The Convergence of Free and Unfree Societies

And now I come to the book I think you should read. In the origins of totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt makes a series of extraordinarily original and surprising observations about the nature of totalitarian rule. Not everybody's read this book, though many people pretend to have read it. And I want you to understand there's a big difference between reading a book and pretending to have read it.

The masses are obsessed by a desire to escape from reality, because in their essential homelessness, they can no longer bear its accidental, incomprehensible aspects. This is a fundamental part of Arendt's argument. Totalitarianism offers a solution to the loneliness of modernity. Propaganda is possibly the most important instrument of totalitarianism for dealing with the non-totalitarian world.

Terror, on the contrary, is the very essence of its form of government. The true goal of totalitarian propaganda is not persuasion, but organization. Each of these quotations was, to me, surprising the first time I read it. In fact, I can recall having to read it twice each time.

The Nazis started with the fiction of a conspiracy and modeled themselves more or less consciously after the example of the secret society of the Elders of Zion. Whereas Stalin imposed upon the Bolshevik party structure the rigid totalitarian rules of its conspiracy sector, and only then discovered the need for a central fiction to maintain the iron discipline of a secret society under the conditions of a mass organization.

This is an amazing set of observations. The Nazis modeled themselves on the imaginary or fake protocols of the Elders of Zion. Stalin also needed a conspiracy theory, the Trotsky conspiracy. Totalitarianism in power uses the state administration for its long range goal of world conquest and for the direction of the branches of the movement.

It establishes the secret police as the executors and guardians of its domestic experiment in constantly transforming reality into fiction. And it finally erects concentration camps as special laboratories to carry through its experiment in total domination. The camps erect rights were turned into drill grounds, on which perfectly normal men were trained to be full-fledged members of the SS.

And finally, and perhaps most importantly, the aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions, but to destroy the capacity to form any. What totalitarian rule needs to guide the behavior of its subjects is a preparation to fit each of them equally well for the role of executioner and the role of victim.

Think about these insights. They are profound, and they tell us important things about the true character of the extreme case of the unfree society, which is a totalitarian dictatorship. Now, the interesting thing is that in certain superficial ways, the democracies in the mid 20th century took on some features of the totalitarian regimes that they fought against.

And this is one of the paradoxes of the mid 20th century. The apparent convergence of national security states engaged in total war, the control that all the combatant powers of World War II had to exert over civilians to wage the war. If you think about the feat of mobilizing vast millions strong armies, democracies had to resort to all kinds of coercion and propaganda to achieve their purposes.

If one looks at the org charts of the mid 20th century corporations, this is General Motors, there's a striking resemblance between the org charts of corporate America and the org charts of the collective systems of the totalitarian world. In the world of economic governance, planners during and after the wars in the western world were also highly attracted to the idea that one could control society and regulate it, almost like some kind of hydraulic system.

Everybody felt, even British conservatives, that they should have a plan. Not necessarily a five-year plan, but some kind of a plan. After 1945, planning wasn't peculiar to the totalitarian states. So one of the things that's challenging for us as historians is to realize that in certain superficial ways, the free societies in the mid 20th century behaved like the unfree societies.

Conscripted all males of military age, imposed total control over economic life, and resorted to coercion, too, when people refused to obey the rules. This caused a lot of confusion for some thinkers in the mid 20th century. They started to believe that the systems were converging, and soon there would be no difference.

When George Orwell wrote his extraordinary 1945 essay, you and the atomic Bomb, in which he coined the phrase Cold War, his central thesis was that any state possessing an atomic weapon would become an autocracy, would become a slave state. Put your hand up if you've read 1984. Keep your hand up if you've really read it and didn't just pretend to have read it.

Good, so you know that the central idea, which derives from that original article, is that everybody becomes a totalitarian regime. That the Cold War is between the three totalitarian regimes, one of which is clearly the United States, one of which is clearly Europe, one of which is clearly China, Europe, and Eurasia, to include, of course, the Soviet Union.

But this wasn't quite right. In fact, this was the thing that Orwell, who was in many ways a genius, got wrong. Despite the somewhat exaggerated fears of an imperial presidency, of a national security state, the United States did not become a totalitarian regime. The power of the presidency turned out, in fact, to be limited, constrained by the power of newspapers and of television.

In this state, California defense department contracts, which were clearly not under very close supervision, were used to build what became the Internet, something that it was impossible for the Soviet Union to do, although they did try.

So the narrative that's central to Orwell's dystopia is, in fact, a wrong prediction.

This is really important. He was right about Russia. He was right about China. He was wrong about the United States. He was wrong about the west.

The Internet is as transformative of society as the printing press was when it suddenly swept Europe in the late 15th century.

It transforms the public sphere as profoundly as the printing press. You're familiar with data like this, showing how within a really short space of time, beginning really, at the beginning of this century, the world went online. And you've grown up, you were also maddeningly young in this hyper connected world, which is radically different from the world of my youth.

So different that if I could only take you in a time machine back to Oxford in 1982 when I was an undergraduate, you'd be shocked. You'd be shocked. What would shock you most? Probably our sense of humor, which was so politically incorrect that every single thing we ever said would get us canceled today.

Our incessant profanity that probably would have shocked you. The amount we smoked might well have shocked you. The amount we drank would have deeply impressed you.

But what would really stun you, what would stun you was how much fun we had, how much unbridled fun it was.

And it was fun because we didn't have smartphones. There were no social media sites. We communicated either by going into coal boxes, which we put coins into. They smelt of urine, because people used them as urinals routinely, or we wrote notes to one another, and we left the notes in little wooden boxes called pigeonholes.

That was how we communicated with one another. You'd be so shocked by the fact that when I was your age, the world was that different in its communications infrastructure. You'd be lost. When we had to go from one end of town to the other, we either knew the way or we used things called maps.

The Oxford diary that every undergraduate carried around to keep track of when tutorials were, had a map of Oxford in it for such eventualities. I wish I could take you back there. And then I'd like to take you to the 1930s, second stop. First I'd like you to take you to 1930s America, and then I'd like to take you to 1930s Germany.

And then I'd like to take you to 1930s Russia. And by the time we'd finished our tour, you'd get what I'm talking about.

This brings me to the final phase of my argument and the clinching phase. Yawn now and then focus with a passionate intensity, as if your lives depend on it.

So we all thought, for a brief and happy period that some of us look back on with amusement, that everything would be awesome when the world was completely connected, and all ideas could be shared immediately, and everybody would be a netizen, and it would all just be awesome.

And then the awesomeness would spread around the world and topple all the bad people, and there would be universal democracy, and that would be awesome, too.

But I told you, didn't I, that networks shape-shift. In the west, the shape-shifting took the form of the emergence of network platforms with massive central control over all the personal data that we foolishly had given up in the belief that we were getting free services in return.

But what really, almost nobody foresaw, and I include in this, the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party, as well as President Bill Clinton. Nobody foresaw that the Chinese Communist Party would be able to control the Internet. Bill Clinton said it would be like nailing jello to a wall.

They nailed the jello to the wall. They nailed it so hard that you'll never get the jello off the damn wall. I give you the most powerful man in the world, and I give you the app where you can enjoy his thought. Did I say enjoy? No, master it, learn it, and be prepared to regurgitate it when required.

The title of the book, The Square and the Tower, is as that image from Siena was supposed to convey, that there is a square of networked activity and there's a tower of hierarchical power. This image tells you all that you really need to know about the relationship between the square and the tower in China, the tower rules.

After the publication of the book, it became even clearer that Xi Jinping ruled over Jack Ma because Ma was essentially cancelled for making critical remarks about Chinese financial regulation. The political and legal system of the future is inseparable from big data. Bad guys won't even be able to walk into the square.

That was when Jack Ma was trying to stay on the right side of the CCP. It didn't really work. That's a key quotation. And remember, the significance of the term square in the context of Chinese politics.

Totalitarianism lives on. It exists today.

That's what is happening in Xinjiang.

It's unmistakable. It has all the features. The camps, the relentless surveillance, the indoctrination, the genocidal intent. It's all there.

But what are we?

If that's what Hannah Arendt was talking about with the central importance of fear, what are we?

Are we Gilead? Are we going to become Gilead because Roe v Wade was overturned?

The category error, which is so widely believed, particularly in American universities, is that, yes, we are. That the society Margaret Atwood depicted in the handmaid's tale will be realized, at least in a part of America, because that is what the American conservatives yearn for, a theocratic, patriarchal, totalitarian regime.

Put your hand up if you read The Handmaid's Tale.

More of you should read that book. It's a brilliant book, but it's not about America. It's about Iran. The society that most closely resembles Gilead in the world today is the Islamic republic of Iran, not the United States.

The United States is not even close.

On the left, Gilead. On the right, actual America. I love the headline, Police in south Florida, Disperse Unruly Spring Break Crowd.

Now, it's conceivable that we'll go from there to there somehow. That's essentially what Atwood argues, in The Handmaid's Tale, happened.

But I would give you a very low single digit percentage probability that that's what's gonna happen. And I would say the probability that the United States becomes a totalitarian regime in your lifetimes, never mind mine, is vanishingly small. We can debate what will happen here, and that's, I think, what we should do next.

But I just want to conclude by observing that if you asked Hannah Arendt, hey, Hannah, do you see signs of incipient tyranny? And should we follow Tim Snyder's advice on what to do? She would crack up laughing at that thought.

I'll pause there and invite you to ask questions.

Thank you.