Totalitarianism is a political system where the state (or Government) exercises total and absolute control over everything (political life and discourse, the arts, sport, industry, the economy, health, education, even religion) within its jurisdiction.
For the purposes of our discussion I will call such a country closed.
People growing up nowadays in Ireland have an expectation that society will be open and free, but openness and freedom are, like poverty and wealth, relative terms. For example, in the 1920’s, soon after the radio (in those days called the wireless) became popular, some clergy in the Catholic Church in Ireland tried to ban jazz, lest it corrupt our youth and dilute our Irishness – or more specifically – our Catholicism. And when I was a teenager in the 1960’s many films and books were banned for the same reason.
Now not many who were living at that time would really have described Ireland in the nineteen-sixties as a closed society, but looking back, in some ways, it was!
In the context of power and control, a human being can be considered to be an open system, as can, of course, a family, which is a collection of humans. So communities, cities, countries and society (all just bigger groups of humans) also tend towards being open.
So, in terms of openness and closed-ness, true totalitarian regimes may be thought to be societal laboratories of sorts. That is, they try to control, or predict with certainty, how their people will behave.
Rulers in such regimes try to concentrate power in the centre, and control their countries by making them closed, trying to get their citizens to conform, prohibiting them from leaving, forbidding visitors from other countries moving freely through their countries, and trying to ban foreign radio, TV, internet etc.
But, because human beings are open systems in their own right, and can grow in unpredictable ways, totalitarian societies have always proven to be unsustainable – and I would predict that current totalitarian regimes that are closed will either gradually become open, like ice becomes water when immersed in it, or suffer catastrophic implosion visited from the inside or outside. Unfortunately, the opening up of closed societies (in my lifetime anyway) has usually involved significant suffering, as those in power do not relinquish it without a fight.
However, it is not all one-way traffic.
Many societies that were thought to be relatively open, when under pressure in past times became closed. Now, under different circumstances, they are open again. In what we now call the Western World, the fascist countries of central and southern Europe in the first half of the 20th Century are the obvious examples here.
But I argue that while they appeared relatively open in, say, the latter half of the 19th Century, true openness was not really embedded in their societies at that time.
I believe that it is difficult to go from true openness that an entire society embraces, with human rights checks and balances embedded both in the custom and the legal practices, to totalitarian closed-ness. But there are still powerful conservative forces (as there were in 19th Century Europe) who resist true openness, lurking in what we consider open societies.
For example, England and USA were two of the most open societies in the world when I was young, leading the way in the human potential movement, counter-culture, music, literature etc. Now they are far more closed than they were then.
But nowadays, generally, because of the speed and extent of communication, the world as we know it is more open than it has ever been in history. This openness makes it increasingly more difficult for harsh, controlling rulers and regimes to impose closed-ness in their countries.
Now – just a little thought for our consideration!
We in the Western democratic world are critical of other countries behaving what we might term to be a totalitarian manner, not having free and fair elections, restricting people’s access to foreign media etc.
But before we clap ourselves on the back because we have a free press it is good to remind ourselves that the news has always been managed (and massaged) by corporate-dominated media in the Western world to airbrush out horrifying stories of centuries-old western world cruelty and abuse that give us the standard of living that we enjoy today.
This will be dealt with more detail in the next Sub-Chapter when I describe corporate closed-ness.