Evil abstraction: the psychology of totalitarianism

How do we begin to make sense of the mentality of a person, even an entire political regime, that equates complete annihilation with 'liberation'? How do we make sense of an attempt to save and protect a people by raping, torturing, massacring and utterly destroying this people? Are these claims to 'liberation' and 'protection' just cynical public relations messaging meant to mask good-old economic interests, or is the essence of the situation a lot more complex, involved and nuanced than that? And what do these claims reveal about totalitarianism as a form of government?

Many philosophers have had sympathies for, flirted with, or even flat-out subscribed to, totalitarian regimes. Nazi party member Martin Heidegger was just a particularly prominent and relatively recent example. This isn't too hard to understand: democracy is messy, slow to come to solutions, and equates the self-perceived intellectual elite with the masses when it comes to political power, for every vote counts the same. Many philosophers may see this as a kind of levelling at the bottom, which wastes human potential.

And here I must humbly make a confession; a confession mostly to myself, made in the form of a public acknowledgment: I, too, have had limited sympathies for certain forms of totalitarianism. If you continue to read this essay from this point on, please read it through to the end, otherwise you will be left with the impression that the point I am trying to make is the opposite of what I intend.

For 15 years I was married to a Russian originally from the Donbas (we've been divorced for a decade now, but are still friends and I still consider her family—some of whom are still in the Donbas—my family). As such, I've had the opportunity to share in the lives of a typical Russian family from the late 90s up until deep into the Putin era. And it is a fact that the lives of average Russians (except, of course, those in Chechnya) significantly improved in the first years of Putin's rule. He brought back a degree of stability, limited economic security and a healthy sense of pride in being Russian. Compared to the drunken Yeltsin years, those were welcome changes.

And so I was willing, for a long time, to overlook the obvious shortcomings of Putin's government: the cynical assassination of dozens of political opponents, growing corruption that increasingly reminded me of the plundering of Russian wealth by the original Yeltsin oligarchs, press censorship, etc.; all the hallmarks of totalitarianism. Perhaps because of its history—or so I reasoned in my own internal apologetics—Russian society needs a strong hand to be stable; maybe it's just part of the national character and psychology, and we shouldn't be arrogant to the point of thinking that our chosen form of government in the West should apply to everybody.

I've worked in the high-tech industry for well over two decades. During that time, I've had the opportunity to visit China repeatedly, and to work with Chinese both inside and outside China. Indeed, some of the Chinese I know are the smartest people I've ever met (you know who you are, if you are reading this). And it is undeniable that the lives of the average Chinese have improved markedly over the past two decades. Perhaps—I thought—a strong hand is what the Chinese culture and society, given their history, need to be stable and foment economic progress. For even though I am a philosopher, I am very keenly aware that philosophy is irrelevant if one doesn't have a roof over one's head, food on the plate, security for one's family, and healthcare. And many more Chinese have those things today than did in the late 1990s.

Then came COVID, which laid bare the shortcomings of consensus-seeking democracies: while China reacted promptly and took all necessary (and hard) measures, we, in the West, were initially paralysed by discord, marred in nonsensical conspiracy theories and entertaining hysterical fake news on social media; what a circus that was. That caused me to have doubts about the long-term viability of Western democracy: if the vote of a thoughtful and responsible citizen counts the same as those of hysterical idiots out to create havoc just for the heck of it (yes, these people exist), where are we going to end up? If fringe nonsense amasses popular support comparable to that of hard science, what are we to expect of our future?

But Russia's invasion of Ukraine has sobered me up and brought into sharp focus the fundamental difference between the admittedly semi-dysfunctional Western democracies and totalitarian regimes: the latter create an environment extraordinarily conducive to the replacement of human empathy and compassion with ego-inflated geopolitical abstraction; an environment liable to losing touch with human reality and, thereby, turning into an instrument of great suffering.

Some pundits say that Putin does what he does just so he can steal more money. I don't think this holds water. I think Putin, who is now turning 70, is in a desperate search for meaning in his life. He has bought into certain historical, sociological and geopolitical abstractions about Russianness, about the glory and role of the Russian Empire, fantasies about land powers like Russia—in contrast to maritime powers such as the UK—being the guarantors of family values and traditions. As someone deeply anchored in the so-called maritime powers (Portugal, Denmark and the Netherlands are all maritime powers), I know from empirical experience that family and traditional values are as much a part of maritime cultures as they are of land powers. But as nonsensical a fantasy as this stuff may be, I do believe Putin has bought into it, so to place the meaning and purpose of his existence in a greater historical context. His desperate attempt to cement the meaning of his life before his personal death is as intrinsically human as it is dangerous, when it unfolds within a totalitarian context.

Under totalitarianism, the head of state begins to identify with the nation, including its historical past and its fantasized future. This is an exacerbated form of ego inflation that robs one of one's own humanity: after all, one is now a historical figure larger than life, an abstract immortal, something more akin to a slick marble statue than a mere human who must sit on the toilette bowl, every day, to do the stinky business of moist, warm biology.

The problem is that, if one loses one's anchor in humanity, one becomes a great danger to humanity. For human life is now expendable, a means to an end. The warm and moist character of life becomes insignificant before the abstract, slick, sanitized, mythological greatness of Mother Russia, its historical significance and role in the geopolitics of the planet.

This way, the state acquires a standalone ontological status that, in reality, it can't possibly have: after all, there is nothing to the state but the warm, moist, suffering lives of its citizens. There is nothing to the state but the lives of its citizens. Warm, moist, conscious human life is the only carrier of reality any state can ever have. But in the mind of an ego-inflated totalitarian ruler, the state becomes a thing unto itself, its people being merely its servants, means to an end. Not only that, the ruler becomes the very embodiment of the state, no longer a mere mortal. In this grandiose mythological narrative, the suffering of the people is an unfortunate but necessary sacrifice for the glory and transcendence of the state.

At this point, pure abstraction—groundless fantasy, story, made-up nonsense—replaces a faculty almost every person is born with: the ability to empathize with another human being, to feel compassion for people's suffering, to recognize the conscious inner lives of people as the only human reality that there can ever be. Totalitarian rulers lose their humanity—their humanness—and become an instrument for the destruction of the very thing they swore to defend: their own people, who are the nation. And so Putin, by annihilating Mariupol, has 'liberated' the Slavic nation: a fantasy of his pathological mind is liberated within the confines of his pathological mind, while the reality of human life is barbarized. In his mind, Putin is 'saving' an entirely abstract Ukraine by turning the real thing to rubble, raping its women, killing its children. Contact with reality—the reality of conscious suffering—is lost in the name of de-humanized, ego-inflated fantasies of grandeur. This is what evil is.

Indeed, many of us seem to have a very naive understanding of evil: we think evil is deliberate sadism, the felt delight of inflicting pain. This is not what real evil is, for sadism loses its appeal when the suffering of another becomes a statistic, as opposed to a very personal, very intimate experience one-on-one. Sadism doesn't thrive on large numbers, on industrial scales, but real evil does, for it is precisely the de-personalization entailed by large numbers that foments a departure from reality and into fantasized abstraction. The greatest evil-doers are precisely those who believe, sincerely, that they are the ones with the guts to do what is necessary for the greater (totally abstract) good, despite the costs. Hitler did. Stalin did. Putin undoubtedly does.

Make no mistake, it is now patently clear that Putin is evil. He is destroying not only the real Ukraine, but also the real Russia. He is bringing devastating, incomprehensible suffering into the only reality of any people, any state: the experienced reality of its individuals. For the sake of impersonal geopolitical abstractions, he has lost sight of the fact that individual experience is the only carrier of reality we can ever have.

Now, as dysfunctional and slow to act as democracies may be, they do not offer fertile ground for this extraordinarily dangerous form of madness. Democratic leaders are, by and large, not given the (psychological) chance to identify with the state. Whatever ego-inflation they may be predisposed to, the system's checks and balances... well, check and balance the leader's view of themselves. The rotation of power and the social scope of debate prevents the type of myopia and limited view of reality that leads autocratic rulers to take their mere opinions for 'The Truth.' The shadow we all carry inside gets less chance to dominate a democratic system.

The simple truth is almost cliché: unchecked power corrupts. Democracies are less conducive to this kind of moral corruption, for democratic leaders are constantly being confronted by the opposition, the press and the people. Inefficient as it may be, this factor alone renders democracy the form of government least prone to the catastrophic effects of grandiose geopolitical abstraction—that is, to real evil.

In hindsight, the ostensive inefficiency and dysfunction of democratic governments turns out not to be as bad as I originally thought: ultimately, the West did do what was necessary to curtail the pandemic, despite all the hysteria and nonsense. Who would have guessed, prior to 2020, that we could adapt our way of life so dramatically, and so quickly, to address the problem? Working productively from home became our normal modus operandi within mere weeks; not traveling didn't prevent us from doing business and carrying on with life; effective vaccines were developed, tested and deployed to entire populations within months; the wearing of face masks in public became very matter-of-fact in our culture within weeks. It is almost incredible that we could adapt so much so quickly, and to consider these enormous changes all pretty normal in almost no time at all. Prior to the pandemic, these adaptations would have seemed unthinkable. Yet, here we are, with the pandemic more or less under control, while Shanghai is in total lockdown. The dysfunction of democracies may be more superficial than I, and other philosophers before me, thought.

Don't get me wrong: I don't think the West should become some kind of police of the world, and impose our own preferred form of government on peoples with different values and history. The more distinct from ours the history and values of a culture or society are, the more unreliable are our value judgments about how they should live and organize themselves. But when a totalitarian regime gains ground in the midst of our own world, our own culture and value systems, I believe we have the moral and practical obligation to defend our way of life. In this context, the Western reaction to Russia's invasion of Ukraine is inappropriate only in the sense that it may be more restrained than it should have been. Once compassion is replaced with abstraction in a well-armed government, our way of life is threatened and we need to defend it, should we want to continue to live as we have thus far.

In Europe—if not everywhere—totalitarianism is a committal step towards evil. History has shown this again and again, and I feel embarrassed for having overlooked and relativized such a fact. While I admire the nonviolent approaches of a Gandhi or a Luther King, if they are coming to rape my partner, torture my cats, destroy my house and kill me, I will do whatever is necessary to defend myself, my loved ones, and my hard-earned property.

I am surprised when I see some of my readers concluding that such a forceful approach contradicts the oneness of a universal mind. Analytic idealism isn't romantic; in my mind, it isn't at all contradictory with the recognition that, although evil is intrinsic to nature and, as such, to universal consciousness itself, it is still not okay or tolerable; that humans have the moral obligation to pass value judgments and act accordingly, so to deter evil; and that sometimes only force stops it. You will never hear me say that, since the rapist, too, is an aspect of universal consciousness, we should in some sense—any sense at all—tolerate the rape; absolutely not.

My views here should not be taken for naïveté about geopolitics in the West. I am keenly aware that Western powers prop up, finance and protect totalitarian regimes across the world because of economic interests. I am keenly aware that Western militaries have treated some places in the world in ways comparable to how the Russian military is treating Ukraine today. And I am keenly aware that the country that passes for the greatest defender of democracy in the world today operates according to a political and economic system that, technically, doesn't even qualify as democratic. Our hypocrisy is far reaching and abominable.

Yet, the principles I have tried to outline above do not become invalid because of that hypocrisy. We may have a long way to go, but to progress we must have mature clarity about which path to take. Despite my past misgivings, it is clear to me, today, that the path to pursue is one of democracy, press freedom, open political debate, and the protection of individual freedoms and human rights. Totalitarianism, even when it starts well, invariably leads to catastrophe, with unfathomable costs not only for its own people, but its neighbors too.

My vote shall thus never go to anyone who, more or less like a past version of me, engages in apologetics towards totalitarianism, cosies up and schmoozes with autocratic rulers beyond the demands of diplomatic courtesy, offers admiring remarks to criminal governments, or betrays ambitions towards totalitarianism themselves. Alluring as the efficiency and speed of autocracies may be, they are a slippery slope towards geopolitical abstraction, ego inflation, the devaluing of human life, and therefore flat-out evil. And I shall never collaborate with, offer justifications for, or even tolerate, evil.