How to counter the psychology of totalitarianism

The Psychology of Totalitarianism is a book for our time. It should be high on the reading list of anyone who wants to understand our cultural moment, and to make an informed and effective response.

Mattias Desmet teaches at Ghent University in Belgium—in the Department of Psychoanalysis and Clinical Consulting. According to the book’s introduction, he noticed in 2017 that the “grip of governments on private life was growing tremendously fast.” When this phenomenon went into overdrive in the early months of 2020, he was driven to complete the project.

Desmet begins by asking a simple question: Why is it that totalitarian governments never arose at any time in history until the 20th century? He answers, “totalitarianism is not a historical coincidence… It is the logical consequence of mechanistic thinking and the delusional belief in the omnipotence of human rationality.” 

With the term “mechanistic thinking,” Desmet means the myth that man can be “reduced to a biological organism.” This reduction explains every human action as a mere biochemical reaction that is strictly determined by external factors. In other words, human will and purpose are non-existent. Human behavior can be controlled totally by anyone able to manipulate the world.

When enough people adopt this false, mechanistic worldview it is inevitable that they will begin to pull levers and push buttons in an attempt to act on their beliefs. That, and not some grand conspiracy, is what we are seeing in our cultural moment.

This mechanistic thinking is sometimes called “Atheistic Materialism,” sometimes, “Epicureanism,” or simply, “Science” with a capital “S.” However one names it, we should recognize it as a religion in its own right—one that is in direct conflict with Christianity. 

Christianity sees will and purpose at the core of the universe. God has perfect free will. When He creates man in His own image, God passes that will down to the human race as human agency limited only toward its creator. Therefore, it should be no surprise that the mechanistic thinking that dominates our world sees any vestige of Christianity as unacceptable blasphemy.

Mattias Desmet
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Desmet’s book is divided into three parts. The first section is valuable as a concise history of science. It traces how scientific advances can create the illusion that the entire universe is nothing but an elaborate machine. But once this illusion is mistaken for reality, it takes on a life of its own.

Scientific evidence that disproves the mechanistic assumption must be discounted, ignored, or denied. Fraud required to preserve the illusion creates a feedback loop of ever-increasing fraud. Eventually, the fraudulent science becomes impossible to hide and society reaches a tipping point.

The second section is the most riveting. It details how societies in the grip of a mechanistic worldview can fall into a type of mass hypnosis. It always begins with four widespread societal conditions.

The first two are the loneliness of social isolation coupled with a feeling of meaninglessness. From these the next two conditions arise: free-floating anxiety and free-floating aggression. By “free-floating,” Desmet means that these feelings are not connected with any particular threat or enemy. Such disconnected anxiety and aggression can easily be connected to something concrete. When that happens, we are in the early stages of totalitarianism.

In Nazi Germany, Jews were named as the cause of anxiety and the target of aggression. In Bolshevik Russia, it was the aristocracy—the “haves” became the targets of the “have nots.” In Communist China, it was those who stood against the Great Leap Forward.

In America today, the four conditions of totalitarianism are again present. Broken families and social media create widespread social disconnect. Notions that the universe, and life itself, arose from random chance feed a sense of meaninglessness. People feel anxiety without knowing why. The op-ed page daily demonstrates festering anger and aggression.

What will it take to prevent America’s falling into the same abyss as Germany, Russia and China? That is where Desmet’s book shines, and the reason it is a must-read. 

The path to reversing course begins with a sense of the transcendent and sublime. Science is not the end-all and be-all of the universe. Humans are more than biochemical machines. We really do have free will that can consider options and act on them. This reflects the will of a sovereign God guiding the universe.

Totalitarianism seeks to stamp out this truth. Don’t let it. Do not be intimidated into parroting the latest lie designed to squelch this truth. Speak the truth. Stand on principle. Swim upstream—especially when you are in the minority. 

Through each of these small acts of defiance, you assert your true humanity. In so doing, you reflect the God who created you. You become a beachhead of life that no mechanistic power can crush.

To end the public warfare, stop the war within.

Photo credit: Jonathan Borba on Unsplash

The tragic loss of life in Uvalde Texas should be an occasion for coming together. As one, our hearts break at seeing the photographs of 19 tiny victims, two female teachers, and a husband who died of a broken heart. We needed time to process, time to grieve. We did not need the immediate exploitation of the crime for political ends.

Only two days before the horrific shooting, the WTE editorial board published a call for civility. Its tone was sincere, but pessimistic. “It almost seems like a waste of words to ask for and expect anything else. Yet we can’t help but try.” I think they articulated the hopelessness felt by an overwhelming swath of readers.

We know that we want to be left alone to live in peace the lives that God has given us. We want to raise our children in an environment where all our neighbors and teachers help us to protect them both from those who would murder their bodies with bullets and those who would murder their souls with lies.

Uvalde victims

I believe that nobody in this entire state would disagree with that simply stated desire. And yet, I can already feel the tug at the leash as the dogs of war ready themselves. Two sides of an incessant cultural war long to sink their teeth into that red meat and pull it in two vastly different directions, tearing its unity right down the middle.

Before the words of unity even leave our mouths, the noise of the mob turns them into words of war. One mob accuses the proponents of gun control of killing children by leaving them defenseless. The other mob accuses the opponents of gun control of killing children by arming irresponsible and troubled people. Both consider the lies that kill children to be in the mouths of the others.

Our pessimism arises from the repeated experience that neither side can possibly concede an inch to the other. It’s not that they don’t want to do so, but that they cannot. It is not merely about willfulness and hard-headedness. We are—all of us—chained into a way of thinking that prevents thought. We have been drawn into a liberty that enslaves us.

Alasdair MacIntyre, the Scottish philosopher, began to uncover this impossible situation in his 1981 book, “After Virtue.” There he wrote about how the emerging redefinition of “liberty” threatened to enslave us all in the hopeless world we are now experiencing. When freedom is reduced to the unfettered ability to do whatever the bleep I want, we simply lose the ability to have civil discourse. When truth ceases to exist, the only value that matters in the public square is “what I want.”

In a particularly lucid paragraph, MacIntyre writes, “Contemporary moral experience has a paradoxical character. For each of us is taught to see himself or herself as an autonomous moral agent; but each of us also …[practices] manipulative relationships with others. Seeking to protect the autonomy that we have learned to prize, we aspire ourselves not to be manipulated by others; seeking to incarnate our own principles and stand-point in the world of practice, we …[direct] towards others those very manipulative modes of relationship which each of us aspires to resist in our own case.”

Once we define “freedom” as the ability to live completely and absolutely by our own inner desires, we have no alternative but to stop up our ears to any and every external authority. Other people’s opinions become threats to our very existence. Not only people, but also facts, logic, Bible, and even God Himself become mortal enemies. That is the prison that encloses us.

This lie about freedom isolates us in silos of individuality that are oppressively lonely. It prevents us from having civil discourse. It poisons the world that we want to be safe for our children. It is precisely this false view of freedom that unleashed the demons in Buffalo, Uvalde, and across our own state.

But I am not pessimistic. The chains that enslave us in this hopeless thought-world may be impossibly strong, but they are also brittle. Built on a lie about human freedom, they can be broken by a single word of truth. For truth exists not in each private will, but as a public gift from God. This truth frees us from the slavery of pretending to be gods.

Thus, we are freed from the slavery of obligating others while, we ourselves, avoid every obligation. We are freed, instead, to submit to the obligations that God lovingly gives us. These are gifts, not debts. Under God, we neither manipulate others, nor are we manipulated. 

Civility returns because we have stopped the endless war within ourselves.

What is Truth?

Ecco Homo by Antonio Ciseri

The world is facing a crisis of confidence. Whenever a once-trusted institution is caught in a lie, two things happen. First, those betrayed begin to look elsewhere for reliability and truth. Second, the level of proof that they demand becomes higher than before.

That higher level of scrutiny can, in turn, expose other lies. The exposure of these lies shakes confidence in still more institutions and raises the level of scrutiny even higher. Before long, the spiral of increased scrutiny applied to ever more institutions becomes an uncontrollable chain reaction.

Like the chain reaction at Chernobyl, the exponential release of destructive energy will lead to a smoking hole in the ground. That is what we are experiencing on a global scale. Legacy media, the intelligence community, globalist corporations, and international NGOs are nearing a meltdown as more and more information becomes available about their blatant and complicit lies. 

Fukushima nuclear meltdown

Unless they quickly restore confidence by public repentance for past lies and absolute transparency, they will sink into irretrievable irrelevance. They may still speak just as loudly as before, but their betrayed constituents increasingly tune them out as part of the background noise. 

Soon they are viewed as the anti-truth. People listen to them only to learn what NOT to believe. There has always been a fringe who viewed legacy media and government officials in this way. But today, that group may well be a majority. And, polls indicate that it is growing larger by the day.

From the perspective of news consumers, this meltdown is disorienting—even tragic. But it doesn’t have to be. It can also be a catharsis, a cleaning out of the cobwebs. It gives us an opportunity to ask a more fundamental question, namely, what makes any source reliable or unreliable?

That question is at the heart of epistemology—the study of why we believe what we believe. “What is truth?” That’s the question Pontius Pilate asked Jesus on the day of His crucifixion. On this Good Friday it still hangs in the air.

“What is truth?” The very question presupposes that truth exists. That is the very first truth. Modern philosophies that deny truth’s existence contradict themselves by claiming that the statement “there is no truth,” is itself true. In so doing, they discredit themselves and the entire system they have built.

This is good news for many who have been led falsely into the desert of nihilism. This dead-end philosophy destroys lives with a fundamental lie. It strips life of meaning and purpose and leaves behind a wake of despair, suicide, and murder. The lie of nihilism is the world’s most deadly weapon.

This leads to the second rule of epistemology: Once any source is caught in a single lie, the entire source becomes unreliable. It may still speak some truth from time to time, but it must always be judged by something outside of itself. We experience this whenever we are lied to. We are no longer able to trust that source. This is not a choice, it’s a consequence.

When we recognize this reality, it is immensely helpful. It narrows the field of competing truth sources—drastically. What human being has never told you a falsehood? Which of you has never deceived yourself? Honest answers to these two questions turn our eyes away from every human teacher. As the Psalmist says, “all men are liars” (Psalm 116:11).

Stripped of any confidence in humanity, but armed with the knowledge that truth nevertheless exists, we must conclude that truth transcends humanity. This observation discredits Humanism and Secularism as lying philosophies. Both falsely claim that human beings can find—or create—truth for themselves. 

It is no coincidence that those philosophies that deny the transcendence of truth are the same ones that now deny plain biology, math, and logic. This is simply the logical outcome of denying plain truth. 

Truth is an integrated whole. It is impossible to deny one aspect of the truth without distorting all of it. This explains why Jesus told Pontius Pilate, “Everyone who is of the truth listens to My voice” (John 18:37). 

It was not very long ago that we all knew this. Universities openly acknowledged theology as “the queen of the sciences.” Bacon, Newton, and all scientists knew that denial of Jesus would lead down a rabbit hole of nonsense and madness. Like it, or not, current events have proved them right.

But our situation is not hopeless. While madness is contagious, there is an inoculation against it. Jesus has promised, “If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (John 8:31-32). This, of course, refers to freedom from hell in eternity. But its blessed side benefit is freedom from today’s madness.

Lincoln at the Springfield Lyceum

Few beyond the most devoted historians are conversant with Abraham Lincoln’s “Lyceum address.” But many have heard its most famous passage. There he prophesied that America will never be invaded by a foreign power. “If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”

“The Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois” met in the tumultuous years before the civil war to consider how the Republic might be preserved. Several things are noteworthy, here. First, more than two decades before the outbreak of war, these men saw storm clouds gathering. Second, they were not the gentry, but the young family men. Third, they prepared not by honing their combat skills, but by considering First Principles.

We should look to their example. During our own tumultuous times, it is an act of love and good citizenship for young leaders of every Wyoming community to call their countrymen together and look toward the future. I will write more about this in the near future.

We possess the richest land, the soundest constitutions, and an explicit awareness of our place “under God.” These we have not built, but have inherited from the labor of our forebears. To pass them to our children, we must, first, work to preserve them.

On that January night in 1838, Lincoln was invited to address, “The perpetuation of our political institutions.” It was only eight days after an Illinois jury had acquitted the murderers of Elijah Lovejoy, a newspaper editor. 

Years of lawlessness in the federal government had spilled over into state and local governments. Corrupt officials at every level ran roughshod over the rule of law. Open murderers were given a pass while the harshest of penalties were meted out in minor cases.

As an example of the latter, Francis McIntosh was arrested on April 28, 1836. He was a freeman employed on a riverboat recently docked in St. Louis, Missouri. While minding his own business, two police officers chasing a third man ordered McIntosh to join the chase. When he declined, they arrested him for “interfering in an apprehension” and informed him that he would spend the next five years in prison.

This set off a chain of events that, eventually, led to a mob dragging McIntosh out of the city, chaining him to a tree, and burning him alive. The grand jury, convened two weeks later, refused to indict his murders. To make matters worse, Judge Luke Lawless falsely told the jury that an abolitionist newspaperman, Elijah Lovejoy, had colluded with McIntosh.

For the next 18 months, mobs canceled Lovejoy. First, they destroyed his printing press and two subsequent replacements. Finally, they gunned down Lovejoy himself as he tried to protect his third replacement press. On January 19, 1938, the mob was put on trial but found not guilty.

Examples of such corruption of government institutions and its resultant vigilantism could be found across the United States. It was the poison fruit ripening on the diseased vine of slavery. Manifest injustice, defended and tolerated, must produce antisocial fruit. This is as true in our day as in Lincoln’s.

Young Lincoln drew out three consequences of this downward spiral. First, he noted that whenever vigilantism circumvents the rule of law, it will inevitably punish and murder the innocent, worsening the stench of injustice. Eventually, that injustice will rebound to sweep up the original vigilantes themselves.

Second, criminals and would-be criminals will learn from the example of mobs that get away with arson, assault and murder. Those without self-restraint are only restrained by the dread of punishment. When they learn by example that they might escape punishment, they will become “absolutely unrestrained.”

The outbreak of general mayhem unleashed by the evils of corrupt governments and mob justice will, finally, have its most terrible effect of all. Good folk, “seeing their property destroyed; their families insulted, and their lives endangered; their persons injured; and seeing nothing in prospect that forebodes a change for the better; become tired of, and disgusted with, a Government that offers them no protection.” 

Kenosha, Wisconsin - August 24, 2020

When good citizens reach that stage, there is no one left to defend the Republic. The solution that Lincoln prescribe is personal. “Let every American, every lover of liberty, every well wisher to his posterity, swear by the blood of the Revolution, never to violate in the least particular, the laws of the country; and never to tolerate their violation by others. As the patriots of seventy-six did to the support of the Declaration of Independence, so to the support of the Constitution and Laws, let every American pledge his life, his property, and his sacred honor.”

Lincoln’s Lyceum speech is worth reading in total. Let it be heard in a hundred Lyceums across our state. 

Also published in the Wyoming Tribune Eagle, February 4, 2022, and in the Cowboy State Daily, February 3, 2022.

Pandora’s Box and the Innocence of Minors

Pandora's Box, Sebastian Becker

Before there was “Crosby, Stills, and Nash,” Stephen Stills and Neil Young spent two years in a band called “Buffalo Springfield,” which released three albums and one smash hit. Exactly 55 years ago, “For What It’s Worth” was on its way to a No. 7 peak on Billboard’s hot 100 list.

“There’s something happening here. What it is ain’t exactly clear.” This iconic song became the anthem of Vietnam war-protests. But when it was first performed on Thanksgiving Day, 1966, Kent State was four years in the future. Stills was talking about the Sunset Strip Riots.

Pandora’s Box, a nightclub that catered to teenage partiers, was about to be bulldozed. On November 12, 1966, teens staged a sit-in that turned violent. Stills witnessed it on his way to a gig, and the song was born. Later, he mused, “Riot is a ridiculous name, it was a funeral for Pandora’s Box. But it looked like a revolution.”

That, I think, is why the song is so famous. It captured a feeling in the air. While revolutionary events are in process, few contemporaries notice. Stills did, and his words beckon us to do the same.

Buffalo Springfield

There is, indeed, something happening today. Pandora’s Box has been opened and has unleashed war upon us. In the fog of that war, it is difficult to know exactly “what it is.” But our moment screams for everybody to “look what’s going down.” If we don’t, we will fall under the same harsh judgment that we pronounce on others. 

Consider past cultures that failed to understand their own times and to stand against massive evils that we now see with 20/20 hindsight. How could the denizens of France not predict that a Reign of Terror would result from murdering priests and kings? Why didn’t more Russians stand against the murderous Bolsheviks who were gaining power? That mistake cost 100 million lives over the next 70 years. What devilry gripped the cultured, Bach-loving Germans? They allowed a madman to turn their industry and efficiency into a murder machine.

While Stills thought the Sunset Strip Riots were hardly riots at all, he couldn’t shake the sense that “something’s happening here.” They were more than another salvo in the Sexual Revolution. They crossed a new and significant line. On that night, the Sexual Revolution enveloped minor children.

The sit-in remained a peaceful protest until the stroke of 10 o’clock. At that time, the LAPD was tasked with enforcing the city’s curfew on minors. The people of Los Angeles had passed an ordinance to protect the innocence of children younger than 18. Push came to shove, and the Sunset Strip Riots were born.

The opening salvos of the Sexual Revolution were attacks on marriage. Its philosophical leaders, going back to Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) and Percy Shelley (1792-1822), were intent on destroying the sacred bond between husband and wife. Divorce, fornication, and adultery were means toward that end. 

But as the Revolution advanced, the crosshairs shifted to the children. “Free Love” was never the ultimate goal. It has always been a means toward an end. The goal is the breakdown of the family. Once the marriage vow is obliterated, the battle must shift to the natural bond between parent and child. While that remains, family bonds still have precedence.

Maybe Stills knew this consciously—maybe, only subconsciously. But children were the focus of his haunting refrain, “I think it’s time we stop, children. What’s that sound? Everybody, look what's going down.” Whether Stills intended this, or not, Carl S. Trueman painstakingly documents the sexualization of children in his new book, “The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self.”

This book is a must-read for parents and policy makers who are interested in the health and well-being of children. It helps to explain how the innocence of children came under attack through the militantly atheist philosophy of people like Shelly. It, further, documents how Sigmund Freud deliberately sexualized every aspect of childhood development—from breast-feeding to potty-training.

It is precisely at this point that school boards and library associations come into the picture. Statutes protecting minor children obligate state actors to respect parental rights. But these statutes hinder the agenda to dissolve the natural family and replace it with the state. 

Those who tell you that the arguments over objectionable books and curricula are about “free speech,” or about “access to information,” are either deceived, or deceiving. The fact remains that statutory age restrictions on sexual consent (statutory rape) and access to sexual content (e.g. Restricted films) are legal recognition of parental rights. Violation of these laws violate parental rights. Nobody has the right to interfere in the sacred relationship between parents and their own children.

Will we, as a lawful society, respect parents who guard the innocence of minors? Will we help them maintain their sole authority to educate their own children in family formation and emotional health?

Or, will we undermine parental rights and give ever more power to teachers’ unions and library associations to indoctrinate our children in the philosophical thought-stream that brought us the French Revolution, the Bolsheviks, and the Hitler Youth? 

According to legend, Pandora’s Box contains war. The nightclub that circumvented parental rights and brought the sexual revolution to minor children could not have been more appropriately named.

Also published in the Wyoming Tribune Eagle, January 14, 2022, the Cowboy State Daily, January 13, 2022, and the American Thinker. 

Thankfulness in hindsight gives hope in foresight.

Lovingly baked turkeys and hams, all over Wyoming, have become chaotic pots of leftover meat. Formal dinner rolls have been repurposed as sandwich buns. A bevy of side dishes now languish in refrigerators vainly hoping to be chosen before they spoil.

Black Friday shoppers have been up since the crack of dawn to snatch up deals to put under the Christmas tree. Thanksgiving Day 2021 is in the books.

For the past five years, this author has stoically accepted the fact that any Friday column that attempts to chime in on Thanksgiving will be embarrassingly late to the party. This year, however, I want to buck convention. After Thanksgiving celebrations that focused on present blessings, let’s use this day after Thanksgiving to be thankful for the blessings of the past.

I am thankful, first, that my parents had me. They didn’t have to. They were wed in the same year that the Pill was released on the world. After having two children, already, I was not needed to complete their perfect suburban family. By a mere daily dose of the new miracle drug, I would be a cipher.

It is impossible to imagine what non-existence would be like. Gone would be all the happy memories of childhood, achievements of adolescence, and satisfaction of raising a family under Wyoming skies. More than that, the kids and grandkids that laugh and fight around my table would be deleted from the universe, and the world would be less joyful, absent their love.

I am thankful that my grandfather attended youth group at St. John Lutheran Church in Ord, Nebraska. He might have frequented the bar, instead. As with most young men of his age, it is quite likely that he was Luke-warm to the meetings. Perhaps he had a few arguments with his parents over driving all the way into town for a mediocre Bible study and corny games. But despite any youthful resistance, he met my grandmother through it.

Over a century ago, there is no way on God’s green earth that a farm-boy from Ord, Nebraska should meet a girl who lived 70 miles away. But, facilitated by the Walther League, two Lutheran families intertwined. Rather than falling into the chaos of the roaring 20s, two kids built a nest of stability, warmth and value that still nurtures and protects generations of family scattered from Seattle to Sarasota. 

I am grateful to God for the freedom that enabled my great great grandfather, John, to travel the streets of Chicago in horse-drawn wagon and distribute bottles of fresh milk. Decades before anybody had refrigerators, there were a thousand ways for milk to spoil and sicken his many customers. But the relationship of conscientiousness and trust built between John and his customers enabled them to receive safe and nutritious milk without stifling government regulation.

For John, this freedom provided a stable home to share with his wife, Anna, and their seven children. It enabled them both to teach their children ethics of hard work, trustworthiness, sexual virtues, and faithfulness to God. Generations later, these lessons would still echo in the hearts of their descendants.

Words fail to describe the multitude of blessings that have fallen to me from their self-denial and hard work. Yet they are merely random examples—cherry-picked from dozens of generations known, and hundreds of generations unknown—who lived lives of extraordinary ordinariness. I don’t deserve to have their gifts. But I do.

Not just me, but all of us are infinitely richer because of the heroic lives they led. Yet, they did not consider their own lives “heroic.” As they trudged the dusty streets and cultivated the sunbaked ground, they were incapable of seeing over the horizon of time to the particular ways that they were storing up treasures for me.

Daily, they rolled out of bed, put on their shoes, and put their hand to the plow. Daily, they encountered pain, disappointment, and loss. Daily, they fought temptation to choose the easy way over the right way. But with each triumph over temptation, they were storing up a cornucopia of fruit for today’s bounty.

We live in a culture of individualistic, immediate self-fulfillment. We are saturated by preachers who tell us to scratch every itch and gratify every lust. We know, intuitively, that these are false preachers. Yet, in the middle of the struggles their message is tantalizing. 

That is why I am grateful not only for the benefits previous generations accrued for me. Even more, I am thankful for the example they left me. It is a light at one end of the tunnel. Looking back and seeing that light we are encouraged and assured that there is light at the other end, as well.

Also published in the Wyoming Tribune Eagle, November 26, 2021, and the Cowboy State Daily, November 28, 2021.