The common feature of all totalitarian systems is neither concentration
camps, secret police, nor mass surveillance – as horrifying as all these
are. The common feature of all totalitarian systems is the prohibition
of questions: every totalitarian regime first monopolises what counts as
rationality and determines what questions you are allowed to ask.
If you don’t see that precisely this is happening on an unprecedented scale globally, you have not been paying close attention.
Polish
philosopher Leszek Kolakowski’s described the totalitarian method of
imposing unity on an entire population as perfect integration through
perfect fragmentation. Mull over this phrase while you watch TV or
scroll social media: perfect integration through perfect fragmentation.
In
the Czech context of the 1970s and 1980s, as Professor F. Flagg Taylor
writes: “[Vaclav] Benda saw that the Communist regime either sought to
infiltrate and co-opt independent social structures for its own purposes
or to de-legitimate and destroy them. It sought to maintain a populace
of isolated individuals without any habits or desires for association.”
In other words, as he put it, the Iron Curtain had not just descended
between East and West, but between one individual and another, or even
between an individual’s own body and his soul.
Benda was a
faithful Catholic and remained grounded in his Christian convictions as
he faced the challenges of his time and place. He recognised that any
hopes for the regime’s fundamental reform or even moderation were
futile. It was time to ignore the regime’s official structures and build
new ones where human community could be rediscovered and human life
could be lived decently.
Benda proposed building new small-scale
institutions of civil society – in education and family, in
productivity and market exchange, in media and communications,
literature and the arts, entertainment and culture, and so on – what
Benda called “The Parallel Polis.”...<<<Read More>>>...
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