While many structural forces — independent courts, free press and fundamental rights for citizens, to name a few — create bulwarks against totalitarian government in America, it remains important to assess the status of our culture and its propensity for totalitarian psychology. Totalitarian psychology is responsible for the mobilization of modern democratic peoples for the greatest evils in human history.
It is imperative that Americans deeply interrogate their own beliefs, practice critical thinking and humility and reject totalitarian impulses in favor of a reasonable and inclusive politics.
No ideology is infallible, and no ideologue has all the answers. As such, if one ideology claims a monopoly on political justice or righteousness, it necessarily tells a totalitarian lie. No political party is immune to the totalitarian mind and no dogmatic ideology is exempt from culpability.
For a better society and a better politics, totalitarian psychology must be honestly recognized and then unequivocally abandoned. Montgomery Fellow Jake Sullivan discusses policy. Existential risks x-risks are disastrous because they lock humanity into a single fate, like the permanent collapse of civilisation or the extinction of our species. These catastrophes can have natural causes, like an asteroid impact or a supervolcano, or be human-made from sources like nuclear war or climate change.
Hitler inspects advanced German engineering of the time - what if it had given the Nazis an unbeatable advantage? Credit: Getty Images. Toby Ord, a senior research fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute FHI at Oxford University, believes that the odds of an existential catastrophe happening this century from natural causes are less than one in 2, , because humans have survived for 2, centuries without one. However, when he adds the probability of human-made disasters, Ord believes the chances increase to a startling one in six.
Researchers at the Center on Long-Term Risk, a non-profit research institute in London, have expanded upon x-risks with the even-more-chilling prospect of suffering risks. In short: a future with negative value is worse than one with no value at all. If a malevolent group or government suddenly gained world-dominating power through technology, and there was nothing to stand in its way, it could lead to an extended period of abject suffering and subjugation.
Though global totalitarianism is still a niche topic of study, researchers in the field of existential risk are increasingly turning their attention to its most likely cause: artificial intelligence. Once in charge, it would control advances in technology that prevent internal challenges, like surveillance or autonomous weapons, and, with this monopoly, remain perpetually stable.
A nuclear missile on display in China Credit: Getty Images. Being Jewish, deprived of her German citizenship, she became stateless — an experience that shaped her thinking.
She remained safe in France for a few years. But when France declared war on Germany in September , the French government began ordering refugees to internment camps. While writing these essays she learned of the Nazi destruction of European Jewry.
Although that might be true, I argue there is an equally important lesson to be drawn — about the importance of thinking and acting in the present. She argued that what happened in Germany was not inevitable; it could have been avoided. It happened because ordinary people failed to stop it.
She argued that the disintegration of the nation-state system following World War I had exacerbated these conditions. Those conditions alone were not sufficient to lead to totalitarianism. Possibly the one ray of hope in these systems is that because they pay no attention to actually governing, they are not likely to be sustainable in the long run.
The incredibility of the horrors is closely bound up with their economic uselessness. The Nazis carried this uselessness to the point of open anti-utility when in the midst of the war, despite the shortage of building material and rolling stock, they set up enormous, costly extermination factories and transported millions of people back and forth.
In the eyes of a strictly utilitarian world the obvious contradiction between these acts and military expediency gave the whole enterprise an air of mad unreality. But in the meantime, what these regimes create is so devastating to humanity that it would be naive to assume that humanity will always bounce back.
Here the night has fallen on the future. When no witnesses are left, there can be no testimony. The carnage they create tears apart all social fabric.
And we must not assume that they exist only in the past. Read Next. Learning Reading Time: 6 minutes. The People One of the most disturbing things about Nazism in Germany is how quickly the country changed. However, … the [totalitarian] movements showed that the politically neutral and indifferent masses could easily be the majority in a democratically ruled country, [and] that therefore a democracy could function according to rules which are actively recognized by only a minority.
And how do they get there? How do they get this power?
0コメント