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>>>...
