that's a quote, by the way
(Link)
This is a link to the image that currently graces my desktop at home (image insertion seems not to be working right now). And this is a link to the website of the creator of that image: (Link) You should look at his stuff, it provokes thought and that in itself, in this dumbed-down age of complacent fear and self-satisfied hysteria, is a dangerous act, almost a revolutionary act.
The greatest threat to any State is not an armed populace. It's an armed populace that thinks. Consider the text at the bottom of the image, the text that forms the title of this article. What does the juxtaposition of the words 'totalitarianism', power', and 'idealism' with the image tells us about this artist's conception of all three ideas? The image combines technological artifacts with human form to produce something which is either more or less than either (depending on your point of view) but which in either case is alien. The humanity of the form is consumed by the machine and in the process the machine becomes something more menacing than it otherwise would have been. Intelligence, capability, possibility - but without conscience and therefore without remorse.
Power without conscience expands into every area of possibility open to it, becoming Total Power as it does so, becoming Totalitarianism when it finds an Idea by which to define itself (the Idea of Blood, of Race, in the case of Nazism) and Idealism as it finds a philosophy to explain and justify the dominance of the Idea over everything else.
Any human collectivity can become possessed by an Idea. The Germans under Nazism were possessed by the conjoined ideas of Blood and Race. Jim Jones and the Kool-aid Kids, David Koresh and the Branch Davidians, were alike possessed by the Idea of the Messianic Hero: evidently, some Ideas are more toxic than others.
Every Idea can become an Idealism and every Idealism is, according to this artist, anti-human because every idealism is one more means to feed the totalising of the Idea, and from the totalised Idea flows the persecution of everything that does not conform to that Idea.
'Jesus Christ' is an Idea that in certain sections of American society is total and totalizing, that subsumes the whole of the lives of its adherents within its own life. 'Allah' is a total and totalizing Idea that does the same in the lives of its adherents. Look at the fervor in worship of the evangelical sects, look at the fervor in worship of Islamists: Islamists kill the opponents of Allah; evengelicals (some of them) kill the opponents of Jesus Christ. The origin of the killings in both cases is an Idea of God as total and totalizing, leaving no room for opposed points of view. The names differ, the form and the outcome is the same. Not all Islamists are killers. Not all evangelicals are killers. Those that are killers are so for the same reason - they subordinate humanity and its differences to an Idea that excludes and demonizes difference. Add the fervor of religious identity to the fervor of the political zealot who, for example, believes it to be incumbent upon America to make democratic Republics based on capitalism and free enterprise the political norm throughout the world. The one Idea reinforces the other, they meld into each other, become an Ideal, an Idealism and eventually a political philosophy and a political practice.
It becomes increasingly likely that every opposition to that practice will cease to be seen as merely a divergence in opinion and way of life and come to be seen as an attack upon something that is intrinsically and naturally right. The charm of the Total Idea is that it explains everything. The danger of the Total Idea is that it explains everything but itself as being wrong, and dangerously wrong.
Take away the Total Idea from its adherents and their world flies off its axis and tumbles into chaos. This explains why for the Bible-Believing Christian (for example - it's equally true of Koran-believing Islamists) there can be no errors in their respective books and every text within them is divinely authored. There can be no plurality of Ideas where the mind of God is conceived of as unitary, and the order that proceeds from that mind as necessarily universal in nature.
'Totalitarianism' is not about dictators and repression - as it is commonly misunderstood and misrepresented. Democracies can be totalitarian in the application of a principle (such as 'homeland security'), making that principle a concept to which everything else in life is subordinated.However while democracies may be totalitarian in their application of given principles they do not, usually, comprise totalized States because within a democracy there is, usually, some system of checks and balances working against the free exercise of unlimited power. However, in age of mass democracy and party representation, that system of checks and balances is vulnerable to capture by the Executive - especially when the Executive manages to instil in the population at large a pervasive sense of being under threat, arguably what is now occuring both here in the USA and in the UK.
When power assumes the form of an ideal - an ideal democracy, for example, meant to be a panacea for the world's ills, and that ideal is driven by fear, it is increasingly likely that the power which has assumed the form of an ideal will become totalized because in order to secure the success of the ideal no area of life can be left unpenetrated by power. In America that process has never advanced very far because of the barrier to totalizing power represented by the Constitution. But it is advancing, because every sacrifice of liberty to the Ideal of security makes every subsequent sacrifice that little bit easier.
Until one day you wake up and discover that the face that regards you from the mirror is no longer a face you recognise because, more than anything else, it resembles everything you thought you could not be.