A theory of dictatorship

Photo taken at Fort Breendonk, Belgium

About half a year ago I have written the blog “How to become a dictator”. I propounded there the view of the French neuropsychiatrist Boris Cyrulnik about this question. Of course, Cyrulnik is not the only one who has dealt with the problem. Not only political theorists and other scholars have developed dictatorship theories, also novelists have done so. The best known novelist who did was George Orwell (1903-1950), who treated the theme in two novels: Animal Farm (1945) and 1984 (1949). I think that all my readers will have heard of these important books and maybe they have read them as well. Nevertheless, as it goes, at least often with me, maybe you keep something in your mind of the books you have read, especially if you consider them important, but gradually it fades away. So it happened to me also for Orwell’s books, even though I have read them several times. Therefore, I was happy to come across a book by the French philosopher Michel Onfray, titled Théorie de la dictature, that compiles Orwell’s work on dictatorship and discusses its main theses in a clear way. Since nowadays the power of dictators is growing again, I want to share with you the main lines of Orwell’s theory of dictatorship, as explained by Onfray.
When talking of dictatorships, most readers will think of Putin’s Russia and Xi Jinping’s China, and indeed, these are the most important dictatorships in the present world (certainly in view of the size of the countries, for the situation in a country like North Korea is even far worse). However, dictatorship is not a black-and-white phenomenon in the sense that a country is a dictatorship or it isn’t. Moreover, often a country doesn’t suddenly become a dictatorship but gradually develops to become one (see Russia since 1991). It’s a phenomenon on a sliding scale. A country can be more dictatorial or less dictatorial. It can also move into one direction or in the opposite direction. Actually, Onfray’s book is not a warning against Russia or China (although it helps understand these countries, too), but a warning against dictatorial tendencies in France and the European Union. So, if you live in a democratic country, then you can use Orwell’s view also to judge your own country and use it as a guide to stopping dictatorial tendencies. However, in democratic countries dictatorial tendencies often don’t come from the top but are the result of developments on all levels of society. It’s an interaction between social developments and governmental interventions. Keeping this in mind, here then are the main lines of Orwell’s theory of dictatorship summarized in seven theses by Onfray with a little bit interpretation by me:

1) Destroy liberty. Watch people continuously; prevent that they have a personal life and that they live on their own; let them participate in common feasts and ceremonies; manipulate and uniformise their thoughts and views.
2) Impoverish the language and manipulate the thoughts with the help of words. Introduce new words and if possible a completely new language or terminology. Ban undesired words. Give words a double, possibly contradictory, meaning. Prefer oral texts to written texts. Try to prevent that people read the classical authors or rewrite them. A present example here is the term “special military operation” instead of “war” for Russia’s attack on Ukraine.
3) Do away with the truth. Develop and teach an ideology. Use the press as your instrument. Spread false news. Only what the authorities say is true.
4) Manipulate history. Erase undesirable past facts. Rewrite history and “make” new facts. Destroy books and write literature according to the official norms.
5) Deny or ignore nature. Deny natural human desires or just use them as a way to distract people from the real problems (sex, sport). Promote an ideal type of living; an ideal model of man. Regulate procreation. Medicalize life. See, for example, how China deals with the Covid pandemic. On the one hand, it tries to stop the spread of the coronavirus with measures which may reduce the spread of the virus but cannot destroy it (nature is ignored), while on the other hand these measures are a manner to keep the people under control.
6) Propagate hate. Make an internal or external enemy. Make war. Say that those who criticize your measures are psychiatric patients or criminals; make them “confess” their sins. Examples here are the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny (the internal enemy) and Ukraine and the NATO (the external enemy).
7) Strive for full power and control of all aspects of life. Take full control of the education of children in all its aspects. Make your own opposition. Put the elite to your hand. Make that scientific facts are only known to those who really need them (so to the scientists). Make people believe that they have something to say and that they have an influence, although, of course, the real power is in the hand of the leader(s).

This theory of power is based on Orwell’s imaginary worlds in Animal farm and 1984. Even in the most severe dictatorships, it can happen that its aspects are not fully realized and maybe never will be realized. But Orwell holds us a mirror that reflects a possible world; a world that has already partly been realized in some countries. If we may believe Onfray, France and the EU are on the way to become dictatorships. I think that this is a bit exaggerated. Nevertheless, we can see Onfray’s thesis as an early warning, and in order to see how France, the Netherlands and the EU are developing, we can use Orwell’s theory of dictatorship and Onfray’s interpretation as a checklist. If warned in time, maybe we can keep the situation under control, but for that we need more than a checklist but also people with a democratic mind.