Thanks to Smitemouth’s recommendation, I recently read Live Not by Lies by Rod Dreher.
The book has two parts. In the first part, Dreher argues that we are rapidly entering a world of tyranny that has remarkable similarities to what people experienced under Hitler, Stalin and Mao. In the second part, he gives a meditation on Christian suffering under such tyranny.
I read the book to try to understand what the distinguishing traits of this tyranny are. In the introduction, he mentioned four.
- “Elites and elite institutions [abandon] old-fashioned liberalism, based in defending the rights of the individual, and [replace] it with a progressive creed that regards justice in terms of groups. It encourages people to identify with groups — ethnic, sexual, and otherwise — and to think of Good and Evil as a matter of power dynamics among the groups.”
- People living under such tyranny “can never be sure when those in power will come after [them] as a villain for having said or done something that was perfectly fine the day before.”
- “[T]he consequence for violating the new taboos are extreme, including losing your livelihood and having your reputation ruined forever.”
- “The foundation of totalitarianism is an ideology made of lies. The system depends for its existence on a people’s fear of challenging the lies.”
“A totalitarian society is one in which an ideology seeks to displace all prior traditions and institutions, with the goal of bringing all aspects of society under control of that ideology. A totalitarian state is one that aspires to nothing less than defining and controlling reality.”
“Today in our societies, dissenters from the woke party line find their businesses, careers, and reputations destroyed. They are pushed out of the public square, stigmatized, canceled, and demonized as racists, sexists, homophobes, and the like. And they are afraid to resist, because they are confident that no one will join them or defend them.”
The new tyranny is able to be far more invasive than the old, since we have all voluntarily acceded to the demands of Big Data. Just today I read a story about how the FBI is using cell phone data to find everyone who was near the Capitol on Jan. 6.
Dreher calls the modern system “soft totalitarianism.”
“Under soft totalitarianism, the media, academia, corporate America, and other institutions are practicing Newspeak and compelling the rest of us to engage in doublethink every day. Men have periods. The woman standing in front of you is to be called ‘he.’ Diversity and inclusion means excluding those who object to ideological uniformity. Equity means treating persons unequally, regardless of their skills and achievements, to achieve an ideologically correct result.”
Dreher believes “modern liberalism’s goal [is to] free the individual from any unchosen obligation.” That’s a reasonable way to put it, from a certain point of view, but it’s also clearly contradictory, since liberalism expects us all to be obligated in many ways that we have not chosen. For example, I have not chosen to be obligated to use another person’s preferred pronouns.
If you’re looking for hope, this is not the book to read. Dreher believes the culture war is essentially over, and the bad guys won. He said “the collapse of civilizational order begins when its elites cease to be able to transmit faith in its institutions and customs to younger generations.” That ship has obviously sailed, so we are, by Dreher’s reckoning, way past the beginning of civilizational collapse.
One interesting difference between communist totalitarians and woke totalitarians is that the woke “don’t want to seize the means of economic production but rather the means of cultural production.” To which I would add, at least not yet.
Dreher’s book is largely based on interviews he’s had with people who have escaped from totalitarian regimes. They are, he says, amazed. They came here to find freedom, but instead they find that we are going down the same path of the tyrannies they just fled.
A lot of people think the threat isn’t very serious, since we still have the rule of law. “But over and over, dissidents told me that the law is not a reliable refuge; if the government is determined to take you out, it will manufacture a crime from the data is has captured, or otherwise deploy it to destroy your reputation.”
I don’t find that threat to be particularly frightening because I don’t think the main problem right now is the government. The threat we face is the woke takeover of corporate America. The law (at present) can’t help you when private corporations choose to ruin your reputation, “de-platform” you, refuse to offer services, or refuse to hire you because you don’t sign on to their ridiculous ideologies.
Woke ideology is like Nazi or communist ideology in that it expects you to accept contradictions and lies. You must change the badge on your social media platform to express solidarity with the latest woke nonsense, or you have to submit to diversity and inclusion workshops that teach absurd garbage. You can’t challenge woke orthodoxy without risking your job and your reputation. So people go along.
Dreher calls us to not live by lies — not to participate in them — and to prepare ourselves for the suffering that is likely to result.
I don’t accept his pessimism or his passivity. There is certainly a point where the only option is to be true to your beliefs and suffer for them, but I think there is still time to fight back.
Woke tyranny is already here, and it’s only going to get worse unless people strike back. Hard and fast.
Don’t live by lies, but — while we still have a chance — don’t allow these tyrants to win.
I still think that if you want to get anything like Maoist totalitarianism started you need a Mao. In order to get anything like Nazi totalitarianism started you need a Hitler. Stalin of course built on Lenin, who was a master of radicalizing large portions of the population during a time of war and poverty in Russia.
I think that depends on what you mean by “anything like.” Having a single, evil dictator at the top probably does change things. But a lot of the evil was done in the name of the party and the movement.
I am not saying that no evil has been done by the “woke” movement, but I don’t seeing it fitting the model of any totalitarian movement as we know it. All the ones that I know of have that unifying and radicalizing leader.
That’s an interesting question. I don’t know enough about the history of totalitarian movements to be able to say. Has there ever been, for example, a totalitarian Baptist culture, or a Marxist country that didn’t have a “dear leader”?
There couldn’t be such a thing Baptist totalitarianism because people are simply too fond of dancing.
Correction: There couldn’t be such a thing as Baptist totalitarianism because people are simply too fond of dancing.
Your reply might also help to explain why there’s so much hatred directed at leaders. I remember being somewhat amazed at people who were afraid of James Dobson.
It’s one thing to be afraid of “the woke,” or the “alt right,” or whatever. It’s another thing to be afraid of Obama with his woke army, or Trump with his evil minions. The “unifying and radicalizing leader” provides a focus for friends and detractors.