An alternative title for this piece was How Totalitarianism Depends on Optimism. But it’s too late now; you’ve been rightly and fairly sucked in.
Yes, I am implying that the masses are culpable for much of dystopia, by way of being generally unwitting handmaidens and cheerleaders of propaganda.
Indeed, they are often better at delivering propaganda than its original architects, because they make it authentic — not as in valid, but ignorant or stupid in superficially reasonable ways, which happen to be so earnest that you almost feel ashamed to not fall for it with them.
Shove It
Potential energy is to physics what capital is to economics and the two domains are seamlessly interpenetrating. A rugby scrum, for instance, deploys united physical capital and labour.
It’s adversarial aspect is clearly not between those two. Rather, it is due to a shared conceit regarding one ball and opposing ends of the playing field.
That could even be a metaphor for the gap between theory and practice of bicameral politics in general.
All shoving is a force economy, of applied capital. In other words physical, political, social, intellectual, financial and most other resources are worked in a labour to overcome something, which is typically seen in an adversarial light.
So it might be called a manifestation of capitalism, or more specifically, seizing opportunity afforded by means to produce benefit which has a unilateral aspect.
Shared Benefit
To excuse such aspects, some kind of universal benefit is invoked and generally by way of ideology, as social restoration, whether by a purging revolution, benevolent invisible hand in deregulated markets, or whatever else.
Ideology is inherently and necessarily optimistic about that which it recommends. It is also, inherently and necessarily, a thing in common with other individuals.
Every one of its instances, moreover, would like to be a thing in common with all individuals. Ergo, it presents itself as best representing what everybody really wants: universal peace and prosperity. This is the inevitable nature and origin of its most basic propaganda, however merged it may be with opportunistic narratives arising from allied interests along the way.
All ideological optimism is thus a philosophy of community, albeit resigned on account of earthly pragmatics to being a somewhat exclusive communism in practice. ‘Socialism for the rich’ is for instance a fashionable epithet directed toward neoliberalism.
The border which separates those who do from those who do not appreciate this expression is of course a mental one and porous at that.
Ideology of every kind presides over borders among other things, because the universality inherent in its aspirations and inspirations cannot ultimately obscure something very different, namely, that the self-determination or predicament of others renders it somewhat partisan and thereby exclusive in practice.
The Ubiquitous, Treacherous Bliss of Totalitarianism
Nationalist socialism is an ideology which makes its primary border a physical one and thereby stands for closed community. That is somewhat oxymoronic of course (after the fashion of most everything to do with ideology) and perhaps in the starkest way when it comes to international conflict.
Manifesting opposites is the true name of this game and its peak is totalitarianism, for that is where everyone joins to conspire against everyone else and thus themselves, capitalising on all combined individual resources and labor as the collective means to what is sadly only that collective end.
The real and only enemy is totalitarianism and it always been on both sides, promising miracles.
The more that is promised and premised on destroying the other, the more totalitarianism reigns, with it’s only weapon of deranged intoxication.
Reason
Should we it leave it so poetically, or rather note that derangement obviously violates reason?
Here I stand again with Orwell, who puts it in almost crudely prosaic terms, because that is precisely where the most important point resides:
“Freedom is the freedom to say that 2+2=4. If that is granted all else follows.”
Nobody is more unreasonable than the totalitarian.
It naturally shows too. So if you’re ever forced to choose a side, do it on the basis of which rationales most consistently and centrally avoid what textbooks unambiguously classify as fallacy.
That is not necessarily the side that is more outwardly friendly, especially under this reign of naked Emperor Smarm.