Tyranny offers the individual a form of escapism and freedom, but the personal restrictions of a free society are the price of long-lasting freedom
Perhaps one of the most profoundly paradoxical features of political and economic freedom is that it burdens us with a vast amount of restrictions. Liberation from a central plan and a social ideology imposed from above leaves the individual unmoored from the reassuring safety nets of the state that provide a sturdy guidance for human lives. Building a free society involves teaching people to accept the great encumbrance of responsibility for the outcome of their lives. This is far more stressful than the easy life of tyranny.
When Nazi Germany was defeated in 1945, one of the mysteries that political scientists and philosophers had to grapple with was the unnerving reality that Nazi tyranny proved relatively easy to impose on the country’s population. It took Hitler over a decade to consolidate his hold over the German public, but in an historical context it was a rapid transition that seemed to have been surprisingly effortless to congeal and direct. Surely, humans naturally want to be free? How was this possible?
This week, a copy of Hannah Arendt’s magisterial work Eichmann in Jerusalem, published in 1963, appeared as an image on Twitter. The book had been torn in the rampage that occurred in a Ukrainian twitter-user’s house just outside Kyiv. The owners found the damaged book in their ransacked apartment upon their return. Whoever was in that home could not have damaged a more worthy article. The book is an account of the trial of one of the architects of Hitler’s Final Solution, who was snatched from Argentina to face trial, in an elaborate plan hatched by Israel’s intelligence agency Mossad. I doubt the marauders who damaged that book knew of the author or her works. They should, because Arendt was a Holocaust survivor. She had first-hand experience of Nazi atrocities and she was perhaps the person who did the most to unlock and solve the paradox of the hold of tyranny on the human mind. If the apartment’s raiders had read her book, they might have learnt something useful.
Arendt had studied in detail the interviews with Adolf Eichmann that had been compiled to construct the case for his trial in 1961. It was within them that she found an answer to the timeless paradox of the ease with which totalitarianism takes hold. Arendt realized that tyranny is a form of freedom. In her other great work, The Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1976, there is a paragraph that I think gets at the essential problem: “These men began to tell the mob that each of its members could become such a lofty all-important walking embodiment of something ideal if he would only join the movement. Then he no longer had to be loyal or generous or courageous, he would automatically be the very incarnation of Loyalty, Generosity, Courage.’
The essential feature of totalitarianism is that it absolves the individual of the need to think, as he absorbs himself fully into a pre-arranged doctrine. Any failure in life can be blamed on the ‘system’ over which one had little control. At the very least, any failures at the personal or national level can be written off as a misplaced trust in the state from which one can, as an individual, move on after the catastrophe. Signing up to a tyrannical regime offers either participation in a great victory with no personal need to fashion a philosophy of life for oneself, or plausible abnegation of personal responsibility for a calamitous outcome. What’s not to like? Tyranny is the ultimate personal freedom. This form of freedom, which one might perhaps call the ‘freedom of submission’, is highly attractive to many people, because not everyone has clearly defined personal goals in life. Being given a plan to follow is a relief, a comfort even.
One of the most corrosive features of this freedom of submission is the capacity for individuals to carry out heinous crimes under the pretext that these are the work of higher minds who understand the greater historical arc in which those crimes take place. Although I, as an individual, may be responsible for something appalling, the overall good that will ultimately result from the larger plan will overshadow the small-scale terror that I have unleashed. These impulses explode with catastrophic speed and rapacity because they give free reign to the most reptilian instincts of the human mind, leading to cruelty, rape and all manner of horrors and depravities that lurk deep in the human personality, ready to leap into the unshackled human mind when the unlimited and unrestrained freedom of tyranny is offered to the individual. The freedoms of totalitarianism have within them the seeds of unimaginable sufferings.
But there was more that Arendt found. Another aspect of this mindset was that it required no great complexity. When Arendt and others tried to dissect the phenomenon of the Third Reich, they expected to find some highly intricate set of social conditions that allowed the rise of this barbarism. Surely some convoluted plan would be found that would give us the reassurance that statistically this was unlikely to ever happen again? What she found, instead, stunned her as much as it was unbelievable to others. A shrill, demanding, insistent, and above all, simple, message is all that was needed to create the mass movement into which individuals can surrender themselves totally and achieve the freedom of tyranny. Indeed, the simpler it is, the easier it is to convince the human mind that within it lies an anodyne existence free of the trouble of thought. Hannah Arendt grasped the banality of evil, the subtitle to her famous book, ripped in half in that Kyiv apartment.
It is not enough to see the banality of evil as a violent struggle of the tyrant against a free people. It is necessary to read Arendt once more to understand that the struggle is not so much to convince people of the benefits of freedom, but in a strange way, the exact opposite. We need to do a better job of understanding that the freedom of a society in which the basest of human instincts is held in check by controlled government is one in which one must take on the burden of personal responsibility to work towards constructing the civic structures of accountable government.
Turning Arendt’s observations on their head, we can also see that as a mirror image of the freedom within tyranny, a free society has running through it the inescapable strands of tyranny. Nineteenth century philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville noticed the ‘tyranny of the majority,’ the powerful majoritarian peer-pressure that comes from the very process of democracy itself. The ‘tyranny of custom’ was a fascination for nineenth century English philosopher John Stuart Mill. Customs, traditions and habits are necessary boundaries for a stable civil society that can keep the worst of human instincts properly shackled, yet they encourage the shrivelling glare of public disapproval for eccentricity and acts of individualism. Thus, released from the reassuring all-embracing doctrine of the state, the individual finds himself confronted instead by the judgemental gaze of society. Yet, this tyranny of freedom is the necessary price to secure the longer-term freedoms that give us a peaceful life without the arbitrary forces of human violence. The tyranny of freedom is unappealing to those who want a simple life, but the rewards, even to the most unambitious person, are worth much more than what the freedom of submission can grant.
The task that lies before humanity is to convince and remind our fellow humans that the freedom of capitulation to state power is no real freedom at all. The numb simplicity of the national enemy, the symbols of war and the existential threat to a nation provides a short-term catharsis from individual responsibility. Real freedom, and by that I mean a society in which both the leaders and the population are accountable to fair laws, and where all the freedoms of expression, assembly and press can be enjoyed to their fullest, requires individuals to forfeit the ease of hiding behind the state’s message and to expose themselves to a critique of their own decisions. The challenge for all of us is to bring up a generation of people who understand that if you want lasting freedom, you must trade in the freedom of tyranny for the tyranny of freedom.
