The Fascism of Big Ideas

Nothing thrills intellectuals like big ideas. Being an intellectual means having renounced the market and the battlefield, the better to gain status and stature in the marketplace of ideas. There, intellectuals reign supreme. But, they are never contented to remain in their ivy towers. They want to  apply their superior wisdom to practical matters in the real world. After all, they believe that what happens in the real world is merely an expression of what is happening in the world of ideas. Thus, if only they can persuade enough people to change reality, they will bring a brave new world into being. They will even change human nature, for the better, of course.

One recalls that the Vietnam War was the brainchild of a group of sophisticated intellectuals, dubbed the best and the brightest. When it failed, its leaders should have learned a lesson. They did not. The intellectual elites deftly shifted the blame for Vietnam on the troops that fought, thereby living to create more calamities.

I offer this preamble to introduce George Friedman’s  brilliant essay about what happens when great ideas are put into practice... by people who worship ideas. The ideas sound great at first. They are so complicated that we need a group of philosopher kings to explain them to us. Only they can see the ideas clearly. But, when these guardians direct policy, when they try impose their ideality on the real world and on real people, very bad things happen.

How bad? Bad like the Soviet Union. Friedman takes it as his test case. He shows how a bastardized version of Enlightenment ideals, directed toward the betterment of human beings, leading to an unexampled level of brutality and human suffering. Other nations might have provided similar examples, but Friedman chooses the Soviet Union because we are fast approaching the centenary of the Bolshevik Revolution.

Since no one has ever seen, heard, tasted, touched or smelled an idea… we need to understand how they present themselves. Sometimes we grasp ideas as scientific hypotheses. Sometimes we grasp them as fictional narratives. 

When your idea is a hypothesis, you are willing to test it against reality. You are even willing to modify it, the better to negotiate with reality. If your idea is a fictional narrative, you will not need to test it against anything. You will tell yourself that reality must fulfill the terms of the narrative. If it does not, we have to change reality, even if that reality is human nature.

With that in mind, turn to Friedman:

The Enlightenment was the age of ideas. Ideas left to themselves, without being wrapped in a sense of decency, know no bounds. That was the history of much of the 20th century, shaped as it was by Hitler, Himmler, Lenin and Stalin. Logic is like a game of chess. You don’t worry about the fate of a pawn. So too the ideologies of the 20th century. The death of a pawn meant nothing compared to dreams. And the greater the dreams for the people, the less important people were. Thinkers embody logic, and logic that is unleashed is devoid of pity.

Friedman explains the dangers that arise when ideas are taken to be absolute truths, only judged by their inner logic. It’s like saying that a narrative fiction works or does not work by its own inner logic. Its value cannot be determined by real world outcomes.

He continues:

The lesson of this is the danger of ideas when unleased as absolute truths demanding utter logic, thus precluding the softening of kindness or decency. If ideas must be pursued at all costs, then anything standing in their way must be crushed. The problem is that in that world, the man who crushes best wins. Thus Marx, the hapless intellectual who set this all in motion, was superseded by Lenin, half intellectual and half thug, who was in turn superseded by Stalin, entirely a thug.

Friedman’s ostensible topic is the Russian Revolution:

The 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution is approaching. It was a revolution based not merely on hope but on the certainty that the human condition could be filled with equality, plenty and freedom. It created a regime that was willing and felt compelled to go to any lengths to create that perfection, but that regime ended in 1991, exhausted by the squalor it had created.

The Russian Revolution was inspired by the work of Karl Marx, and that work was the reductio ad absurdum of the French Enlightenment. The Enlightenment had argued that humanity was engaged in progress – knowledge was constantly accumulating and, with that, the human condition was constantly improving. At the center of this process was reason, which would drive progress. And its main thrust was that the most perfect government was one that promoted the principle of human equality.

The agent of all of this was the intellectual, who placed reason at the center of all things, and therefore was the one who would deliver progress. The intellectual would understand the necessity of improving the human condition and therefore understand that anyone who impeded this was the enemy. The intellectual became a politician seeking power, and then driving the masses toward a transformation of human life.

Intellectuals promise human progress. They present themselves as part prophet and part facilitator... of a wonderful new future. But they tell us that this can only happen if we allow them to govern us:

But the Enlightenment presented a paradox. If human progress was certain, then why should the intellectual have to undertake the effort and risk of driving it forward? But there was another paradox. The intellectual was also hungry for a significance beyond those with whom he shared his life. He hungered for power and recognition, and therefore the vision of progress being his to deliver to humanity was tremendously seductive. The paradox needed examination by the contemplative. But the contemplative bypassed the paradox and presided over the French Revolution. And those who thwarted progress had to be eliminated. The intellectuals displayed the ruthlessness of pure logic, a logic that saw the people as tools to be shaped.

Marx took the Enlightenment’s impulse to its logical conclusion. He believed not only in progress but in progress that would result in the perfection of humanity. That perfection would lead to the end of scarcity and the emergence of true human equality. This was inevitable because capitalism’s internal contradictions would ultimately destroy it, freeing the proletariat to impose a dictatorship that would forge this reality.

So, it was all for your good. If human behavior did not affirm the validity of the ideas, then we would have to change human behavior. I have discussed this topic at some length in my book The Last Psychoanalyst.

How would Communism change human nature? Simple, by elevating a class of superior minds, philosopher kings, and allowing them to make all decisions. If the verdict of the marketplace produces unequal outcomes, we need to find a band of intellectuals who will correct the malfunction. Note that said intellectuals base their authority on the fact that they are morally superior because they are not driven by the profit motive:

Marx tried to solve the problem by arguing that a revolutionary party would emerge from the proletariat and impose a dictatorship that would be the agent to both organize the workers and forge a new humanity.

But, is it democratic? Of course, Communists always pretended to be democratic. By that they meant, if their side did not win, if the people did not accept their rule, the people were suffering from “false consciousness.” By this principle the intellectual elites in the party could decide for them. The party knew what was best because it represented what Rousseau called “the general will.”

Vladimir Lenin focused on building a communist party. The problem, he argued, was that the working class suffered from “false consciousness.” It did not know what its own interests were because of its condition and therefore couldn’t free itself. The Communist Party had to be built from those who had pierced the veil of false consciousness and saw clearly what needed to be done. It wouldn’t simply lead the working class; it would compel the workers toward progress. And the people who could see through false consciousness were the intellectuals, who came to be the leaders of the Bolsheviks.

The party did not try to persuade people. It preferred to terrorize them:

Lenin apparently uttered the timeless phrase, “The purpose of terror is to terrify.” The revolution could succeed only if it could terrify the masses into doing its bidding, and to that end terror was applied. It was a terror that would last a long time but whose purpose it was to build a new, humane society. The vision of a decent society merged with a pride in ruthless logic, and ruthless politics. It created a culture in which mercy was a counter-revolutionary weakness.

The truth was that the intellectuals knew terror only as an abstraction. They applied it, but not with the thorough ruthlessness of the complete thug. They thought too much and that stayed their hand.

The more it failed, the more brutal the oppression became. It led inevitably to the advent of a strong man, a thug like Josef Stalin:

What emerged from this was Josef Stalin, who acted as a thug to perfection – the only thing that had in fact been made perfect. Men like Trotsky and the other leaders of the Bolsheviks wrote of the merciless prosecution of revolution, but Stalin was ruthlessness personified. He was not like the intellectuals; he had no interest in their theories and delusions. He displaced the intellectuals who had led the revolution, and ultimately murdered them and millions of others. When the Soviet Union needed to modernize its industry in the expectation of war, it raised the money by selling grain – almost all the grain the Ukrainians produced – creating mass starvation and leading to the death of millions.

Thus, the rule of philosopher kings led to the rule of fascist thugs:

This was the kind of problem that thinkers should think on. But being men of action rather than men of contemplation, Stalin and Hitler pursued their dreams with a scientific precision that focused only on considerations of necessity and not of humanity. The distance between thinkers and common sense was never greater than in the 20th century. Rather than sorting through the tensions in their thoughts, they put them aside in order to act. And to put them aside, they turned the means – ruthlessness – into an end.