The Dehumanising Effects of Technocratic Rule, By James Reed

An insightful piece at the Daily Sceptic.org compares the totalitarianism of Cold War Eastern Europe, with the creeping totalitarianism of today in the West. There are many parallels, with it often being said that the West engages in putting an iron fist inside a velvet glove, but one with woke rainbow colours. Still the hardest aspects of Eastern European totalitarianism were seen during the Covid plandemic, where the velvet coverings were dropped. The police were not as brutal in dealing with protesters as the Eastern Europeans were, using rubber bullets rather than lead ones, but the aggression and hatred of the common people was the same. I do not recall any footage of Eastern European cops pepper spraying grandmothers. As well, since Covid, there has been movements to internet censorship and a sustained attack upon freedom of speech, as our Dark Lords see dissent as mighty inconvenient.

The big question is where will this go? At least as the election of Trump showed, here is still some possibility of electoral resistance, but this is going to be difficult in the UK, the rest of Europe and Australia, where there is entrenchment of the power elites of the Left from the kindergarten up. Still, a revolt of the masses may occur as economic conditions continue to deteriorate. Until then, it will be more hard times.

https://dailysceptic.org/2025/02/02/towards-post-totalitarianism-in-the-west-some-warnings-from-the-east/

"Do we not stand as a kind of warning to the West, revealing to it its own latent tendencies?" So asked Czech playwright Václav Havel in 1978 in 'The Power of the Powerless', his epic essay on the nature of dissent in Communist Eastern Europe. Havel argued that the fate of East European countries under Communist tyranny stood as a monument to the debilitating effects of late-stage techno-bureaucratic rationalism – a system focused solely on material existence. This system, he argued, ceased to serve humanity, eroded individual dignity and coldly tore people away from their natural affiliations: their habitat, their family, their community, their nation.

For Havel, there was no evidence that the charms of Western-style democracy offered a better solution to the dehumanising effects of technocratic rule. In fact, he contended, the West's greater political freedoms and economic success merely obscured the underlying crisis more effectively. In parliamentary democracies, he believed, people were manipulated in subtler ways than under the callous authoritarianism of Communist rule – through consumption, production, advertising and consumerism.

In these views, Havel echoed and expanded upon earlier dissident writers like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Czesław Miłosz, who also identified in Communism the totalising impulses of materialist ideologies. These ideologies, they claimed, gave rise to new religions based on the remoulding of human existence in line with a utopian vision of historical destiny. Eastern Europe under Communism therefore stood as a 'Warning to the West' – as Solzhenitsyn put it – about the natural endpoint of sustained bureaucratic rationalism.

The Art of Living with Lies

History never repeats itself, but it often resonates. It is surprising, perhaps, that dissident writings like those of Havel are not more closely studied in Western societies for the profound insights and admonitions they offer. The contemporary West, to varying degrees, may be experiencing a similar condition of moral, spiritual and political decay that Havel observed in late-stage Communist states toward the end of the twentieth century.

During this period, writers like Havel examined the evolving nature of authoritarian rule following the end of uncompromising Stalinist repression. This era saw limited political openings after Nikita Khrushchev's ascent to the Soviet premiership after Stalin's death in 1953 and the discrediting of hardline Communist rule following the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956.

In Czechoslovakia, these changes led to a period of political liberalisation culminating in the 'Prague Spring' of 1968. Reformist leader Alexander Dubček sought to loosen media, speech and travel restrictions, decentralise the economy and reduce Party authority. Fearing these reforms could unravel the Communist imperium in Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union invaded in August 1968, sending half a million troops to crush the nascent political awakening. A compliant regime under Gustáv Husák was installed, returning the nation to heel.

What followed was notable. The Communist system after the Soviet invasion reconstituted itself not through Stalinist-style terror but through what Havel termed 'post-totalitarianism'. This concept absorbed much of his attention in his political essays. In 'Letter to Dr. Gustáv Husák' (1975), Havel asked why his country was plunging into an ever deeper moral crisis. Why did people behave as they did? The simple answer, he perceived, was fear. Not physical fear, but psychological fear. People were not afraid of being tortured, tried, or executed. Instead, they feared social exclusion and losing privileges: a job, a promotion, access to university, the ability to work in one's chosen field, or a holiday in Bulgaria.

The Cost of Conformity: Personal Loss and Public Decay

Post-totalitarianism did not intrinsically require trials and prisons to enforce its rule because, by design, the whole population was ensnared in a web of existential anxiety – everyone nervously trying to preserve what they had or gain what they did not yet possess. Thus, because the system demanded outward compliance rather than genuine belief, most people avoided conflict with authority. Conformity cost nothing, obliging only performative displays of allegiance. Since most people recognised the lies propping up the system, their loyalty was often entirely superficial.

The problem, Havel maintained, was that participating in this system led to despair, apathy, and inner moral debasement. That was the psychic cost of outward compliance. It compelled individuals to live within a maze of lies. The energies of the population were intentionally diverted toward maintaining private material comforts, with little attention paid to their shrinking spiritual, ethical and political horizons. By gearing people's focus toward materialist interests, the system rendered them incapable of recognising their diminishing freedoms. By accepting their life within this system of lies 'individuals', in Havel's haunting words, "confirm the system, fulfil the system, make the system, are the system".

Havel queried what human qualities such a regime encouraged if outward adaptation was the key to advancement. The answer: selfishness and careerism. Those who resisted performative dissimulation were dismissed as quixotic fools or shunned as threats to society. Such individuals exposed the lies underpinning the system and highlighted the cowardice and moral compromises of those who conformed. To protect their small worlds of self-preservation, even sympathisers avoided associating with such mavericks.

For all its cynicism, the post-totalitarian system was, however, intrinsically entropic. Over time, it immobilised itself, suppressing cultural vitality and stifling society's ability to expand liberty and discover truth. The regime promoted only its own ideological 'truth', discounting genuine knowledge and flourishing. It engendered intellectual stagnation, dogma and a cheerless, resentful obedience. Leadership positions were filled by flunkeys, opportunists and incompetents. The system, as a consequence, promoted only banality and the cult of 'right thinking mediocrity'.

Any capacity to express yourself freely under such a dispensation was, of course, an illusion. One might, in theory, have the right to speak one's mind, but the exclusionary and latently punitive mechanisms of the post-totalitarian state ensured that no one else would be listening. People would naturally recoil from proximity to dissenting voices, fearful of endangering their, often meagre, privileges.

The result was that creativity withered, innovation dwindled, and cultural and technological dynamism faded into irrelevance. Not only was there no real political competition for political power, which of course was the whole point of the post-totalitarian system, but no channels for any meaningful political discourse and exchange existed either. Pressing questions were silenced or brushed aside, leaving a society that seemed calm on the surface. Or "Calm as a morgue or a grave – would you not say?" as Havel memorably put it in his letter to Dr. Husák.

Echoes from the East: The West's 'Prague' Spring?

Does any of this strike an unsettling chord with those of us in the modern West? The warnings of Eastern European dissidents echo with uncomfortable clarity today. Communist governments in Eastern Europe ultimately wielded a police-state that dwarfs anything seen in contemporary Western democracies, yet some of the patterns they described feel oddly recognisable.

While the United States may be shaking off the creeping authoritarianism experienced under the Biden administration's tenure, Western Europe in particular remains mired in what might seem a not dissimilar malaise to end-of-era Communism in Eastern Europe. As Havel cautioned, such systems drain vitality, enforce conformity and corrode the moral and spiritual core of society. His message – and that of his fellow dissidents – demands renewed attention, since history is rhyming once again.

Before probing into the evolution of post-totalitarianism in the West, consider this: has the West already experienced its own version of the Prague Spring – in 2016? Havel described the events of Prague in 1968 as a moment when people broke free from illusions to live in truth. The two electoral shocks of 2016 – Britain's Brexit vote and Donald Trump's surprise election – can be seen in a similar light. As Havel noted, such moments arise when something long suppressed erupts from the 'hidden sphere', disrupting the carefully constructed façade of political consensus. Recall how often commentators dismissed the chances of Brexit or Trump's victory – until reality shattered those illusions.

The events of 2016 can be interpreted in various ways, but one compelling perspective is that they represented democratic jailbreaks – attempts to escape from the suffocating ideological orthodoxy that had dominated Western governance since at least the end of the Cold War. While this orthodoxy was not totalitarian, it was nevertheless totalising in its globalist outlook, shaped by the belief that liberal democracy had emerged as the inevitable 'end of history'.

After 1991, globalist ideology assumed that convergence toward liberal norms was both desirable – expanding personal freedoms and enabling global capital – and inevitable, given the absence of viable ideological alternatives. However, this homogenising vision, reinforced by neo-liberal economic policies, failed to deliver a more just and equitable world. Instead, it deepened wealth disparities within states, fuelled aggression abroad, and imposed a rigid, one-size-fits-all framework – most conspicuously embodied in the European Union's bureaucracy. This process not only eroded democratic autonomy but also stripped communities and nations of their distinct customs, cultures and traditions – echoing, in some ways, the mechanisms of East European Communism that Havel once criticised.