Knowledge And Decisions

The particular ideology may be a creation of the totalitarian leader, as in Hitler’s National Socialism, or may have an historical tradition, as in Marxism. However, even in the latter case, the ideology may still be instrumental rather than controlling. Certainly people following Marxism — as distinguished from using Marxism — could never set up a totalitarian state. Marx and Engels opposed autocracy, much less totalitarianism.¹⁸ The whole point of the proletarian revolution — i.e., a revolution from the bottom up — was that revolution from the top down implied a post-revolutionary dictatorship over the proletariat.¹⁹ Lenin’s revolution from the top down confirmed the Marxian fears, but Lenin was not bound by the “original meaning” of Marxism and in fact reinterpreted Marx to justify what he had done.²⁰

Ideology is not only instrumental, or a producer’s good, for the government; it is also a consumer good for the populace, or segments thereof. Totalitarian ideology typically features (1) the localization of evil — in Jews, capitalists, or some other group — so that comprehensive political solutions to age-old human problems seem feasible within a reasonable time horizon by surgically removing the offending group, leaving a healthy body politic intact, (2) the localization of wisdom, to explain why this miraculous cure has escaped so many minds for so many centuries, as well as explaining the necessity for superseding democratic institutions and beliefs, (3) a single scale of values by which priorities may be arranged in every field of human endeavor, to be achieved “at all cost,” (4) the presupposition of sufficient knowledge to achieve whatever goal may be projected, (5) the urgency of the “problem” to be “solved” so that ruthlessness is the lesser of two evils, and (6) a psychic identification with millions, whose opinions may nevertheless be disregarded and whose lives may be sacrificed in the cause, without feelings of guilt. Finally, the totalitarian ideology must be a self-enclosed system, to exclude alternative views and visions which are — regardless of their substance — inherently antithetical to a single totalitarian ideology. It is therefore central to totalitarian ideology that it convert questions of fact into questions of motive.²¹ Facts are a threat because they are independent of the ideology, and questioning the motives of whoever reports discordant facts is a low-cost way of disposing of them.

An ideology may be viewed as a knowledge-economizing device, for it explains complex empirical data with a few simple and familiar variables. It is hardly surprising that ideological explanations should have a special appeal to those with higher costs of alternative knowledge — the inexperienced (“youth”) and the previously politically apathetic (“masses”). As a leading student of totalitarianism has observed:

It was characteristic of the rise of the Nazi movement in Germany and of the Communist movements in Europe after 1930 that they recruited their members from this mass of apparently indifferent people whom all other parties had given up as too apathetic or too stupid for their attention.²²