(Wikipedia) Totalitarianism is a form of government and a political system that prohibits all opposition parties, outlaws individual and group opposition to the state and its claims, and exercises an extremely high if not complete degree of control and regulation over public and private life. It is regarded as the most extreme and complete form of authoritarianism.
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Single best form of government, if and only if your autocrat is highly competent and selfless. In other words, it’s an awful form of government.
Decisions can be made very fast though, this is why most governments have a mechanism by which they temporarily become somewhat autocratic (martial law, appointing a chancellor, etc). Note that this has been very bad when not temporary.
It’s not true that decisions can’t be made quickly by democratic governments. There are truly thousands of counter examples, but to take a single one, in the COVID-19 pandemic, many democratic governments took rapid decisions. Some of these decisions turned out badly and some well, which provides a second stumbling block to your thesis: decisions taken quickly can be bad as well as good.
Secondly, it’s not true that totalitarian regimes act quickly. There’s a governmental bottleneck of the ruler and his clique. If they’re not paying attention to a given issue at a given time, decisions can’t be taken at all, making for less efficient governance. And, in practice, such decisions as are taken are often not implemented: you end up with rune-reading and kremlinology by officials trying to work out what an order ‘really’ meant, or whether it really was an order, because there’s no clear method for governing other than ‘Do what the leader said’.
I appreciate, by the way, that you’re making a devil’s advocate argument, here. Just wanted to explain why it’s wrong, as OP seems pretty disposed to believe the devil!
Ok, so one good thing about totalitarianism is that decisions can be made fast.
Why is that a good thing? It would only be good if the results of the decisions were good. Making bad decisions fast would make things worse.
Decision speed is simply neutral unless there is an associated bias towards good or bad results from those decisions.
Because, all other things being equal, getting where you want to go, quicker, is generally considered to be a good thing.
So that would only be ‘good’ from the point of view of your totalitarian ruler themselves. It doesn’t say anything about whether it is good or bad for anyone else. And - critically - only good even for them as long as your ruler was actually competent enough to get to where they wanted to get to in the most efficient way. If they were not going to be taking opposing views into account they would have to be universal experts.
What if they realised they’d made a very stupid decision and if there’d been some more checks and balances that decision could have been avoided?
The Third Reich, I think we can all agree was totalitarian. Hitler wanted to plunge into a war on two fronts against the USSR drunk on victory against France and expecting to beat Britain. Most of his military advisors weren’t keen. But being a Dictator he could just do it and hey presto war against Stalin. As time went on he got more erratic, made more random millitary decisions overruling his generals and made a pigs ear of things but whatever decision he made on a whim happened straight away anyway.
That’s just a famous and obvious example of a totalitarian leader rushing into things and getting where he wanted to go faster which didn’t end well for the leader.
In Dune, it was used for thousands of years to build up a desire to spread, to instill a lasting distrust of leaders who would implement it, and to control the genetic trajectory of humanity in a way that would let them survive a foreseen existential threat.
In the real world, the benefits of it are for the ruler, not the populace.
Individuals don’t have to make their own decisions. A lot of people see that as a positive.
Yeah, I am shocked how many people regard exercising their autonomy as a punishment rather than a privilege, and they seem to genuinely hate it and want someone to tell them what to do with their life and what to think.
Yeah, I am shocked how many people regard exercising their autonomy as a punishment rather than a
privilegebirthright.
I could be wrong here – I haven’t exactly done a long-term study on this – but my impression is that the way young people are treated (in the US at least) sets people up for this. When you wake up is dictated. What you do with most of your waking hours is decided for you, without your input or slightest consideration. What you wear, what you’re allowed to say, who you spend your (increasingly limited) time with and what you spend it doing and where, even the emotions you express on your face, can be dictated to you by others who consider themselves in the right to do so.
This continues from before you are self-aware until nearly a decade beyond the age of abstract reasoning.
By the time you’re allowed to make a serious decision, others have been dictating them to you for your entire conscious life. It’s no wonder people never learn how to decide for themselves. I’m reminded of Brooks from The Shawshank Redemption: institutionalized. So conditioned to having no freedom that it’s terrifying rather than liberating when you finally do.
Aha! Another good thing about totalitarianism : Freedom from decision-making.
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One benefit that hasn’t been mentioned is that it avoids the democratic issue of tyranny of the majority.
One “group” can’t just fuck over another by virtue of having more people.
Of course the benefit here assumes the leader doesn’t want to fuck over such groups. That can clearly be worse in many situations.
But this is tyranny of the minority, as in a single person or family. That’s certainly worse than the majority “dictating”
Not necessarily worse. It definitely can be but it doesn’t have to.
Do you think a government with total impunity and 0 accountability could be “good” and would remain “good”?
I don’t even think democracy with accountability will stay good. 30% of the US voters have checked out of reality and are voting based on lies they want to believe.
Agreed. Although, I do not believe its the voters/citizens fault. Indoctrination and propaganda are powerfull tools of the state.
They aren’t even necessarily “of the state” since rich people can often participate in those influence campaigns as well.
Just like how a democracy can work. It all comes down to the people in charge of any system.
Tyranny of the majority is always happening though. It can’t really be avoided. The US is experiencing it on everything from race to religion to home ownership.
There is no country homogeneous in every way to avoid it.
There aren’t any.
Totalitarian regimes are fundamentally not a sensible way of organising society at any level, even if we for some reason decide to ignore the manifold human rights violations committed by totalitarian governments. There is a longheld belief that they are in some ways more ‘efficient’ than democracies (as expressed in the myth that ‘Mussolini made the trains run on time’ – he didn’t) but this isn’t true.
To take two obvious points of comparison, North Korea, the closest to a completely totalitarian regime of any country on Earth, is one of the poorest countries in the world. South Korea, a democracy, is one of the wealthiest.
The truth is so obvious that you cannot imagine any alternative?
I can imagine an alternative, but the reality is that such an alternative has never arisen.
The imaginary ‘good’ version of totalitarianism, I assume, is one where there’s a ‘good’ dictator who is also so intelligent they’re able to run everything very efficiently, where everyone enjoys or at least accepts the dictatorship because everything gets better for everyone. But that’s a very odd utopian daydream. In reality, being a dictator and being good are mutually incompatible.
EDIT: Read this back and realised I’m describing the plot of Red Son!
Not looking for a good totalitarianism. Looking for a thing that is good about totalitarianism.
One example that has been offered in this thread is, “decisions can be made fast”.
There aren’t any, because if there were, there would be good totalitarianisms.
I partially addressed the ‘fast decisions’ myth above in my comments about efficiency and in more detail here.
I can, but totalitarianism isn’t a viable alternative.
It’s like asking me if I’m so dirty, am I so accustomed to the comfort of showers that I can’t imagine the benefits of an acid bath. Like…no, I’m not taking an acid bath regardless of how clean it makes me.
You could argue that China has devolved into a totalitarian state under Xi. There’s a lot of corruption surrounding the party’s Ministry of Railways, which has led to some perverse incentives to invest (possibly way too much) in HSR and urban metro networks across all of the country. And thanks to the extremely centralized power structure, you have a lot of standardized components used to roll out those networks, making construction cheaper and faster due to economies of scale.
Tldr; China’s rail infra is pretty great, especially when so many of its cities are very rough around the edges otherwise. That said, East Asia’s democracies (Taiwan, S. Korea and Japan) also have excellent transportation networks, so who knows.
Totalitarianism - Under totalitarianism all things are good about it…because you’re not allowed to say otherwise under totalitarianism.
Authenticity.
Totalitarianism is usually easy to identify. A corrupt democracy still has a veneer of legitimacy in a way that an out-and-out totalitarian regime does not.
It’s efficient. No fighting between a million little kings for profit and market.
Smaller grocery stores. One brand of orange juice. One brand of canned corn.
I think the issue is that you are hypothesizing what you think you’d like, while ignoring all the real life examples that show things can go astray. For example, you talk about the benefits of not having a million little kings w/o acknowledging that the one kingmaker can make the head of groceries his inept brother-in-law who pockets half of the funds.
Instead of responding to people why you like totalitarianism, how about you show reference a historical example that was beneficial to a society?
If you definitely know what’s right then forcing everybody to do it your way is a good thing.
Your premise posits that it’s possible to have an infallible leader that always knows best. People are neither infallible nor able to always discern the best course of action. Autocracies lead to repression and stagnation given enough time.
What the leader was an organization of scientists?
Call it a “scientific totalitarianism”. Heck, look at the recent covid thing. If we were all forced at gunpoint to mask and vax. That would be a good thing, right?
Scientists are just as fallible as other people. “Sciences” like phrenology and eugenics used to be in vogue. There’s nothing stopping similar bad science from gaining prominence in a technocracy. If there is an organization with absolute power it will attract people with unhealthy ambition and those people tend to use the tools at their disposal to consolidate their power. Systems need to be built to withstand the worst kinds of people, not built to empower the best kinds of people. It’s a nice idea but it doesn’t work in practice, imo.
My point is, if you knew what was right (Scientific being just one example) then forcing the (ignorant) people to do the right thing is good. This is obvious.
You don’t let the kid drink a bottle of gasoline because the alternative is to infringe upon his freedom of choice.
In a utopia where you have a perfectly benevolent leader an autocracy would be great. My point is power attracts unscrupulous people which given enough time will shape policy to benefit themselves and consolidate power if there aren’t safeguards in place.
If you can prove beyond any reasonable doubt that someone is ignorant of facts, and then sure you can call it obvious and good. But when nobody can agree what is reasonable, why is your perspective of good the one everyone must follow? It’s not always obvious. Don’t pretend it is. And things that are reasonable and obvious to you aren’t necessarily reasonable and obvious to others. You aren’t willing to embrace the diversity of human experience and opinion, so you won’t get the benefits of that diversity. Just because someone else has a different idea doesn’t make it wrong. If you think literally every idea that isn’t exactly the same as yours is wrong, then we’re wasting our time here anyway.
So again, why is your path the one we’re picking? Even if I do agree with it, I am not willing to agree to it blindly, I want to know why we’re supposed to follow your advice/instructions/demands. At gunpoint or otherwise. And that’s why I’ll never follow a totalitarian, because totalitarians never have to explain themselves, and generally won’t. I hope you brought enough bullets if that’s your plan.
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What if they are eugenecists and start sterilizing “disabled” people?
I mean, its scientifically sound. Right?
What you’re describing here (and in the thread below) sounds a bit like technocracy, so you might be interested in reading about the Technocracy Movement.
Forcing anyone to do anything is inherently wrong.
Also, “whats right” isnt objective.
