[For this In the Mutable Eye, we are posting a selection from The Indifference Engine, Clarke Cooper’s unpublished masterpiece on neo-totalitarianism. The full manuscript can be found on Substack here.]
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Part I, Chapter 4: Efficient Systems
The classic totalitarianisms were evil and violent from beginning to end, but Hayek showed that a nascent totalitarianism need not begin that way and I have showed that it need not run that way. Totalitarianism is not what people think. The hallmarks of totalitarianism are not the brutality or the extravagant autocracy—those were only ancillary characteristics of a particular type of totalitarianism; side effects. The real essence of totalitarianism is the primacy of a System.
Not every system can do it, of course. Arendt noted that for a classic totalitarianism to really get going and achieve a decent approximation of totality it has to be based in a country that's big enough and powerful enough to have at least a rhetorical chance of actually taking over the world. Germany had the industrial power and just barely enough bigness; the Soviet Union had all the bigness and just barely enough power. Similarly, for a System to be effectively totalitogenic it must meet three interdependent criteria. It has to be big enough and general enough to plausibly encompass most activity. It probably has to be or promote a spontaneous order—it needs laws of its own innate physics that can determine (or equivalently, explain) the "natural" behavior of every element; this is how it can live. And it should exhibit positive feedback: any compliance should generally encourage more compliance; this is how it can grow, which it must if it's going to become properly infinite.
The cosmic sort of purely Natural system succeeds at having enough largeness and generality—it is the Universe; it literally does encompass every activity. It is also, as noted before, a spontaneous order, organizing itself—and us—according to its cosmic principles. But it fails with the third, because anything you can do in the physical universe you can do exactly as much of as you want to, then stop, and there will rarely be any repercussion (of non-linear proportion). So although the cosmos lives, it can't grow, it has no invasiveness; it never makes things get more cosmic than they already are. It really is The Totality, so while it inflicts every constraint of our existence it also, by the weird miracle of our consciousness, appears to leave room for us to act freely in our responses to all those imposed conditions.
More modest systems can be more compelling. The ideological systems of the classic totalitarianisms meet the requirement of comprehending everything, exactly because of their actual intention to be complete ethical codes. They produce a spontaneous order in that to the extent the ideology is realized it will produce a society of a certain kind: The theory, unfolded into practice, develops into a certain shape peculiar to itself and determined by its principles, and it will tend to maintain that shape. And with a terror mechanism to encourage compliance these systems will grow, increasing themselves and reducing alternatives every time one more person declines to resist.
That will work. But probably only to a point, because as the Natural system fails in the third requirement, ideological systems are weak in the second: Their order is not as spontaneous as one would like. Although it can operate on its own it's not of itself; that order was designed. Also, while negative terror is necessary to the system for promoting compliance, it isn't inherently of the system—it's an add-on; a patch.
A standard market system is strong in the third criterion, very strong in the second, and weak in the first. We'll come back to that.
What unites the various sorts of system is the principle of efficiency. Natural systems work according to the laws of physics, ideological systems work according to the logical laws of ideas, and economic systems work according to a sort of material logic. An event of any of these systems is the transformation of one state into another according to the appropriate laws, such as the fusion of deuterium and tritium to produce helium, a neutron, and 17.6MeV, or the demonstration that because Socrates is a man and men are mortal, Socrates is mortal. When a system is left undisturbed it produces events among its elements in the maximally efficient way: best logical answers are those that proceed from assumption to conclusion with the least accessory entanglement; best physical answers are those that produce their effect with the smallest inputs of materials, energy and time.
There are also mechanical systems: those that use natural rules according to a human design to achieve a human purpose; because of this human interference mechanical efficiency is a little different. Among the machines what efficiency amounts to is ensuring that all the energy goes where we want it to. Any strictly natural system (or any machine considered as a natural system) is always one hundred percent efficient because inputs invariably equal outputs—it's the law. But human purposes are different from natural results—we're almost never interested in every effect of an event, so we only collect the part we're interested in and consider the remainder to be "waste". If you have a drive shaft that wobbles a little then some of the energy that could be going to the output is being lost as the "waste" of vibration and friction; if you can eliminate the wobble by putting in a better bearing, your machine will be more efficient. If you want your machine to convert gasoline into motion it will also produce some heat as a side effect. Naturally speaking that's still perfectly efficient, but you don't care about the heat so the part of the gasoline's potential energy that shows up as heat rather than kinesis is just waste to you, and represents your machine's inefficiency.
Mechanical efficiency is all about eliminating side-effects like vibration, heat and excess inventory. Or, more directly, efficiency is the prevention of everything except the desired effect. There is no inefficiency in natural systems because without a specifically desired effect nothing is a side-effect—it's all just effect. "Inefficiency" is actually imaginary—it only exists to the extent that there's a difference between what we intend and the way Nature naturally works, because there is some "desired effect" that we're arbitrarily imposing on the events. Nature is only efficient; that's because Nature is a system, and a system is a pattern of how things happen. The things are always going to happen, and they're always going to happen in the way that they were already going to. That's what they do. That's the system. Every system is the realization of its particular kind of efficiency. And it isn't anything else.
So we arrive, finally, at the definition: Totalitarianism, old and despotic or new and entertaining, is the domination of a society by system. The domination need not be perfect—all that's necessary is that in most situations the systemic response is more possible than any other. To the extent that that is true, activity in the society will be calculable according to that system's physical or logical laws, just as a natural system is calculable. To the extent that the societal calculation can be accurately made, the society is totalized: it is operating efficiently.
This doesn't mean we could necessarily do the calculating and predict or generate events just as we please—it's very likely that the means for that would always be beyond us. The significant calculator is the relevant system itself, just as the market calculates prices with an efficiency we could never match. It also becomes difficult to make a distinction between prediction and causation: If the result of an event is the same as what the system would predict about it, that means it's more possible for system-results to happen than any other—the system is realized; the system is what's happening. Did it do that? Well, yes and no. It happened, because that was the most efficient outcome.
Efficiency is unity. The input and output of a physical or logical reaction look like two different things but they're really only the two ends of a single thing—the inputs of a chemical reaction are equal to the outputs, and I'm the same me whether I turn towards you or away from you, and the acorn is the oak. And since each input came from a previous reaction and each output is the input for another, the entire constellation of the system's elements and all their reactings is only one single—totalized—thing. That thing has a shape, and that shape is the system's order.
The spontaneous order of humanity, on the other hand, is disorder. Not especially anarchic most of the time, but a specifically unpredictable ferment; we call it a "culture". Nothing happens in a culture; every event in a culture is something being done. Cultural events aren't governed by laws but by reasons, which are mutable representations of relationships between an individual and his environment. The mutability of the reasons is patterned but lawless, and means that the elements of an event are not efficiently united; there's always an uncapturably unpredictable residue, and no guarantee that the equation will work out the same way next time. Culture is disunity. And inefficiency.
Totalitarianism, being systematic, is a uniter. The classic totalitarians systematically sought the efficient course leading from here to humanity's destiny—as they perceived it. They sought the unification of mankind with historical inevitability—and "inevitability" may seem like a bold claim, but if you can just get your system working right the prophecy becomes self-fulfilling, since nothing else shall happen.
This is why totalitarianism eradicates culture—the chess for chess's sake, the personal relationships, the idiosyncratic ideas that become art, the subjective experience. It doesn't "need to" or certainly "want to"; it just does. If two systems of comparable power are competing for the same resources, is it the efficient one or the inefficient one which will prevail? That's not a threat; there's no malevolence; it's just what happens. In Nature. It's the law.
And this is why totalitarianism is understood as a conformity-production system. But the important conformity is not that all the people should look and think and act alike; that’s helpful and efficient because it makes them easily interchangeable, but it's mainly cosmetic. The important thing is for each of us to be in conformity with our function; you must be united with your use.
The totalitarianism Arendt described was a social expression of the desirability of efficiency. It starts with an ideology because ideology is the efficient description of our lives and our goals. It boils things down, and purports to show that despite messy appearances there's really only one direction for all of us.
The totalitarianism Hayek described was an economic expression of the necessity of efficiency. Wherever there is a socially mandated ideology, if anyone is serious about implementing it then it will be necessary for every element in the society to be controlled and efficiently directed towards the ideological goal.
But those systems failed because they worked by mechanical efficiency, not natural efficiency. They only had an interest in one of the outputs; they failed to achieve Nature's indifference to the reaction products, so every other result was waste and had to be liquidated, re-educated, what have you. It had to work this way, because these systems were designed by humans for reasons.
Where systemic conditions are right—and when there's no ideology to get in the way—natural totalitarianism will take over; this is the expression of the sufficiency of efficiency. Efficiency doesn't need us; the entire universe already does it, automatically, always, without a single side-effect. It all happens. We like efficiency because in small amounts it helps us, so we have always specifically sought to achieve it—to overcome our human difference from the universe. The Enlightenment was a major step in the recognition of efficiency as such and in setting it before other values; the Industrial Revolution brought tools with which to practice it, and the Computational Revolution begins to set it free.
Early in our history the gap between the power of our crude tools and the ambitiousness of our goals leaves a space for us—the human difference—where universal efficiency can't intrude. The gap between what we can intend and what we can actually accomplish is a failure-space where the systems all break down, and in confronting these inadequacies we are forced to think. Later, as we improve our technologies by adding to their efficiencies, the goals come within range; eventually, as our social, technological and economic systems become more powerful, approaching unity with natural efficiency, each goal—large societal ones or little personal ones—become things that happen, natural outcomes of the systems, rather than things that are done. Then universal efficiency can begin taking hold of them one by one and apply them to its own end. The gap closes; the human difference—a temporary side-effect of the universe—is assimilated.
It was the puniness of our weapons that formerly saved us. When our effective consciousness first stood up from Nature we experienced the desire for states other than what would naturally happen; "humanity" is our attempting to bring about those states—not our succeeding at it. But when our systems don't just bring the desired states within reach, but attain the power to make them already the state, our doing is done; we were a complication for a while, but have returned to order and sink back into the universal system. Whether we physically still exist or not, that is the end of humanity.
So: What is our objection to totalitarianism? If a political system has been evil but could just as easily—more easily, in fact—bring us exactly every comfort, how is that so bad? Doesn't that sound good? That depends. The correct objection to totalitarianism is not that it's evil and violent, but that it isn't human. And I have my opinion, but I will not presume to tell you what your feelings about it should be. You decide.
There are three major grounds where the totalitarian efficiency of the systems erases the human difference: Meaning, Power, and Action.
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2025 Addendum:
This could use a nice structural edit but it does what I needed it to: Cap the abstraction layer and show that there’s a definable source of the destruction I allege. This wraps up Part I. Parts 2, 3, and 4 are about Meaning, Power, and Action—what they are, why they’re human and how they are wrecked.
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Leftovers:
Hayek, 78—In fact, as planning becomes more and more extensive, it becomes regularly necessary to qualify legal provisions increasingly by reference to what is "fair" or "reasonable"; this means that it becomes necessary to leave the decision of the concrete case more and more to the discretion of the judge or authority in question.
• which now happens to be (nondisputed) Science, or the Market [quote in ch1; this here. Or... Power...]
The whole of his social philosophy may be described as an assault on the exaggerated claims made for 'reason' and a justification for the view that we must adopt an attitude of humility towards natural processes and "submit to conventions which are not the result of intelligent design, whose justification in the particular instant may not be recognizable, and which will..... often appear unintelligible and irrational." [quote fr Hayek "Individualism: True and False," in Individualism and Economic Order, p. 23.; whole fr Norman Barry, "The Tradition of Spontaneous Order"]
[back from Market Power]
So the path we've been taking is the Scenic Route to Serfdom. By freely pursuing our individual best interests we build a new Nature, the Market. Within the natural Nature we can improve our condition by making use of its materials and forces; this is possible because we are made of that Nature ourselves, so wherever Nature might bring a force to break a tree or burn it, we can manipulate its forces to do the same, imposing our will on its materials. We are Nature's forces and materials brought most intimately together. We are made of Nature; we are Nature standing up.
The new Nature is made of us. Its rules and forces are its own, and we are its material. It will nourish, break or burn us, depending on the weather within it, and there is very little we can do against it. We can do a bit to direct its forces by manipulating its materials—through economic regulation, for instance—but to do so is to treat each other as means to ends. And that is just what totalitarianism is all about: the obliteration of the human in the pursuit of some goal. Planned economies might reach totality faster because their Authority explicitly recognizes humanity as material to be applied towards the goal, but the Market will achieve the same effect once it has enough power to overcome our relationships to each other. The effect needn't be universal; the Market may never intervene between you and your friends and family. All that's necessary is that it could.
