continues. It’s a simple and familiar recipe, not too hard to implement:
—Shut down polling places in targeted neighborhoods. Deliver fewer voting machines to the polling places that are left so people have to stand in line for hours in the cold and rain. Make voting so hard that people give up and go home, like single moms who need to get back to their kids, or old people who don’t have that kind of stamina anymore.
—Schedule voting on Tuesday, a workday, when people can’t get enough hours off work to wait in the long lines.
—Gerrymander communities of color so they’re spread across different legislative districts and thus have no chance of electing one of their own who can speak for them.
—Draw maps so that when the clear majority of people in a state vote for one party, the losing party sends more representatives to Congress.
—Get state legislatures to pass voter ID laws to exclude legitimate voters. Toss people off the voting rolls if they don’t vote often enough. Toss people off the rolls just because you can get away with it.
It’s well known that Republicans are the ones who in recent years have been driving voter suppression. They want what they want and they don’t care how they get it, even if it means sacrificing the basics of democracy.
But let’s be fair. The facts tell us that Democrats, despite their lofty talk, have not put up a determined fight for voting rights. And why? They know if they managed to actually enfranchise everyone, many corporate Democrats would be replaced by more progressive candidates, and the corporate folks prefer to lose some, even many elections, rather than let that replacement happen.
There are things we could do to fix the voting problem. We could automatically register everyone to vote when they turn 18. We could schedule voting for two days, like on Saturday and Sunday. We could terminate the Electoral College.
If we really were the world champions of democracy, wouldn’t that mean that at the first sign of any kind of voter suppression, our nation would rise up in unison in protest and put a stop to it instantly? But we don’t do that. So maybe we don’t really love democracy as much as we say we do. Or maybe we don’t believe in it.
Given our national disregard for voting, we can’t say we’re a true democracy. But we’re also not a pure oligarchy either. We’re a hybrid. We have some features of democracy, but those features are mainly there to serve as a safety valve. When exploitation gets too onerous and pressure builds to the breaking point, voters are given a way to express their discontent. They get to vote into office new representatives who make the adjustments necessary to forestall mass rebellion.
But while voters might elect new leaders, they don’t get to elect a new system. They don’t get to replace the oligarchy with rule by the true majority of citizens. So if we want to apply the word democracy to America, the best we can honestly say is we’re a managed democracy, with the elites managing it for their own benefit.
In our country, tens of millions of people are politically homeless, definitely a sign of despair. Look at how many folks who could vote, don’t. In many elections, the majority don’t. So if the majority rules, that means despair is what wins those elections.
And why don’t people vote? It’s in part because of the obstacles to voting, but the biggest issue is that millions of people have given up on voting because they feel it doesn’t make enough of a difference to be worth the effort. Look at the approval rating for Congress. It’s abysmal. People don’t count on Congress to look out for them and protect them.
Republicans have long been known as champions of the rich. They sweet-talk their base while they deliver the goods to the elite. They funnel free money to people who already have more than they know what to do with, while cheating the mass of Americans out of the basic things they need. The Republicans want a government of the wealthy, by the wealthy, for the wealthy, one which only pretends to have a populist spirit.
But the Democrats don’t get a pass. I remember seeing them move to the center during the 1990s. Drifting is what I thought they were doing in order to chase voters in the middle. But I didn’t understand the real significance of that shift.
The fact is the Democrats got jealous of the patronage Republicans received from the elite and decided to compete for wealthy donors. But first Democrats had to prove they could be loyal to wealth. How did they do that? By demonstrating they could screw their base with gusto.
NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, was designed to hurt the working class and the labor movement in favor of corporations. Launching an aggressive program of mass incarceration targeted the Black community in particular. Degrading the welfare system was an attack on all working class communities.
And to cap it off, Democrats led the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act. This was legislation Franklin Roosevelt got passed during the Great Depression to separate risky investment banking from ordinary banking. For sixty years it protected us from a major financial meltdown. But investment bankers wanted the law repealed so they could be wild and crazy guys like their predecessors in the 1920s. Democrats gave them that repeal as a dowry.
Some Democrats actually bragged they killed the New Deal, which meant they decisively broke their old commitment, limited as it was, to equality. They consciously gave up on, actually turned against, any hope of creating an egalitarian society.
And this worked well for the party elites. Democrats now sometimes beat Republicans in contributions from investment bankers. But it hasn’t worked so well for the country. The repeal of Glass-Steagall set the stage for the crash of 2008, which hurt the majority of Americans, many of them very badly. Democrats like to blame the Bush administration for that, but it was absolutely a bipartisan disaster.
So there we have it. The facts tell us that both our major parties routinely betray their base. Certainly cause for despair.
But what if we managed to turn our government into a perfect definitional democracy? That still wouldn’t be enough. A democracy, even at its best, is made up of human beings, which means it’s quite capable of going tribal and attacking, even murdering other democracies to benefit itself. The facts show us that over the years, America has often been the enemy of democracy as when we’ve interfered in Chile, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, Cuba, Granada, the Philippines, Iran, and other countries. Reading the history of our actions on the world stage can be a rough study. Sometimes unbearable. A democracy can be as cruelly selfish as any other form of government.
And there’s another problem. The ideal of majority rule can in practice turn into “the tyranny of the majority.” For example, in our country, we mostly don’t have genuine majority rule, but in the realm of racial privilege we do. The tribe of white people gets to dominate communities of color. Our elites allow this, in fact, require it. For people of color, this converts our supposedly beneficent democracy into a nightmare.
And now, with the number of people of color in our country growing quickly, more and more whites are willing to turn their backs on democracy altogether in order to protect their special advantages, even though that means putting their fate totally into the hands of elite oligarchs who really don’t care about them at all.
And now, as with all empires before us, it looks like we’re heading into a steep and probably permanent economic decline. So many people, even if they don’t understand the larger forces at work, sense something is very, very wrong. They’re scared about the future and feel they have nowhere to turn and no real hope that things will get better.
So in our time, we’re getting to see firsthand how political despair can go deep enough to turn into political rage. Tens of millions are eager to put democracy killers in charge of our country, a sign they’re not only feeling despair about democracy, but are actually turning aggressively against it.
And here’s something important to remember. Political rage isn’t always showy and explosive. Just like there’s such a thing as a “dry drunk,” there’s such a thing as “dry rage,” quiet, measured, and carefully controlled. Let’s not be fooled by it. It can actually be more effective at destruction because it’s so controlled.
Given that democracy is not saving us, what other options do we have?
We could try to establish a moral democracy, which would be democracy that transcends the tribal and selfish limitations of the human operating system. There would be no oppressor and no oppressed. No one would have too much and no one would have too little. Our national mission would be to meet the real needs of real people in the real world in real time. Our national spirit would be compassion.
But now, you see, I’ve crossed over into the realm of fantasy, because what would it actually take to make a moral democracy?
First, a whole lot of work. Why do we think we can get the benefits of democracy on the cheap? Why do we think good things will come from a steady practice of neglect?
Even to make a technical democracy work, the great majority of us would have to fight for it. We’d have to study and engage. We’d need to acquire a deep understanding of mass psychology, master the art of effective negotiating, develop a talent for mass organizing, get good at tackling complex problems using complex solutions, become proficient at recruiting the very best people to run for office, and so much more.
But the demands of moral democracy are even more daunting. We’d need to reach back into our hunter-gatherer days, pick up on the supercooperation of our small bands, then scale it up by magnitudes to make it work for mass society. This means everyone would have to develop their moral chops in earnest because there’s no intrinsic virtue in democracy itself. It’s only virtuous when its citizens make virtuous decisions day by day about the life of their community. It’s the people who live in a democracy who by their political engagement, or political resignation, give it its character.
But we don’t know how to scale up the fierce egalitarianism of small-band morality. And even if we did, that would still not be enough. We’d also have to transform our tribal history into a trans-tribal future. We’d need to learn how to get along with very different kinds of people, not just tolerating them, but embracing them. And we don’t know how to make such a radical transformation, not on a mass level.
And there’s more. To convert to a moral democracy would take a profound shift in our way of life. We’d have to work through the kind of personal disruption and pain that goes with such a changeover, and are we, as a society, prepared to do such a thing?
For example, imagine it’s the period following our Civil War. But this time poor and middle-class whites refuse to ally themselves with white elites. Instead they make common cause with the freed slaves and freeborn Black people, actually go over and join them. And dedicate themselves to ending oppression all the way down and privilege all the way up, not as a matter of charity, but as a deeply personal, moral commitment. And over the succeeding years, continue to link up with other communities of color to engage in mutual advocacy.
Imagine how this would have changed the history of our country. People of color would have escaped the terrible suffering of racial oppression. Working-class and middle-class whites would have not only felt better about themselves morally, they would have done better economically, too. White privilege gave them a significant advantage over people of color, but at the same time it kept them trapped in their place in the oligarchy by keeping the elite exploiters firmly in power. Maybe these working-class and middle-class folks weren’t on the bottom rung of society, but they were only on the second or third rung.
The moral thing would have been to get rid of the ladder of hierarchy altogether and end exploitation. Then we really would have become a light unto the world instead of a discouragement unto ourselves.
What scares our elites more than anything else? Trans-tribal action. For example, racial groups linking up to fight for a moral democracy. That’s why for centuries our elites have been using every trick in the book to drive racism deep into the American psyche. There’s no way we could ever become a moral democracy unless we could first cleanse ourselves of the evil of racial division.
But the odds are against that. How hard would it be to make intimate common cause with people you’ve been taught to hate? What kind of courage would that take?
Moral democracy is clearly the answer we need, and it’s the only answer that could possibly save us—but we can’t incarnate it on a mass level. And that being the case, and given that democracy is failing, what’s next for us?
That would be authoritarianism, a big word that means giving up on ourselves politically. It means moral abdication. We simply find a big talker who trumpets big promises forged from big lies and get him to make our decisions for us.
This is appealing, because in mass society it’s so much easier to have one guy rule from the top down than it is for hundreds of millions to come together in coherent, disciplined, moral cooperation, day after day, to rule from the grassroots up.
And there’s another reason abdication is so tempting. It allows us to dump personal responsibility. If things go badly, we get to claim it’s not our fault. It’s our leaders who is to blame. Even though we made the initial decision to default to that leader.
How does it feel, though, to be a tough-talking American who likes to brag about his independent, maverick spirit, yet here you are living a submissive life? How does it feel to bow down to a “strong man” and turn yourself into one of his sheep? Might that be cause for despair? And might that despair go so deep it explodes into rage?
And why does the authoritarian leader always call himself a “strong man,” when he’s actually a moral weakling? He’s never strong enough to deal with real reality. He’s never strong enough to stand up to despair and fight for nurturance. He’s never strong enough to hold people’s feet to the fire of political responsibility.
But what if authoritarianism is not potent enough medicine for us? What’s next in line? What we’re seeing in our country and around the world is something worse than simple abdication. We’re seeing an aggressive hatred of politics—of collective moral labor. And this is the perfect set up for totalitarianism, which is something quite different from authoritarianism.
I didn’t understand this difference until I read The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt. She makes a critical distinction. She says authoritarianism only demands that you behave the way the leaders want. You can still have your own thoughts. You can have an inner life of your own. You give up your political soul, but you get to keep your personal soul as long as you keep it to yourself.
But totalitarianism demands total submission. It demands that you sacrifice your moral soul in its entirety. You decimate it. You immolate it. Arendt says that totalitarianism is best described as a merged mass of soulless nobodies.
This includes the supreme leader, too. He has to make himself into a nobody because otherwise he couldn’t merge into the totality. He mythologizes himself. He makes himself larger than life. He becomes more a symbolic figure than a real person. He erases his past. He appears in public only in the midst of showy spectacles of flaming torches, waving banners, martial music, and ecstatic followers. He struts around like a super-somebody when in truth he’s become a super-nobody.
The “strong-man” authoritarian has to have a very big, very definite ego in order to lead his country. But a totalitarian leader, by contrast, cannot have a hard boundary to his ego. It has to be fluid so he can merge with the nation. This means an authoritarian leader whose ego has rigid boundaries, a man who cares only about himself, a man who can’t share the spotlight with anyone or anything, including, most especially, the state, cannot become a totalitarian because he cannot merge. He can be an authoritarian, he can destroy his country, but at least he cannot take that next, more harrowing step into totality.
Reading Arendt, I kept struggling to understand how a thing as evil as totalitarianism could be generated by inner nothingness, how the seeming emptiness of despair could generate a political system that kills tens of millions of people.
Finally, I got it. Totalitarianism isn’t actually empty inside. Morally it’s empty for sure. It’s a mass of nobodies, so there’s no one who’s the least bit morally responsible for anything. But it’s sizzling with the endorphins of supremely merged togetherness. For social beings like us it’s a high unlike any other. It’s total fusion. It’s like the universe right after the Big Bang, pure plasma, too hot for individual atoms and molecules to form. There’s a special euphoria to it. You’re not just bowing to the leader like you are under authoritarian rule, humbling yourself and subjugating yourself. Instead you’re merging with the leader. You identify with him and so you’re lifted up. You get to share in his glory.
Totalitarianism is an experience of absolute togetherness even while it’s absolutely antisocial. Because once you’ve sacrificed your soul, anything goes. You will faithfully carry out whatever duties the totality asks of you—torture, mass murder, even the willing and willful sacrifice of your own family, or your own self if the totality asks for that.
Turning yourself into a nobody is a profound act against yourself. You do it out of desperation not joy. And that act generates rage, because it’s an evil thing for a human being to give up his very self. And the resulting rage is nihilistic.
While authoritarianism is a lust for control, totalitarianism is a lust for death. It feels like salvation but it’s not. It’s annihilation. Death is not a secondary byproduct, it’s the primary appetite. And there’s no satisfying it. It doesn’t matter how many millions have been killed, the system, Arendt says, because it’s rooted in total despair, demands more and more killing until it reaches the logical conclusion of totalitarianism, which would be the death of every last human being.
And this brings us to Hitler. I don’t believe in throwing his name around lightly, but I don’t believe in never talking about him because too many people do throw his name around too lightly. I believe in studying him as an example of what he actually is an example of, which is nihilistic rage.
It seems to me that in trying to solve the puzzle of fascist Germany, some historians have focused too narrowly on Hitler the man, rather than focusing on Hitler as the incarnation of the despair-rage of the German people following their defeat in World War I. Totalitarianism is not a clever trick pulled on a country by a mutant monster. It’s generated and maintained by the masses.
I think it’s important for us to study the classic totalitarianism of the past so we can get a feel for the underlying nihilism that drives it. We need to get to know this nihilism so well that we can smell it through any disguise it might wear, because in our time it’s showing up disguised and pretending to be the answer to our political despair, when, in fact, it’s a capitulation to that despair. And what we’re facing now is a version of totalitarianism far trickier and far worse than what the Germans perfected.
After I discovered Hannah Arendt, I went back and reread the Joachim Fest biography of Hitler and suddenly it was clear to me how his entire adult life was a story of despair-rage.
When Hitler was a young man, he was hapless and next to homeless. He was living in Vienna and his big dream was to enroll at the Academy of Fine Arts so he could become a famous artist. But he was rejected twice as a mediocre talent. Meanwhile he lived in housing for single men who were struggling to make it on their own. He was a dead-end guy with no idea how to create a future for himself and he was known even then for his angry pontifications and his remarkable collection of hatreds. So there in his early years, we can see both despair and rage entwined in his character.
In 1914, when Germany declared war, Hitler enlisted and served as a courier. This was a seriously dangerous job, but he was happy. It was in the midst of the grinding brutality of trench warfare that he found his first real home as an adult.
After the war, he again had no idea what to do with himself. He remained in the army and was sent to spy on a tiny right-wing group of about fifty members which would become the National Socialist German Workers’ Party or Nazis. He liked what he saw. Even better he liked the effect he had on them. When he spoke, he electrified them. His hatreds had currency with them.
But it was more than speaking skills that shot him to prominence in the larger context of the right-wing movements of the time. He had an uncanny ability to channel German despair, along with the rage arising from that despair. His speeches were not masterpieces of political sophistication. They were dumbed-down, repetitious refrains. He did tantrums: We were betrayed! We were stabbed in the back! We want retribution! We want our glory back! But those tantrums, because they were feral, were compelling.
Hitler did not invent this despair-rage, he embodied it. He did not initiate this wave of bitterness, he rode it. If Germany had been happy, we’d never have heard of him.
Albert Speer, a favorite of Hitler’s and his Minister of Armaments, said in his book, Inside the Third Reich:
As I see it today, Hitler and Goebbels were in fact molded by the mob itself, guided by its yearnings and its daydreams. Of course, Goebbels and Hitler knew how to penetrate through to the instincts of their audiences; but in the deeper sense they derived their whole existence from these audiences. Certainly the masses roared to the beat set by Hitler’s and Goebbels’ baton; yet they were not the true conductors. The mob determined the theme.
And Speer continues:
To compensate for misery, insecurity, unemployment, and hopelessness, this anonymous assemblage wallowed for hours at a time in obsessions, savagery and license. The personal unhappiness caused by the breakdown of the economy was replaced by a frenzy that demanded victims. By lashing out at their opponents and vilifying the Jews, they gave expression and direction to fierce primal passions.
It’s often said that Hitler had the power to hypnotize the masses with his emotional tirades. But that was only true when they were willing and eager to be hypnotized. In 1927–28, the economy of Germany had improved significantly, and because of that, Nazi Party membership dropped off drastically. It was a crisis for Hitler. If he had had unilateral hypnotic powers, he would have kept growing the party no matter what.
The American stock market crash of 1929 changed his fortunes. Because now Germans were hurting again, and he was there waiting for them, offering them exactly the wrong solution to their pain. And Wall Street guys, please take note, without the folly of your predecessors, Hitler might never have come to power. Crashing an economy is an exceedingly dangerous thing to do.
It’s also said that Hitler was politically brilliant. He was indeed a schemer, but it seems to me the key to his success was brutality, not brilliance. The Weimar Republic was a weak opponent. The Bolsheviks were as fierce as the Nazis, but the industrialists and financiers in Germany were scared to death of the communists given the revolution taking place in Russia, so they delivered their backing to right-wing fanatics like Hitler, providing the decisive advantage.
In the power game of politics, Hitler stopped at nothing, absolutely nothing. Even before he was in power he was busy murdering his enemies. He was thoroughly amoral. He believed in lying, so he was able to lie with such conviction that leaders like Neville Chamberlain found him credible when they should have known better. It wouldn’t have taken a major intelligence operation to know that Hitler had evil intent in his drive for power. He had a very public history of speaking, writing, and action that made this perfectly obvious—if you wanted to know the truth.
Hitler did not just believe in using violence to accomplish his ends. He loved brutality for its own sake. He adored it, he lived for it:
“There must be no tenderness in youth. I want to see in their eyes the gleam of the beast of prey.”
“The very first essential for success is a perpetually constant and regular employment of violence.”
“This struggle is one of ideologies and racial differences and will have to be conducted with unprecedented, unmerciful, and unrelenting harshness.”
“Struggle is the father of all things. It is not by the principles of humanity that man lives or is able to preserve himself above the animal world, but solely by means of the most brutal struggle.”
Dietrich Eckart, a mentor for Hitler during his early period, a man who Hitler called his “father friend,” had been looking for a national savior: “a fellow who can stand the rattle of the machine gun. The rabble has to be scared shitless.” And he said about this supreme leader: “He doesn’t need much intelligence; politics is the stupidest business in the world.” Hitler was the savior Eckart was looking for. Hitler was a blunt and vulgar guy who first found his home in brutality then found his salvation in channeling German rage.
What about the total merging that’s essential to totalitarianism? It’s expressed in this popular Nazi slogan: Adolf Hitler ist Deutschland, Deutschland ist Adolf Hitler.
And in this slogan, Du Bist Nichts, Dein Volk ist Alles, which means, “You are nothing, the people are everything.”
Hitler said, “We must develop organizations in which an individual’s entire life can take place. Then every activity and every need of every individual will be regulated by the collectivity represented by the party. There is no longer any arbitrary will, there are no longer any free realms in which the individual belongs to himself….The time of personal happiness is over.”
A totalitarian leader goes beyond the stupid bragging of the typical authoritarian ruler. He portrays himself as a superman with a religious and mythological aura about him. And this is where things can get darkly ridiculous.
The Nazis extolled their ideal of the strapping, blue-eyed, blond-haired, super-fit Aryan superman. But look at the top Nazi leaders. None of them came close to that. Goebbels was skinny, had a deformed foot, and walked with a visible limp. Goering was obese and was known for his self-indulgence. Hitler did have blue eyes, but he was dark-haired and for many years drug-dependent. Theodor Morrell, his crazy doctor, used a total of sixty different drugs on him. And as the war progressed he became increasingly stooped and debilitated and had tremors in his hand that he couldn’t stop. Not the picture of fitness and health.
There’s a famous painting called “Der Bannerträger,” the Banner-Carrier, which places Hitler in heroic posture on horseback, dressed in knight’s armor, and carrying the Nazi flag unfurled. But many mornings he needed a shot of amphetamine to get himself out of bed.
The supreme leader has to mythologize himself, which means depersonalizing himself, in order to turn himself into a storybook figure. Magda Goebbels, a devoted follower, said, “In a sense Hitler is not human—unreachable and untouchable.” Albert Speer, who many thought was the closest Hitler came to having a friend, said Hitler had no friends.
Hitler hid from public view the long-term relationship he had with Eva Braun because, he said, women were the strongest supporters of Nazism and he wanted them to feel attached to him personally. Like nuns are the brides of Christ, he wanted German women to be the brides of Hitler. Dietrich Eckart had said of his hoped-for savior, “He must be a bachelor! Then we’ll get the women.”
And what was Hitler’s idea of a relationship with an individual woman? “A highly intelligent man should take a primitive and stupid woman. Imagine if on top of everything else I had a woman who interfered with my work! In my leisure time I want to have peace.”
Hitler would never have allowed a magazine like People in for an interview and photo shoot because they would have made their story far too personal. He needed to be mythical so millions of people would accept his fantasy as the truth and live inside the social fiction he created for them.
Finally, we come to the most terrible part of Hitler’s character, his insatiable appetite for death. He killed six million Jews, plus five million Gypsies, homosexuals, mentally ill people, and political enemies. He planned to murder all the Slavic people—tens of millions of them—except for those he would keep as slaves in the colonized lands of Poland, the Ukraine, and Russia. Even if he had won the war and had run out of enemies to kill, he would still have had to go on killing.
And this brings us to Hitler’s relationship with his Germans. He claimed to be their savior but led them to national suicide. At the end of his short twelve-year reign, the country lay in ruins, cities bombed to rubble, his defeated Reich occupied by his enemies, and seven million Germans were dead. That’s one in every ten.
And still that wasn’t enough death. In March 1945, he issued his “Nero Decree.” He commanded that the infrastructure of Germany should be demolished to thwart the invading allies: “All military, transportation, communications, industrial and food-supply facilities, as well as all other resources within the Reich that the enemy might use either immediately or in the foreseeable future for continuing the war, are to be destroyed.” That would have meant the deaths of millions more Germans. But Hitler’s view was, “No consideration for the population can be taken.” A surprising number of military officers and civilian officials risked defying Hitler and refused to carry out the order.
Hitler loved the myth of “Das Volk,” not the people themselves. He said, “The German people consists for one third of heroes, for another third, of cowards, while the rest are traitors.” Toward the end of the war he said that all the heroes had been killed, so who cares about the rest. He said the German people had proved the weaker, had failed him, and thus deserved to die.
According to his doctor, Hitler said, “I have to attain immortality even if the whole German nation perishes in the process.”
And look at his end, self-annihilation, thinking himself very grand because the world would never be able to forget him. Nazi radio made the overblown announcement, “Hitler has fallen!” As if in battle.
But he didn’t “fall.” He shot himself in a dismal room in a dismal bunker, an abysmal failure, a prisoner of his bottomless despair and his monstrous rage.
For years, I worried about an American Hitler. Could fascism happen here? But then I came across the work of Chris Hedges, a former New York Times war correspondent who covered authoritarian regimes and disintegrating societies in combat zones around the world. His books are good, but I like watching him give one of his famous prepared talks on YouTube because he’s a 200-proof guy and his fierce moral passion sets him apart from so many of the pundits on TV.
Hedges calmed my fears about fascism—by scaring me with something worse. Not that we can’t turn fascist, and quickly, but, following the lead of his friend, the late Sheldon Wolin, who wrote Democracy, Inc., Hedges warns against “inverted totalitarianism.” Instead, of a single supreme leader there’s a network of corporate elites at the top who run things. So this is corporate totalitarianism, or corporatism for short. And it’s got a big advantage.
Under classic totalitarianism, if you kill the leader, you’re delivering a devastating, probably fatal blow to the system because it depends so much on the myth the leader builds up around himself, which is what people merge into. You can’t assassinate a network, though. It’s not dependent on particular personalities. It can swap in new members to perpetuate itself. This gives it sustainability.
Corporatism is not your grandmother’s oligarchy. Our traditional oligarchs want basic control over us but our state-of-the-art corporatists want total control. Of course, not every person of wealth is a corporatist. Some just want to be left alone to enjoy their privileges in peace. They don’t want to do the work it takes to manage the world. Others have a moral core that leads them to using their wealth and power, at least part of it part of the time, to carry out charitable projects.
The people, though, who we can rightly label corporatist, are dead set on winning us over so they can merge us into their game plan which is the takeover of our country and the world. They want to control us right down to the level of our souls, which they want to empty out.
As I listened to Hedges marshalling fact after fact to prove his argument, I noticed that even as he was convincing me, I still resisted his conclusion. Could it really be as bad as he was saying?
To answer this question, I decided to look behind the scenes of corporatism, to see if the three fundamentals of totalitarianism were present—despair, merging, and rage. And when I looked, there they were. Not like in the old days, though. Corporatism is totalitarianism on steroids. In our time, these three elements are pumped up to unprecedented levels.
1. Absolute Despair. The Germans were only in distress about their economic condition during the aftermath of WWI. Their despair was situational, but even so, look how terrible their rage was.
By contrast, our distress is ontological. We’re facing the impending extinction of our species. The extinction of the future. The end of children and grandchildren. Our despair couldn’t go deeper. So how much more terrible might our rage become as it erupts?
And speaking of just how crazy despair can make people, look at our modern Neo-Nazis. They sing the praises of Hitler, and they long for his Second Coming because they see him as their great hope. But Hitler destroyed his own people. He was the worst enemy the Germans ever had. So these Neo-Nazis are attaching themselves to a savior who provides salvation through annihilation.
And what’s to prevent broad masses of people today from following some updated political illusion that turns out to be just as crazy and self-defeating?
2. Total Merging. The corporatists want us to transfer our hopes from democracy to themselves. They sincerely believe they’re the right people at the right time. They believe their worldly success means they’re morally and intellectually superior to the rest of us, so therefore they should make all the big decisions.
And really, if you had the kind of enormous wealth and power they have why wouldn’t you let it go to your head? In October 2004, Ron Suskind wrote an article for the New York Times Magazine in which he quoted a senior advisor to President Bush, who was speaking in the language of corporatism:
We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality…we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.
If it’s true that we’re most immediately headed into an episode of simple-minded authoritarianism, how will our corporatists react? Will they see this as competition threatening their own power? Will they put a stop to it?
No, they won’t. They’ll be fine with it, because they’ll be thinking that some buffoonish leader will scare us so badly we’ll go running into their arms begging them, with their cool and cultured confidence, to save us from him.
Over the last half century we’ve seen remarkable advances in technology which have made it possible to centralize the control of masses of people, but nothing compares with the power of the internet.
Activists sing its praises because email and social media give them the ability to mobilize large numbers of people for political action. Yet the internet gives corporatists a far, far greater advantage. In fact, it’s made-to-order for totalitarianism. It’s an instrument of surveillance many times more effective than anything Hitler had. It can be used for political control at a level beyond anything he ever dreamed of.
George Orwell’s dystopian society in his novel 1984 was a grim place, but our internet is fun and endlessly entertaining, which makes it more dangerous. We’re becoming a webbed species, more dependent on the digital network as we lose our ability to live outside it. And it’s so much easier to subside into the unitary mass than to do our own moral labor. Our corporatists, of course, want it this way. And they keep penetrating further into our lives.
For example, digital assistants are invading our homes to make our lives more “convenient.” They take verbal orders from us, do our bidding, give us information, turn appliances on and off, so it seems like we’re in charge. But they’re listening in on us day and night, which makes a new level of detail about our private lives available to the people tracking us. And those people are, as we know, data maniacs. So why wouldn’t they capture absolutely everything they can, even when they say they’re not recording?
Soon our corporatists will know us better than we know ourselves. Or maybe they do already. As they insinuate themselves into our most intimate decision-making, they hope to replace our moral souls with their own guidance:
“Alexa, who should I love?”
“Siri, who should I hate?”
“Google, what should I do with my life?”
They hope to turn us into moral nobodies.
It’s clear that our corporatists are thrilled with themselves, but how do the rest of us feel about them? I mean, totalitarians are vicious, scary people aren’t they? We fought them in World War II, so won’t we fight them again?
Except Hitler wasn’t scary. To his victims and his enemies he certainly was, but not to the great majority of Germans. Once he took power and the economy started to improve, Germans cheered him. When he brought Austria and the Sudetenland into the Reich, they were besotted with him. When he started World War II and his initial victories came so quickly, they went wild with joy. He was restoring their supposed lost glory.
The scariest thing about totalitarianism is how not-scary it is in the beginning. Look at our modern corporatists. Some are crass, competitive cutthroats for sure, but the majority strive to present themselves as smart, articulate, well-mannered, cultured, and appealing, the kind of people you’d want to have dinner with, not scary at all.
These folks are so familiar to us they seem ordinary instead of alarming. We think they’re cool because we think success and fame are cool. Some of our most famous corporatists are the brilliant high-tech luminaries who’ve created a digital wonderland with a non-stop parade of amazing new toys for us to play with. Which makes these guys and gals the very essence of cool.
I grew up believing that niceness is the same thing as having good character. This is so ingrained in me, I sometimes still find it hard to grasp that nice guys can be part of running a political system that does truly terrible things. I need to keep reminding myself that nice is only style, not substance. Certainly not moral substance. And that it’s quite possible for a person to be a thoroughly contradictory combination of good and evil. Rudolf Höss, the Commandant of Auschwitz, who spent his days conducting mass murder, was said to be a very loving father and dedicated family man when he came home at night.
How could Germany, a highly civilized nation, have been so evil? The answer to that perennial question is simple, and perfectly obvious once we’re ready to see it. It’s because culture is not the same thing as moral commitment. Just because your nation can produce beautiful sacred music does not mean it has good moral character. There’s no necessary connection between the two.
Meanwhile an influential group of traditional figures are social proofing our corporatists and giving them deferential validation. In his book, Death of the Liberal Class, Hedges shows how, for decades, leaders in sectors like education, religion, politics, journalism, philanthropy, and the arts, have provided a buffer against the worst excesses of corporate rule. It wasn’t like these stalwart liberals were on a mission to transform our country into a moral democracy, nothing so radical, but they did want to mitigate suffering, and they did believe in individual rights and freedoms.
Now, though, many of them are succumbing to the siren song of status. They want to merge into the power club and be counted among the elite, even if only as junior partners. Merging has become more important to them than standing by their former liberal ideals. But to join the club they’ve had to give up their political souls as the price of admission. Without reading the history of liberalism over the last hundred years, it’s hard to understand just how much we’ve lost with the death of this class and how dangerous that loss is for us.
All these considerations, though, get eclipsed, by the urgency of our need. Democracy is not working. We need leaders who can step into the breach and save us. So why not look to the winners already at the top? They’ve got their hands on all the levers of power. Why not put them in charge of everything? Why not merge? If only we could persuade them to use their considerable influence and resources for the benefit of everyone, what would be wrong with asking them to take care of us?
There are days when I think I might even maybe be willing to go along with corporatism, because I worry that rule from the top down might be the best we can do politically in mass society. But then I have to stop myself and think again, because I’d at least need a minimum commitment. I’d acquiesce only if we’re talking about beneficent rulers. I’d need to see that our corporatists could actually make society work for us, and I mean all of us. And then save us from extinction.
If they could really do those two things, I might be okay with them getting more than their fair share of the wealth in return for their services. Even ten times what they actually need. But not a thousand or a million times more.
3. Nihilistic Rage. Our corporatists see themselves as masters of the universe, and why wouldn’t they? No network of leaders in history has had more economic, military, and technical power. But in real life they’re having blowups and meltdowns.
A classic example is how they sent troops into Iraq in 2003 convinced they would be “greeted as liberators” and would turn that country into a democracy overnight, as if democracy were a simple injection. But our decision-makers hadn’t done their homework. They didn’t understand what they were getting into. As things went south, they got more stubborn, refused to learn anything from anybody, and dug themselves in deeper.
The result? A broken country. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed. A huge number of disaffected Sunnis disappearing underground then returning with a vengeance. We call them ISIS or ISIL or Dayesh, but their real name is Blowback. Not “made in America,” but made by America, a country that mass-produces its own enemies.
And then our bullish, bullheaded elites overthrew Gaddafi in Libya, and, again, a mess and a vacuum and here comes ISIS.
It’s bad enough that our corporatists have destabilized the most dangerous parts of the world. What’s worse is that they haven’t begun to admit their arrogance, which is why we’ll witness a continuing cascade of disasters.
And they’re failing, too, in the realm of business, which is their home territory and where they should be succeeding with ease. After all, since the end of World War II America has been the unparalleled engine of commerce. But that engine is faltering and it’s become distorted in unproductive ways as finance has become the dominant sector. Digital paper-pushing and tricky schemes have become our leading economic activity, eclipsing useful products and services. Our corporatists either don’t know how to fix this fiasco or don’t have the will to fix it. This is why so many of them have become economic vampires, sucking the blood out of our economy as it declines, thus hastening that decline. And what is this behavior but a sign of profound despair?
The truth is that the host of problems we’re facing are way too big for our corporatists—climate change, mass migration, armed conflicts, nuclear proliferation, and a sickening parade of nations taking a hard turn to the right.
Of course our corporatists will never admit they’re failing. No matter how bad things get they’ll never subject themselves to soul searching, self-criticism, or self-correction, because masters of the universe don’t do that kind of thing. Instead they rage. And wrath suits them because it’s a godlike quality.
Who do they target? Everybody except themselves. Instead of taking responsibility for their own failed actions, they take their distress out on the rest of us.
Hedges says our corporatists are doing exactly what someone would do if they hated humankind and wanted it dead. It’s a familiar list of particulars: heating up the planet, melting down the ice caps, drilling for every last drop of oil, ramping up nuclear weapons, shutting down science, degrading education, toxifying our food, killing off pollinators, turning farmland into barren waste, making rural America unlivable, driving the poor into newly impoverished suburbs, turning cities into increasingly desperate fortresses of wealth. Add all this up and what can we call it but a lust for death?
Finally, says Hedges, in response to the mass suffering that such degradation causes, our corporatists suppress protest and push opioids.
But why, if you’re on top of the world, wouldn’t you want to become masters of sustainability? Why wouldn’t you want the ride to go on and on? Why wouldn’t you want to give your kids and grandkids the same lifetime of highs that you enjoy? Why would you ally yourselves with extinction?
Well, you wouldn’t, unless you’re so deep in despair that you can’t see any way out. At least no way out without transforming yourself into a responsible, moral person, which means coming back down to earth and living among the rest of us and caring about the community as a whole and engaging in the work of moral politics.
In the end, our elites, who see themselves as triumphalists, are actually nihilists. And so corporatism scares me more than Hitler. Hitler only caused the death of fifty million people, but corporatism is on track to kill all seven billion of us.
So, let me ask again: What’s ahead for us?
I think it’s going to be a short-term win by corporatism. Why not long-term? Because corporate totalitarianism is a network, and people in a network need to cooperate with each other. But our corporatists have very big egos. They’re always jockeying for position, wanting to be the top dog. Their cooperative abilities have serious limitations. And they don’t know the first thing about sustainability, and don’t even seem to like it. So I believe their short-term win will be followed by a shocking free fall into chaos, triggered by a worldwide economic collapse and political brutality.
And what have we got that we can set against the forces of corporatism and chaos? Just us. Just us putting moral fight into the heart of our politics so we can hold onto ourselves. Moral democracy might be imaginary but political labor is not. And just because moral democracy is not possible for mass society, and just because it can’t bring us salvation, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t fight for it. Because that fight is a good way to live. It’s a profound act of love to stay in the fight. It’s how we keep on being vigorous moral somebodies.
And this matters, because in a time of exhausting despair, when we’re so scared about the coming death of our species, there’s one thing that would be worse than extinction—getting sucked into soulless nihilistic rage on our way out—and please, please anything but that.
