Kort Explores conundrums of the human condition

Most of the attention paid to authoritarian societies has been on their external impacts on neighboring populations. The armies of authoritarian societies have earned a well deserved reputation for violence and depravity committed while attempting to conquer resisting nations, but this tendency to murder is an external manifestation. There is a deeper more fundamental aspect that must be accomplished in order to make authoritarian systems possible in the first place.

In this exploration of the calculus of control I'll use Fascists as a convenient example because their policies and practices are well documented, but nearly any advocate of authoritarianism would do. Down through history the Communists, Royalists, Militarists, and Religionists have all used similar means to multiply their effective presence and establish control over their subject populations.

A single Fascist ranting in isolation is little more threat to those around him than any other individual who believes violence is an acceptable means of achieving his goals. Even a group of Fascists are only as dangerous as a violent criminal gang of similar size. In order to pose a real threat, Fascists need a nation of supporters willing to do their bidding. A dead body becomes a disposal problem, while a living body under Fascist control becomes a tool in the service of the Fascist agenda. The core of authoritarianism is not so much killing as control.

Even inside a Fascist state not all of the citizens are members of the ruling elite. And yet the Fascist elite needs a means by which it can bend the rest of the population to its will, a means by which the will of the ruling elite can be multiplied without consuming more effort and resources than it controls.

Consider the basic economics of exploitive systems. In any economic system the productive individual must support not only his own standard of living, but also some percentage of society's operating overhead. In an exploitive system, the overhead of supporting those seeking to control the society must be added to the overhead required to provide the basic services of that society, placing an even greater burden on the productive sector.

If the productive sector resists control, they increase the amount of direct involvement by those seeking to control them. Take for example the amount of direct supervision required to get children to do chores they don't want to do. In many cases supervising a child takes more effort than doing the task directly would require. In this case the cost to the supervisor is justified since the objective is more to provide a learning experience than extract productivity from the child.

However, when the objective is to maximize the productivity of the controlled side of the equation, this level of one to one supervision is not sustainable. Few individuals are sufficiently productive to carry the load of direct one to one supervision - especially since the intention of most supervisors is to obtain for themselves a superior quality of life than that available to those they control.

Operating an authoritarian society requires a great deal of control over the domestic population. Not only must the economy be directed into efforts that are contrary to the best interests of the citizens, but care must be taken to deal with the inevitable resistance that is the natural human response to such control.

Resistance to control can be infectious. Human behavior is strongly influenced by suggestion and a tendency to imitate those around us. Once resistance gets established it rapidly becomes ever more difficult to suppress. Even the slightest rumblings of resentment and political dissent must be quickly and aggressively suppressed before they can grow into more serious problems. And yet, the ruling elite can hardly be everywhere all the time suppressing the slightest rumblings of dissent. And as it turns out, they don't have to.

Wartime Nazi Germany provides an excellent example of a fully developed police state with near absolute control over the population. The Nazis were obsessed with record keeping, and Gestapo records seized after the war provide a comprehensive account of just how they operated. The popular perception of a police state has sinister agents lurking around every corner, listening to every phone call, reading every piece of mail. But Gestapo records paint a far different - and more cost effective - picture.

According to Gestapo records, it only took a couple dozen agents to control a city of fifty thousand, and these agents spent very little of their time actually engaged in the sort of activities popularly associated with the secret police. It turns out that they had little need to engage in direct spying on the citizens since the citizens themselves were more than willing to do their spying for them. Gestapo agents spent most of their time sorting through the volumes of informant reports that filled their offices.

Some informants spied on their neighbors because they actually believed the propaganda manufactured by the ruling elite. Some denounced their enemies in order to settle personal grudges. Some were driven by their own fears to attempt to deflect attention away from themselves by calling attention to others. Some were motivated by the sense of power turning in their neighbors gave them. Some informants simply went along with what they believed everyone else was doing.

With so many unpaid spies eager - or at least willing - to serve the police state, the Gestapo agents had little need to do their own surveillance of the general population. They simply sorted through the stacks of informant supplied rumors and gossip that flowed into their office, and investigated the ones that caught their attention. As long as the agents made their investigations sufficiently public, and made enough of a spectacle of hauling away the accused, they maintained the atmosphere of terror that made sure the informers kept sending information to their office.

The objects of unwanted attention by their neighbors didn't have to actually do anything against the state in order to accumulate a file in the Gestapo office. It turns out that most of the accusations in the Gestapo files involved petty little complaints about individuals who didn't get along with their suspicious neighbors, said something indiscreet in an unguarded moment, or dressed differently than their accuser thought they should. But even these petty accusations were enough to condemn the accused to the dark depths of the Gestapo terror. Perhaps more importantly from the perspective of the police state, the general knowledge of how easy it was to attract the attention of Gestapo strongly encouraged the rest of the population to be ever more careful in complying with the will of the ruling elite for fear of being next.

While the above example is drawn from the records of the Nazi police state, the same means of control have been employed by all authoritarian systems. The economics of authoritarianism requires that all such systems turn the controlled population against itself. The Soviet system was very similar to that used by the Nazis except that it lasted far longer. The Soviets did take the concept a step further when they used their control over the schools to train children to spy on their parents and the parents of their friends.

The Chinese have employed variations of the same system ever since the Communist takeover, although their perverse implementation has repeatedly degraded into self destructive insanity. During the Maoist period, efforts by the Chinese authorities to turn the citizens against each other resulted in the cultural revolution, which consumed the best and brightest of their society in murderous violence. At first the primitive Communist leadership encouraged the violence against the intelligentsia since as uneducated peasants they feared those with knowledge and understanding of the real world.

It took the massive incompetence of the "Great Leap Forward" and the wide spread famine created by Mao's monumental bungling to force the Chinese leadership to allow even a modicum of common sense in their policies. Eventually, in spite of their pathological resistance to rationality, even Mao and his gang of peasant thugs had to admit that they needed at least a few intelligent people to run a modern nation. Since then, except for periodic massacres of those citizens who think a civilized society should include respect for human and civil rights, the criminals and barbarians who still control China have restrained their terror to using elderly women as spies. Each block of homes now has at least one "grandmother" whose full time job is to watch those who live in her block and report even the slightest suspicions to the authorities.

The intended result of the dynamics of terror is to create a population that participates in its own oppression and control. Even worse, the dynamics of terror create a controlled population that will turn against those who resist the terror, making those who most need saving the greatest threat to those who would save them.

While these tactics have been routinely used by police states to control their populations, they can also be a very effective means of destroying a free society from within. It should alarm anyone who values their freedom that we're now seeing these same tactics being put into practice in America today. Consider the tactics that are being employed in what is claimed to be a war on drugs, but which is increasingly becoming a war on the basic principles of our free society.

It started with a campaign to demonize drug dealers - a class of citizens who only exist because prohibition has created an artificially profitable market for their products. All drug dealers could be instantly eliminated by eliminating the socially destructive prohibition that props up their market, but that would also end the justification for eroding civil liberties. Instead the tactic of choice is to flood the media with messages promoting as heroes those who spy on their neighbors and turn in drug dealers. Claiming to be motivated by concern for the safety of children, the schools are increasingly being used to turn students into informants for the authorities.

Having broken down the principle of respecting each other's privacy with the manufactured fear of the drug war as justification, it's proving an easy step to expand the practice to other imagined offenses. The media treats as heroes those who spy on their neighbors and make accusations of child abuse, improper care of pets, or engaging in a growing list of proscribed activities. What gets far less media coverage is that many of these accusations turn out to be unfounded. Nor does the media like to report on the amount of trouble our increasingly intrusive government causes for the falsely accused.

Snooping and gossiping have now been elevated into honored functions of protecting society from imagined threats. Those among us who have long wanted to dictate to others how to live their lives now believe they've been empowered to persecute anyone who doesn't conform to the dictator's view of a proper life-style. And these former busybodies turned defenders of society are very eager to take on this imagined new duty.

Each intrusion on our civil liberties appears a worthy cause on a superficial level. But none are of greater value than the basic principles of a free society that are compromised when citizens begin to spy on each other and become agents of authoritarianism. Every society that has allowed its citizens to be turned against each other has degraded into some form of authoritarianism. Will America choose tolerance and freedom, or enforced conformity and tyranny?