In the Mutableye

[For this In the Mutable Eye, we are posting a selection from The Indifference Engine, Clarke Cooper’s unpublished masterpiece on neo-totalitarianism.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.