Knowledge And Decisions

It is also in keeping with the concept of ideology as a knowledge-economizing device that there should be defections with age as discordant knowledge forces itself on one’s attention, until a point is reached where the cost of reconciling it with the ideological vision exceeds the cost of discarding the vision itself. Explaining complex reality with simple and familiar variables is a low-cost process initially, but this cost tends to rise over time, as ever more complex relationships must be postulated between the simple variables and the accumulating complex reality — much like the Flat Earth Society explaining away phenomena which have long ago convinced others that the earth is round. Indeed, when theories are viewed instrumentally, rather than as literal reconstructions of reality, the reason for preferring the round earth theory is basically an intellectual economizing process: the incremental investment in a slightly more complex initial assumption than a flat earth is later repaid by lesser intellectual effort in reconciling the results with empirical observation. It is a question of cost-effectiveness rather than of reaching ultimate, immutable truth. For the initiate in totalitarian ideology, however, cost-effectiveness may lie with the simple assumptions, because authentication is a sequential process in which the full costs will be revealed only in the course of time. He may also be more interested in the power than in the cognitive advantages to be derived from totalitarianism — or may become so oriented in the course of time.

This consumer good aspect of totalitarian ideology is an essential part of the phenomenon. The hypnotic fascination and exhilaration with which Hitler’s followers listened to his speeches was an integral part of Nazism. Among Communists, the vision of the ideology itself — the “wretched of the earth” creating “a new world” — substitutes for oratorical genius, and has in fact proven far more effective with intellectuals. The “intellectual delight” and “intellectual bliss” on reading the Marxian vision,²³ the sense of revelation when “the whole universe falls into a pattern like the stray pieces of a jigsaw puzzle assembled by magic at one stroke,”²⁴ the thrill when the “revolutionary words leaped from the printed page and struck me with tremendous force”²⁵ — these are part of the psychic rewards for the total commitment that characterizes totalitarian movements.

Because Marx and Engels had already paid the high fixed costs of creating the vision, latter-day Marxists could achieve ideological results at lower incremental costs. They need not possess Hitler’s genius for oratory or for discerning exploitable human susceptibilities. It is only in the light of such ideological visions that it is possible to understand the “confessions” to nonexistent crimes which have been produced not only in Soviet courts but even in Communist movements in Western democracies — movements possessing no tangible power to punish their members. The ideological context dwarfs the particular characteristics of the particular individual, as in this description of an internal party “trial” among American Communists in the 1930s: