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WC
Totalitarianism behaves like the many-headed monster, the Lernaean Hydra, from Greek mythology.<img alt="Public domain." captext="WC” src=”https://conservativenewsbriefing.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/the-totalitarian-hydra.jpg”>
Image: Hercules and the Lernaean Hydra by Gustave Moreau
As far back in time as we can trace him, man has been tested no less severely by himself than the natural world. Starvation, disease, and wild animals conspired to menace his life. However, so did those of his own kind who envied him what he had and were ready to steal the fruits of his labor. And thus the “history of mankind” began.
Whenever it enters the relationship between fellow men, envy acts like a poison to the soul, displacing good will and tempting to lowliness. It tears families apart and pits siblings against each other. It may also come between man and his god. As we are told, envy spurred Eve to pluck an apple from the tree of wisdom. In fact, any manlike being, to which we attribute thoughts and feelings, is vulnerable.
Turning to classical antiquity, both envy and lust have been terrible driving forces in mythological accounts of divine wrath, going up as high as Zeus himself. At the state level of self-assertion and rivalry, envy is the basis of countless wars down through history.
Since envy between men is reckoned to be an inappropriate feeling in Christianity, downright classified as a “deadly sin” by Tertullian, the “father of Western theology”, it likes to appear in disguise. Of great importance to political upheavals in recent centuries, it pervades allegations of “inequality” and “social injustice” as articulated in revolutionary manifestos.
A third deadly sin is greed. Ideologically uncompromising and incorruptible on the surface, totalitarian tyrants of our time have also been required to cover up that very unflattering sin in order to maintain the “agitprop” illusion of self-disciplined, self-sacrificing popular saviors. In their bombastic rhetoric, greed is something that exclusively characterizes the exploiting “class enemy” — or the racial “enemy of the state”.
While actively (a) demonizing him, (b) exposing him to public hatred, and (c) preparing the people for his liquidation, Bolsheviks and Nazis went after the “capitalist” in general or the “reactionary, tsar-loyal kulak” and “rent-seeking, parasitic Jew”, respectively, in particular. Contrary to the Sun King at Versailles, Louis XIV, “king by the grace of God”, what luxury goods they amassed by simple robbery themselves, the self-made, “revolutionary”, and anti-Christian tyrants carefully hid from the eyes of the public; they were never meant for boastful display as their existence would go against the official narrative of equality and expose the hypocrisy.
Leaving aside the intricacies of lust, the twin sins of envy and greed give away the defining resolve of the modern tyrant to rule totally over his fellow men. Unwilling to let them pursue their dreams and live their lives as they please, he insists on the privilege of arbitrary interference and control.
Effectively the head of a terror-dependent, unchecked state machinery operating like a criminal (mafia) organization, with an invariable demand for submission, the “beloved-leader” tyrant expects to be an object of worship. It reinforces his narcissism to be feared and loved like a god. Zealously, he monitors the relationships of others, never mind any signs of organized opposition to his authority, by whatever means at his disposal. Uneasily aware that his fellow men have thoughts and feelings, he desires to know them in full inasmuch as he “owns” the very persons themselves. Like other psychopaths, he is vain, devious, and conceited, desiring to rule and dominate without restraint.
For obvious reasons, personal prosperity has always been associated with power (as with the absolute monarch of the past). Therefore, the image of a modern tyrant living in abstinence helped feed a false narrative of humility and self-sacrifice for the community.
Since the French Revolution, we have accustomed ourselves to ascetic-looking tyrants like Robespierre (i.e. the revolutionary prototype). For all their differences, Lenin and Hitler followed in his footsteps (as did Mao, Castro, Mengistu etc.). What they had in common, indicating moral depravity, was their view of the “people”: It was but an ideological abstraction whose invocation could legitimize monstrous purges and genocide. Their declared “love” for the people or mankind at large was a sickening lie. The reliance on historical falsification and other pseudoscience was an accompanying disgrace.
The tyrant of our time likes to portray himself as somebody who works around the clock for the people whom “fate” or the “irresistible forces of history” (i.e. rarely the people itself) have appointed him to lead. Power-hungry and self-obsessed, he usually decides on a reputation as the superman who is both an incomparable theorist and practitioner. So he does not sit sprawled on a golden throne with a scepter in his hand, waiting for amusement. No, bent over his desk, he rather pretends to study five-year plans, if not busy signing the death warrants of those standing in his way: Declared “enemies of the people”.
Human nature is and remains what it always has been. What makes the tyrant of our time so monstrous is not his psychopathic desire for total dominance or his brutality, but the means that technology puts at his disposal. They make it truly difficult to contain his executive power.
Totalitarianism is a man-eating monster with many heads. As a social phenomenon, it originates from the same desire for dominance that we know from all parts of the animal world. Thus, judged by its motives (i.e. to be distinguished from its propaganda), it is primitive. If the urge to dominate others under false promises of salvation completely takes over the lifestyle of a person, no matter how cunningly he tries to cover it up and deceive his fellow men, we are entitled to suspect a narcissistic-psychopathic personality.
Western civilization, on the other hand, as informed by Christianity, expresses the loving and morally aspiring side of man, the urge for mutual care and security in the group, a striving for orderliness — and common norms. Indeed, it is about the eternal pursuit of justice. As human beings, we always have a choice. However, it is not always that we know what we choose. Time and time again, we are seduced and led astray which has great costs for mankind.
What fundamentally separates man from the beast is his capacity for magnanimity, tolerance, and generosity, reaching beyond his own immediate needs for self-assertion and the urge to succeed at the expense of others. The thing is that we have the capacity for both “animal evil” and “human goodness”. And being who we are, we have the language to express the difference, but also the language to deliberately obscure it in cases of evil intent.
In reality, totalitarianism represents the pinnacle of political perversion. Without scruples, the tyrant massacres his own people under the pretense of saving it from itself (!) or purely fictitious dangers from without. His brutal conceit is an affront to human dignity and reason. As it happens, parading the tyrants of the twentieth century is like studying criminal psychology. It is about the penetration of malicious behavior in the extreme.
Mankind has not become more evil in the twentieth century. However, atheistic-totalitarian tyrants produced by historical coincidences have embraced the political trend and adopted a self-explanatory language unknown to the monarchs of the past. Sickening heights of hypocrisy are likely to create an impression of unparalleled evil. Ultimately, the messengers of utopia are transparent predators whom modern technology has provided with the means to perfect oppression and cause “hell on earth” (e.g. persecution of dissenters, forced labor in prison camps, mass executions etc.).
Christianity, the foundation of institutional stability in civil society, has long been in decline. For the peoples of the Old World, the price for betraying the faith has been high. Secular utopianism, whether Bolshevik or Nazi, has offered mankind nothing but savagery and suffering.
Totalitarianism, a menace characterized by “ideological sham in competing variants”, should be considered the final interpretation of psychopathic ambitions for total dominance in human society, whether cave or country. And they are as old as man himself.
In summary, the “ancient monster” threatening Western civilization (i.e. freedom of speech, democracy, and the rule of law) is “human evil” or simply the “evil of nature as present in man”. The truth is banal.
