Bureaucracy, Totalitarianism and the Art of Speech

Dear friends,

It's been a while now - it seems like forever. I'm busy writing my next book. That book is about the psychology of truth speech and the end of totalitarianism.

I have to say, it's nice not to be too absorbed by social media for a while. I like to use that time to anchor my roots more deeply in the earth.

We can learn from nature in that respect. When winter passes over the land and everything above ground comes to rest, trees and plants continue to expand their root systems underground. They work in the unseen; in the dark winter soil, they prepare the arrival of spring.

Writing a book means deepening my roots, changing as a human being. If I didn’t go through such a process as a human being, my new book would not be essentially different from my previous one. In other words, there would be no good reason to write it. No matter how well written a book is, it is worthless if it has not changed the author as a person. And there wouldn't be a good reason to read it either. I’ll do my best to make sure there is a good reason to read it.

As for now, I want to share an excerpt from my previous book, an excerpt on the wild proliferation of all kinds of rules in our society. The ‘bureaucratization’ of society is a major aspect of emerging totalitarianism – totalitarian systems are always bureaucratic systems. Here is what Hannah Arendt says about this process:

“In a fully developed bureaucracy there is nobody left with whom one can argue, to whom one can present grievances, on whom the pressures of power can be exerted. Bureaucracy is the form of government in which everybody is deprived of political freedom, of the power to act; for the rule by Nobody is not no-rule, and where all are equally powerless, we have a tyranny without a tyrant.” (Hannah Arendt, On Violence).

At the psychological level, it is clear that the ‘regulation mania’ in our society is an indirect consequence of the decline of sincere speech. The less sincere bonds between people, the more rules are needed to regulate the social fabric. And as such, this excerpt is relevant to my new book as well – it describes one of these problematic totalitarian phenomena for which the only cure is to be found in the art of sincere speech. In the next weeks, I will start to present excerpts from my new book as well. I think it’s great to write in resonance with the people who follow me.

Warm greetings to everyone - use the winter well, prepare a beautiful spring!  

Excerpt on Regulation Mania from The Psychology of Totalitarianism

Society is—it’s hard to ignore—increasingly bogged down in an endless proliferation of rules. On the one hand, such rules are imposed by the government, but on the other hand, there is also a call for more rules—a hyper-strict morality—from the population itself. Like narcissism, this is a frantic attempt to contain the surge of fear and insecurity in human relationships.

It is indeed a striking phenomenon: Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, a new morality has arisen from the belly of Enlightenment thinking, which in a number of respects is stricter, more vagarious, more irrational, and more hypocritical than the prior religious morality, which the Enlightenment sought to obliterate in order to set people free. With the rise of the woke culture, society fell prey to implicit and explicit rules that made every detail of human interaction more precarious. In the wake of the #MeToo movement, students were taught how to flirt legally and compliantly, freshmen initiations were subjected to increasingly strict regulations, Sweden introduced a law stating that sex is only legal if the parties involved give their consent in advance via a signed contract, nude figures of the paintings by Flemish masters were no longer allowed to be posted on social media, and Netflix introduced a rule stipulating that eye contact between employees should not last longer than five seconds and that employees are not allowed to ask for each other’s phone numbers without asking permission for asking first (!). The new norm has become so stringent that even suggesting that there is a physical difference between a man and a woman can be considered a violation of sexual integrity.

The Black Lives Matter movement is captured in this trend as well. The tendency toward increasingly exhaustive standards with respect to racism intensified to little productive end: The chances that such rules truly contribute to the overcoming of the narcissistic superiority feelings that are involved in racism is, in fact, rather small.

The climate movement has also given rise to a new category of crimes: environmental. To the point that using a wood-burning stove, eating meat, or living off-grid in the countryside are considered environmental violations, environmental ideology has been taken to such an extreme that it has become opposed to that which it originally aspired to: getting back to nature. Environmental violations are also rather selective and inconsistent in their strictness. For example, reducing one’s carbon footprint is taken to extremes, while there is remarkable leniency regarding energy consumption through internet use (which is as high as the energy consumption from all air traffic combined) and the “mining” of Bitcoins (which is as high as the energy consumption of an average Western European country). And also the environmental damage caused by mining ores for batteries for electric cars is rarely discussed. The environmental movement was once a dissident voice, but with its turn toward “ecomodernism,” it has clearly merged into the dominant mechanistic ideology.

This regulation mania is also directly visible in the public space. My office at Ghent University looks out over a major intersection. Over the past twenty years, I have watched this intersection change from a large asphalt plain with a few sparse white lines to a mosaic of lines and colored areas, indicating where cyclists, pedestrians, and cars are and are not allowed to go, with ever more traffic signs and traffic lights mounted thereon. And it isn’t only the intersections. In train stations, you have to buy a ticket to have access to the toilets, yellow squares indicate where smokers can indulge in their dangerous addiction, and you’re allowed to park only in certain delineated—paid—parking spaces for a certain period of time. During the coronavirus crisis, this phenomenon reached its temporary peak with an endless number of arrows indicated on floors and stairs, showing where to walk and in which direction, signs reminding you that you are required to wear a face mask, confined spaces demarcated by crash barriers preventing one bubble from coming into contact with another one at festivals and cultural events, red and green dots on chairs indicating where you are and are not allowed to take a seat in the theatre. The moment at which the rules will be abolished is postponed endlessly and will actually never arrive, if it depends on the proponents of the current coronavirus approach. Indeed, the possibility of a few hundred thousand deaths from a “normal” flu virus would surely justify the introduction of similar measures in the future.

Furthermore, the jungle of rules that are activated in response to all kinds of threats varies from location to location. During the coronavirus crisis, mayors are able to adjust rules in their own jurisdictions at their discretion. And the rules also change over time. During thunderstorms, terrorism, and viruses, they can easily switch between green, yellow, orange, or red codes. In the long run, the rules also become so detailed that one either gets angry or has to laugh: In the summer of 2020, it was ruled that an opening dance would be allowed at weddings, however, not the polonaise. The coronavirus apparently knows something about dancing. Keeping up with the rules proves an impossible task, which puts the competent authorities themselves in a state of hopeless confusion. At a certain point during the second lockdown in 2020, the website for the Belgian Ministry of Health stated that noncohabiting partners were allowed to visit one another, yet the police could still fine people for doing so.

The problems exposed by the New Morality are legitimate. Sexism and racism are symptoms of cultural decline; people have to take care of nature (or the climate) or we will irreparably destroy it, and solidarity with victims of the coronavirus (and victims of the public health response) is evidence of our humanity. This doesn’t mean however that the suggested solutions are legitimate. They are excessive, inconsistent, and counterproductive in many respects. In the #MeToo discourse, the lines between clumsy flirtation and rape are blurred; in the Black Lives Matter discourse, to make any reference to skin color is like walking on eggshells; the climate movement alienates man even more from nature; and with the coronavirus crisis, health care has become an attack on life and liberty. Moreover, as Freud pointed out, the repressive nature of the new morality is fueling an exacerbated “return of the repressed”: Between 2015 and 2020, the use of sexist language doubled and the use of racist and menacing language tripled on social media. This counterproductivity must be acknowledged, albeit with the reservations we always have with regard to numbers and statistics.

The new morality is also more and more aggressively enforced, both by the government and by the population itself. Support for free speech, freedom of the press, artistic freedom, and basic self-determination is decreasing at an alarming rate: J. K. Rowling was fiercely attacked (to the point of her house being molested) when she scorned a full-woke reference to “people who menstruate” instead of “women”; German insurers want an alcohol lock in every new car; the New York Times editorial page editor was fired for publishing an op-ed by a right-wing politician about the death of George Floyd; in Australia, a man was declared a public enemy of the worst sort and hunted by the police and army for not complying with the mandatory quarantine after a positive COVID-19 test (which actually may well have been a false positive test).

[…]

The regulation mania, in all its extravagance and absurdity, undoubtedly contributes to the psychological troubles of our time. The contradiction and ambiguity of so many rules creates a neurotic dog-of-Pavlov effect and its excessive nature takes away the satisfaction, spontaneity, and joy of life. There is less and less space for autonomy and freedom. For example, at first glance, there are only advantages to the so-called “zipper rule” that requires late merging on European roads. However, it constitutes a subtle psychological disadvantage. Enforced late merging removes the personal choice, as well as the possibility of a small but powerful human encounter—a situation in which one person chooses to give priority to another. A driver no longer has the option of acting with spontaneous generosity, because he is obligated to do so. This may seem inconsequential but it isn’t. It is precisely those moments of human-to-human encounters that nourish the social bond from within. Without those moments, the social fabric shrivels, and it is only a matter of time until society disintegrates into a loose collection of atomized individuals.

The suffocating effect of an excess of rules is most noticeable when it suddenly disappears, for instance, when you arrive in a small French village and there are no white lines painted on the streets that tell you exactly where to drive and where to park your car. You can park along the road, without paying and for an unlimited period of time. Or a rural train station where you don’t have to pay at a parking meter in the parking lot, where the toilets are freely available, and where the platforms are accessible at all times. It is somewhat reminiscent of the buzz of the air conditioner in your office. You don’t notice that it bears down on you until it disappears at six o’clock, and you experience a moment of blissful peace.

The over-regulation has mostly advanced without us realizing it. It also exerts its suffocating influence mostly without us realizing it. But every time the regulation machine is tuned up higher, we lose some space for our existence as living, human beings. It creates a kind of vicious circle: In order to reduce unease and frustration in social spaces, we make more rules, protocols, and procedures. Those rules subsequently lead to more discomfort and frustration. We respond to that with even more rules. And each time the regulatory fabric is woven a little more tightly, the human being receives less oxygen.

(The Psychology of Totalitarianism, Chapter 5, p.75-81)