Sárospataki Füzetek 1. (1997)
1997 / 2. szám - Dr. Frank Sawyer: The roots of totalitarianism (A totalitarizmus gyökerei)
DR. FRANK SAWYER variability and elasticity".1 We like to believe in modern progress; yet it is modern civilization which by means of techno- scientific and economic means makes total control, total war, total fixations all the more horrendous. Totalitarianism and tyranny, like everything else today, is faster and more efficient. The irony of tyranny is that it only divides people, it can never create true unity. Democracy can also be tyrannical, since it merely tells us in whom the power is located (the people), but does not tell us how much power they receive, so that uox populi, uox dei (the voice of the people is the voice of God) is indeed a tyrannical possibility in western society today, where deeper norms have been discarded for ’quick fixes’, that is: fast solutions to everything. Means and ends: but where are the norms? Tyranny of any kind, whether it bothers to explain itself or not, always believes that the end justifies the means. Pascal wrote that the nature of tyranny is found in its desire to have "power over the whole world and outside its own sphere". And he adds: "Tyranny is the wish to obtain by one means what can only be had by another."1 2 Or said differently by Boris Pasternak: "Civic institutions should be founded on democracy, they should grow up from below, like seedlings that are planted and take root in the soil. You can’t hammer them in from above like stakes for a fence."3 Eastern Europe today cannot turn to the West for insight without great caution. In the West today people shop for moral views, religious experiences and a life-philosophy the way they shop for breakfast cereals, going down rows of endless choices and not staying faithful to anything for more than a short time. The present idea of pluralist freedom has reached the point that loyalties, creeds and foundations for morality have become ’selffounding’. No one - certainly not God - is thought today to be holding the magnet which arranges the iron filings of social 1 Jacques Ellul, The Technical Society (Vintage Books, New York, 1964), p.l27ff. 2 Blaise Pascal, The Pensées, trans.J.M.Cohen (Hammondsworth, England, 196), p.96 (nr.244). 3 Discussed in Peter Levi, Boris Pasternak (London, Macmillan, 1991), p.213. 86
