The new totalitarianism

Political neoliberalism defined itself against two alternatives, one domestic, one international: the welfare state, and totalitarian socialism.

The rise of democratically elected strongmen dictators is not an alternative to neoliberalism. It is authoritarian rather than totalitarian. It is both a consequence of neoliberalism and a form of it.

Biden and the left wing of the Democratic Party seem to want to reinvent the old welfare state. Can then?

If the Fordist model that the welfare state was based on is no longer viable, we might wonder if the totalitarian option is still vital. This surely is much of what China represents. We have the elements of it in our psychological and surveillance state, with militarized policing, a massive shift towards administrative governance, mass incarceration and, perhaps most ominously, a mental health system that wants to involve everyone.

This explains all our popular therapeutic spiritualities, which the 'New Age' is part of. They are ideological adjuncts to mental health policing, which asks doctors and therapists to act as probation officers -- to, potentially, everyone. It is a new form of the old universal Church. Instead of everyone being a sinner suspected of disobedience, everyone is a mentally ill person suspected of failure and unhappiness. In this paradigm, there are only micro-aggressions, where someone is guilty because someone else is offended or uncomfortable as something is said that ruptures the easy truce of the safe space. There are micro-failures, micro-crises, micro-malaises of negative affect.

Psychiatry and therapy are forms of the management of a populace. As always, the managed and (self-)managing mind is not the thinking citizen/subject. Psychoanalysis is a procedure of thinking, whose goal is the old ethical one of ancient philosophy: self-knowledge. Happiness and success in life endeavors is not a goal of this procedure but at best a by-product.

(That is why psychoanalytic therapies always lose out to evidence-and-results-based therapies; they define very modest goals of more optimal performance on the part of the individual subjected to correctional procedures. The studies that show that they meet these goals prove nothing, since the question is answered already when the questions are asked.)

Liberalism sees society as a mass of individuals who are atoms, isolated, and interacting with each other, often in hostile or unwanted ways. This is why the authority/liberty opposition becomes a matter of distribution and variation, but not a choice or opposition. The liberal state can be quite authoritarian. Its weak point is not lack of liberty but lack of democracy, or, which is the same thing, an eclipse of the political. Oppositional thought flourishes because it is contained by forces that make it irrelevant.

The 'totalitarian' model pertains to an idea of modern republican and nationalism that sees the society as a whole, a Gestalt, a fabric. Politics is about questioning or changing the character and feel of this fabric. Its weak point is not lack of democracy but of liberty, which does not eclipse the political so much as it absorbs it. Oppositional thought per se is harder to arrive at.

Both models weaken the political and the capacity to think, which are dependent on each other. Thinking does not solve problems; it creates them; it articulates and elucidates their identity and character.

Our society's more totalitarian qualities lie outside and deeper than its superficial political openness. The power of medicine as a form of police authority exercised over individual citizen-subjects is a governmental one that replaces thinking with management. It has taken over some of the old governmental tasks of religion. Within the system, there is little opposition. Doctors could refuse to be police officers with medical degrees and insist that their only job is to help people with what they need, and consider that they are working for their patients. But this rarely happens. They are trained to exercise a complete authority over the mind. Evidence of this is that any statement you might make can be interpreted by them in their scheme. Unlike in the legal system, these statements may be taken to mean something other than what they do on their face. What you say may be read as not a statement about anything in the world, but only an expression of your deviant (sick) behavior. The practice manuals of psychiatric medicine are clear about this. People are asked certain questions for certain purposes and their answers are effectively coded and translated to mean that they may have this or that symptom of this or that illness.

Another characteristic of contemporary systems of governance is their one-way orientation, often built into to the social practice or technique or the technology. Body cameras have this quality: they don't see what the cop does, but only what the person he or she is interacting with does. Psychiatry like all similar forms of bureaucratic social control is like this, and quite radically. Your clinic or hospital medical records may faithful record both things you said and did and/or the professional's observations or opinions, and these are all treated as on the same level of presumed fact. (A fact is something observed by someone entitled to make statements considered true by the authority of their position.). They will not report what questions you were asked, or what professionals did. And that is true even if they themselves are threatening, violent, or say things that are unaccountably bizarre that anyone who knew they had said that would think improper.

But the solution is not to record everything. That would only generalize the same system of social control. Where people are sanctioned for breaking whatever are the rules.

The solution is to de-bureaucratize the society by politicizing it. This could be done by investing in the right way in education, journalism, and the arts. The good news is that most people will want this if they are exposed to it, at least eventually; the bad news is who does not want it: capital does not want it. The future will either be capitalist or democratic. The prospects for meaningful liberty of the mind depend largely on this.