Your letter didn’t strike me as either rambling or incoherent. The thesis that psychological enslavement preceded every other kind (economic and coercive) is a most interesting one. In any case, in a society without pronounced property inequality and without a distinct coercive apparatus, a ruling elite could only have formed out of people possessing certain psychological traits. Namely, a more developed ‘will to power’ than the rest — that is, a drive to dominate their fellow human beings.
For one who wants to be ‘mistress of the sea’[1], power over souls can be both an instrument for strengthening domination and an end in itself. For until it is attained, domination remains incomplete.
There has never been a more boundless domination of some humans over others than in the first eastern despotisms, which fused spiritual power and the power of force. All subsequent civilisational progress is the process of limiting that power. Yes — with zigzags, breakdowns, failures. But that is, all the same, the general vector of history.
An enormous step along this path was the so-called ‘European’ (bourgeois) modernisation. It qualitatively expanded the ‘personal space’ of the human being — the space protected from coercion by other people. But after each new stage of it, it turns out that part of the elites refuses to accept the limits civilisation has placed on the domination of one human being by another. And then come attempts at revenge.
One such attempt we saw at the close of the industrial modernisation transition. It poured out as the right-totalitarian epidemic of the 1930s, which nearly toppled civilisation. Bourgeois-liberal thinkers to this day trace the roots of ‘the fascist plague’ to a supposed ‘revolt of the masses’[2], when in fact it was a ‘revolt of the elites’. A mutiny of the elites against modernisation.
History is repeating itself almost word-for-word at the next ‘modernisation’ transition — now the post-industrial one. Contrary to the expectations of bourgeois liberals, the new post-industrial (hybrid) autocracies have turned out to be not a form for the gradual phasing-out of authoritarian residues in insufficiently mature societies, but a launching pad for a new attempt at totalitarian revenge.
For many years I have been warning that they would inevitably return to purely totalitarian practices of mass mind-numbing. The reason is the technical impossibility of effectively blocking access to unwanted information in a post-industrial society. The dictatorships of the industrial age — even non-totalitarian ones — coped with that task quite well. But in the digital world it has become impossible. The digital world is transparent.
The way out for dictatorships was to make people impervious to truth, to switch off their rational logic and their conscience. Doing this required digging thoroughly into their minds and souls. As in the previous cycle, right-wing totalitarianism is inseparable from obscurantism. Unlike Soviet-style pseudo-leftist totalitarianism, it does not try to inspire people with the image of some bright and happy future. It appeals to the archaic; it unleashes primal instincts. At the foundation of civilisation, of its progress, lies the principle: what isn’t yours is not yours to take. The whole edifice of contemporary right-wing totalitarianism is built on a stance whose simplicity is irresistible: ‘We are allowed to take what isn’t ours. We are allowed anything. And you can do nothing to us for it.’
This is the stance of the new ruling class, much of which came up out of the bratva[3] of the 1990s and absorbed its psychology, its mannerisms, its ‘cultural codes’. But the ‘upper layer’ has carried the lower mass with this simple idea — the mass that has merged with its own enslavers in the ecstasy of a cave-like ‘roar of the tribe’.
These people will no longer be able to stop. That is why I am sceptical of the idea of an ‘international peace party’. Peace with today’s right-wing totalitarianism is impossible, just as peace was impossible with the right-wing totalitarianism of the previous cycle. With all my sincere respect for my brother Sasha.
Lyuba, if you have a chance to publish this text or to forward it to those of my friends who publish my letters, please do. I’ll be very grateful. For me, after all, this is all a continuation of my work as a publicist.