At the beginning of September, I settled for a couple of weeks in the Himalayas in northern India. I was there to give a few contributions at a conference on local economies. “Where exactly in the desert sand of this life is the line drawn that separates fiction from non-fiction?” — that thought occupies me as the Airbus 320 prepares to land at the airport of Leh. I’m not quite sure why I begin this text with that thought. What I actually want to write about is the human urge for order — and its connection to totalitarianism.
The plane weaves its way between mountain peaks that disappear into the clouds on either side. The ochre-grey rock of the Himalayan giants sometimes seems to come alarmingly close to the dipping and swaying tips of the wings. It feels more like stunt flying than commercial aviation. Just before the plane drops onto one of the highest public airstrips in the world, we’re informed that, should we feel the need to vomit from lack of oxygen right after landing, we can make use of the plastic bag in the seat pocket in front of us.
Leh airport stands at 3,500 meters, in what can best be compared to a majestic lunar landscape — a cold desert above the tree line. The building itself is nothing but a series of barracks, where tourists gasp for air in the thin atmosphere and hope they won’t fall prey to altitude sickness. A rickety conveyor belt bravely rattles its loads of suitcases inside. I drag off my large green suitcase, skip the long queue in front of the three sparse toilet doors, step out onto the asphalt square at the main exit, and after some searching, find a taxi to take me to the Slow Garden Guesthouse.
The first images of the Himalayas pass like a film across a taxi’s window smeared with grease marks and dust, accompanied by a soundtrack of incessant honking. The view shudders to the rhythm of a road full of potholes, flanked on either side by unfinished sidewalks, heaps of stones, and leftover construction debris.Behind them rises a strip of houses and shops built from grey-brown cement blocks. Their fronts are often completely open, with segmented gates that are pulled down at night. Why all this honking from the taxi driver? I observe his weathered face beside me. There is no sign of irritation or frustration.
**
We approach the center of the city. A mass of pedestrians moves through the streets like a sluggish bloodstream — along the sidewalks and right through the middle of the road. Cows, donkeys, and dogs trudge resignedly along in this procession of everyday life. The crowd moves organically, parting for the honking taxi like a murky Red Sea before an ordinary Moses.
What do the animals eat in this desert of cement and asphalt? Cardboard and plastic, I am told time and again. A single blade of grass is a feast. After a few days in Leh, I begin to recognize certain animals as I wander the streets — the leather-colored dog with the black muzzle, the cow with a white patch on her chest that lies down each noon beside a car at a construction site, the five donkeys that seek out a terrace where they can huddle together for the night. I greet them and sometimes try to touch them with my fingertips. Together we wander, lost in thought, along this path of life — unknowing, moving toward a destination we dream of but cannot conceive.
They tell me that the cows are fed a little in winter, because they give milk. The bulls, dogs, and donkeys must fend for themselves. They often die in the winter ice, somewhere beneath a canopy or against a garden wall, while the mountain peaks that rise above the city stand as silent and unyielding witnesses to the end of their inglorious existence.
During the past four days, it has rained as much as it usually does in several years. The mud bricks used for building here cannot withstand it. Left and right, walls have partially collapsed; roads are impassable because of fallen bridges. Here and there I see gaping holes in walls, some roughly covered with tarpaulin. I look inside living rooms with tottering furniture — grayish burrows from which eyes peer out above incomplete rows of teeth.
“Are you happy here?” I ask the taxi driver. “Of course, Sir!” he replies. I glance at him hesitantly. His face radiates. Their shuffling gait and their chatter as they stand before their stalls or lay bricks with mud — the Ladakhis have nothing compared to me. But they have far more time — time to do nothing. Time to Be. “Through everything you possess, you are possessed,” Nietzsche once said.
Helena Norberg-Hodge, the economist who invited me to her conference in the Himalayas, tells me a few hours later about the time when she first arrived here, fifty years ago. There were no paved roads, no electricity, no running water. In the meantime, the people of Leh have been rescued from their pitiable condition. Now there are basic utilities, and owning a mobile phone is more the rule than the exception. The number of suicides has risen, over that half-century of modernization, from one every twenty-five years to one per month.
**
Everywhere in Leh, construction is underway. New houses and small hotels rise from the ground like formations of mushrooms on damp autumn soil. The stones are made on site, from a mixture of mud and cement. The cement has only recently been added, giving the new buildings a grayish hue that is hardly an aesthetic improvement. The people of Leh build without plans. They stack stones one on top of another without following the straight line of a mason’s cord. They simply see where they end up — “on touch and feel,” as the English say. The result gives their houses an organic look. In nature, straight lines are rare, and so they are in the houses of Leh.
Here and there, a house stands out because it is more orderly, more carefully maintained than the rest. The organic shapes of such a house adhere more faithfully to an architectural idea; the garden around it is not strewn with rubble and debris. To me, these houses are a relief — a successful marriage between the spontaneous, unrestrained creative power of life itself and the crystalline order of the Platonic world of ideas.
The urge toward order and regularity is intrinsic to human nature. Man seeks lawfulness. He reduces the overwhelming multiplicity of the Real into straight lines and regular figures; he searches for rule, formula, and theory. He does this to avoid being drowned by the Real, to keep from being passively swept away by the tide of the unfamiliar. He tries to reshape the world around him according to the ideas in his mind; he reforms the chaos that surrounds him. He levels undulating terrain into flat squares, straightens winding paths, channels water into canals, molds buildings according to geometry and the Golden Ratio, directs cars to the left or right, confines pedestrians to sidewalks, delineates plots of land in cadastral maps, and channels a man’s sexual drive into the narrow bed of a marriage contract with a single woman.
Societies and cultures differ greatly in their degree of order. Indian society has a low degree of order and a high tolerance for chaos. Visit New Delhi and you will see what I mean. People wash in the street under a rusted showerhead mounted on a façade; one need not be a vagrant to sleep on a bench or a sidewalk; scooters weave through crowds and piles of merchandise at markets; and it is not unusual to see someone driving against the current on the highway.
Japan lies on the opposite end of the spectrum, with its tendency to subject nearly every act of daily life to social rules. The Japanese delight in ritualizing existence. The tea ceremony illustrates this — one of the great cultural creations of that fascinating island. Every movement is performed according to protocol, with prescribed rhythm, duration, and intensity. The apprentice must allow even the smallest details of his actions to be governed by a language of form and motion passed down through generations. Yet the goal of this discipline is not forced correctness. The apprentice becomes a master only when he performs these culturally imposed gestures fluidly, with the spontaneity of a child. He is pressed like a turbid liquid through the fine sieve of culture, losing himself at first, only to rediscover himself on the other side — transformed and purified.
The drive for order is essential to humanity. Without it, man would not be human. But that drive can overflow its banks and become detrimental to life. This is evident, to some extent, in the high rates of depression and suicide in highly ordered societies such as Japan. When the mesh of culture is woven too tightly, more and more people suffocate as they are forced through it.
The will to order becomes truly destructive in totalitarian systems. Unlike great cultures such as Japan, totalitarian regimes have no ambition to raise man above law and rule. The totalitarian system gives birth to no tea masters or samurai warriors. It regards the submission of man to a proliferating web of bureaucratic rules as an end in itself. Its aim is not to cultivate and sublimate human impulses but to break and subjugate man entirely. In the totalitarian state, the will to order has become completely emancipated from Love.
Aldous Huxley, one of the keenest literary observers of the phenomenon of totalitarianism, saw in the escalation of the “will to order” one of its defining characteristics:
‘It is in the social sphere, in the realm of politics and economics, that the Will to Order becomes really dangerous. Here the theoretical reduction of unmanageable multiplicity to comprehensible unity becomes the practical reduction of human diversity to subhuman uniformity, of freedom to servitude. In politics the equivalent of a fully developed scientific theory or philosophical system is a totalitarian dictatorship. In economics, the equivalent of a beautifully composed work of art is the smoothly running factory in which the workers are perfectly adjusted to the machines. The Will to Order can make tyrants out of those who merely aspire to clear up a mess. The beauty of tidiness is used as a justification for despotism. Organization is indispensable; for liberty arises and has meaning only within a self-regulating community of freely cooperating individuals. But, though indispensable, organization can also be fatal. Too much organization transforms men and women into automata, suffocates the creative spirit and abolishes the very possibility of freedom. As usual, the only safe course is in the middle, between the extremes of laissez-faire at one end of the scale and of total control at the other’ (Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited, 1958, pp.26-28).
Totalitarian rulers seek to reorder the entire fabric of nature according to their ideology. They attempt, through eugenic principles, to create a pure race, or through communism to materialize the ultimate society; now they plan to equip every living being with nanotechnology and to monitor and correct them through the great state computer. As heads of state, they subject the political, public, and private spheres to a sprawling system of bureaucratic regulation.
Yet even there the totalitarian will to order does not stop. The inner space of the human mind, too, must be organized and subdued. That is the function of propaganda: man must also, in his thoughts, conform to totalitarian ideology; he must believe that the totalitarian fiction coincides with fact. For part of the population, this works quite well. They watch the news broadcasts of the national television and believe they are witnessing reality itself.
Until now, the ordering and subjugation of the human spirit to the state has occurred by psychological means — through classical propaganda. But we stand at the threshold of a moment where psychological manipulation may be replaced by biological–material intervention. Since the 1950s, the American military apparatus has worked diligently on brain chips. Elon Musk brings this underground project now into the public sphere through his company Neuralink.
The brain chip will render every process of consciousness transparent; criminal thoughts will be detected before they can lead to criminal acts. The rules of the road, the workplace, and the living room will be projected directly onto one’s retina. At the first sign of transgression, intervention will occur proactively. The fine for your not-yet-committed crime will automatically be deducted from your social credit score and your CBDC account. The total (in)justice of the system punishes crime before it is committed. In the Soviet Union, totalitarian zeal had already reached similar extremes — see the treatment of “objective crimes” under Stalinism.
The totalitarian elite, driven by its will to order, becomes pathologically obsessed with rules; but the totalitarian subject — the group that allows itself to be totalitarized — fares no better. He becomes addicted to rules. Eventually, he can no longer cope with situations in which there is no rule to cling to. Someone must surely be responsible — someone must pay when something goes wrong. We need more lines on the asphalt, traffic lights with six rather than three signals. We must be able to determine exactly who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. All this, of course, in anticipation of the Neuralink chip.
In all of this one sees how the modern human being — estranged from himself and from the Other — seeks to contain his fear and disorientation through order and control. Modernist architecture reduces houses to abstract forms that can be conceived by the brain with geometric precision; cameras record every movement in homes, doorways, and gardens; shutters, refrigerators, and air conditioners connected to the internet are kept in line from a distance with a single touch; in hotels, digital keys regulate access to elevators and rooms; the movements and dealings of children are tracked by apps and, if necessary, corrected; pets are fitted with microchips; cows on their Animal Farm are guided from the milking station to the feeding trough by digital collars. The hyper-ordered, hyper-controlled society is imposed upon the human being from above — yet that human being also chooses it himself.
On the sixth day of the conference, we visit a small Himalayan village where life still appears as it has for thousands of years — or at least, something resembling it. Likir is a village of twenty-eight families that provides almost all of its own food. Each household also keeps a dozen small Himalayan cows for milk and cheese. The young man who shows us around tells us proudly that they are leaving behind their tradition of eating meat. It’s better for the climate, he says. They didn’t yet know that Bill Gates would change his mind a few weeks later — the climate doom scenarios turned out to be exaggerated after all.
That is typical of totalitarian schemes: they rise up and collapse again before they can subjugate reality. One need only read the history of Stalin’s grand projects — one megalomaniac plan after another carried unfinished to the grave. Most of the villagers are also vaccinated against COVID. They had no mental defense against the missionaries of artificial immunity. Bill Gates, meanwhile, has come to new insights there as well: the vaccine ultimately did not deliver what had been hoped. Still, for now, he presses on — the wonder-vaccine will and must bear his name.
I walk further to a small grain mill powered by a trickle of water. I crawl halfway beneath the stone structure, trying to understand its simple yet ingenious gear system. The splashing water disturbs my vision in its urge to see. The miller cannot explain it to me; he doesn’t speak English. The little mill has ground the village’s wheat for hundreds of years, without electricity or combustion engine. The flavor of its flour is mild and complex — perhaps because the slowly turning stone never heats the grain as it grinds.
A young woman tends a relatively large vegetable garden of some five hundred square meters. She is one of the few young people who have chosen to remain in the village. The others head for the city. I probably would have done the same. Perhaps we all must be pressed through the sieve of the over-ordered society before we can re-discover ourselves — transformed, returning to what we had left behind.
I see a dozen women in traditional dress spinning wool from sheep, weaving it into almost everything one needs to keep warm through winter. They chat cheerfully while the threads grow agonizingly slowly longer on their spindles. Who would want to sit here for days spinning a single sweater? — the thought passes through my mind.
Instead of spending hours a day spinning or growing vegetables for their neighbors, people now spend hours behind screens. Unlike the women of the village, they often do not know the purpose of their labor. More than forty percent of people today say they have a bullshit job — a job they themselves believe contributes nothing of value to society. The will-to-order, and its companion the will-to-digitize, drain meaning from the human body and plunge it into lethargy.
**
Yuval Noah Harari writes in Homo Deus that if a surgeon were to open the skull of a human being, he would find nothing but biochemistry. There is no Soul there, and no Free Will. Man does not make choices. Neuroscience, he argues, shows that a person’s decision is already made in the brain before the person experiences the act of choosing:
‘In the nineteenth century Homo sapiens was like a mysterious black box, whose inner workings were beyond our grasp. Hence when scholars asked why a man drew a knife and stabbed another to death, an acceptable answer said: ‘Because he chose to. He used his free will to choose murder, which is why he is fully responsible for his crime.’ Over the last century, as scientists opened up the Sapiens black box, they discovered there neither soul, or free will, nor ‘self’ – but only genes, hormones and neurons that obey the same physical and chemical laws governing the rest of reality. Today when scholars ask why a man drew a knife and stabbed someone to death, answering ‘Because he chose to’ doesn’t cut the mustard. Instead, geneticists and brain scientists provide a much more detailed answer: ‘He did it due to such-and-such electrochemical processes in the brain, that were shaped by a particular genetic make-up, which in turn reflect ancient evolutionary pressures coupled with chance mutations.’ (Homo Deus, pp. 328-329).
In other words: our brain-machine makes the choice for us; we are slaves to the Great Machine, finding our opium in the gossamer-thin illusion of freedom. When I was eighteen, that too seemed to me an inescapable truth: everything we do or think is determined by the biochemistry of our brain. Like Spinoza, I felt compelled to believe that on our path we are no freer than a stone falling to the ground. There is nothing I am more grateful for than having found a way out of that kind of thinking. Those tiny particles that seem to form the rock-solid foundation of materialism — they are such stuff as dreams are made on.
To see the human being as a creature thrown into life — in need of time to discover and refine his own choices — is a sign of gentleness and humanity; for even responsibility requires time to become response-ability. Man is bound to a narrative and a position into which he has been placed by the Other, by a family, by a culture; he clings like a speck of metal drawn to the magnet of addictions; the glow and sparkle of his eyes is dimming under a thousand social rules and power structures; his laughter turns into muffled sobs because his desire is occupied day after day by the demands of the Other.
But deep beneath the knots of a thousand chains, there truly lies a point at which the shackled human being can make a choice — and inevitably does. In the end, we are not merely the lead actors in the drama of our lives; withdrawn deep into the shadows of the theatre, we find ourselves also as the director. The act of choosing is our very essence. We are not the matter of our body, nor are we determined by the material conditions in which we find ourselves. Even in the most impossible circumstances, if we choose what is good at every turn, something of our essence will remain standing — and perhaps even grow. With the words of Emerson: “Nothing is at last sacred, but the integrity of your own mind”.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn describes something of this kind in his iconic The Gulag Archipelago. In Stalin’s concentration camps, he met a fellow prisoner known as Alyosha the Baptist. The man entered the camp sickly, tormented by rheumatism and other ailments, yet he clung steadfastly to his ethical and religious principles. When another prisoner stole his food or clothing, he refused to steal in turn, even if that meant facing the freezing Siberian cold, underfed and nearly naked. He generally obeyed the guards — except when their orders conflicted with his ethical principles. Then he refused, even at the cost of brutal punishment. And he never complained. Whatever God placed on his path, he accepted as rightly given.
Alyosha the Baptist survived years in a camp where nearly everyone perished within months. More than that: he even left his ailments behind. In a chapter entitled “The Soul and Barbed Wire,” Solzhenitsyn writes the following about him: “I remember thinking: I have seen what a pure soul can do with a body. He seemed freer than any of us — freer even than the camp commandant. For freedom does not reside in things, but in the Soul.”
It is in our choice that we realize ourselves; it is in our choice that we are one with the immense process of creation that unfolds at every level of nature. Theologians will affirm that in this love for man, even God meets His limit: He cannot prevent us from plunging into misery; He must allow us to choose wrongly, for otherwise He would make us slaves. That is why love seldom coerces. It safeguards the freedom of the Other, knowing that in doing so, it safeguards the Other’s very essence.
I used to look at my garden and want to impose my order upon it. I had a preconceived idea, an ideal image of how the trees and shrubs should grow, where the grass should stop and the flowerbeds and orchard should begin. Now I see, more and more, that the tree which deviates from the ideal often speaks most deeply to the Soul — the tree half-uprooted by a storm, the one whose limbs broke under too heavy a harvest, the one whose trunk and branches twist in eccentric curves yet still rise toward the heavens.
There beckons an open door to a vibrant joy in keeping porous the order we impose upon life. I see that the forms appearing in my garden have their own desires and inclinations. Clumps of thyme sow themselves in the gravel of a pathway; wildflowers choose a place in the middle of the lawn; tendrils from spontaneously sprouted tomato seeds weave through and over pumpkin plants; maize and sunflower seeds dropped from bird feed grow into stalks that tower here and there above the creeping plants; the gnarled, irregular language of the pollard willow forms a sublime counterpoint to the elegance of flowers and grasses. Here and there, man must call the swelling green and the winding branches to order — but not so strictly that the freedom and joy of growing life are smothered, not so strictly that the essence and the soul of things can no longer speak or sing.
Totalitarianism, with its frenetic will to order and its excess of bureaucracy, is ultimately a campaign against the Soul. It represents a law elevated to absurdity, a rule that has lost all touch with love. It forces life into servitude; it transforms man into a soulless machine. With the imminent merging of man and technology, this process reaches its final stage — the point where this derailed force rises to its maximum and, at the same time, collapses.
"Instead of spending hours a day spinning or growing vegetables for their neighbors, people now spend hours behind screens."
Yes, scrolling all day is like drinking all day. Technology has simply provided a more socially accepted and efficient method for destroying your life. We are in the era of "enlightened" tyranny. Behold the magnificent gilded cage.
Beautiful essay. Thank you.