Totalitarianism

A dictator cannot shoot lasers from his eyes. He cannot personally pull every trigger, sign every death warrant, or stand over every soldier as the order is carried out. He is one aging man in one body, and yet at his word entire armies march, entire populations fall silent, and people who fear nothing in battle suddenly lose the will to resist. This is the puzzle that sits underneath every tyranny, and it deserves a serious answer rather than a lazy one. The lazy answer is that some nations are simply born servile, that obedience is written into their blood. I want to argue the opposite. Obedience is not a national trait. It is manufactured, deliberately and methodically, by a machine that any sufficiently ruthless regime can build — and that almost any nation, however cultured, can be made to feed. ...

There is a picture of revolution that almost everyone carries around, and it is wrong. In it, oppression mounts until it becomes unbearable; the people, pushed past endurance, pour into the square in numbers too vast to suppress; the regime, faced with a sea of human bodies, loses its nerve and falls. It is a stirring image, and it flatters us, because it locates the decisive variable in something we can imagine summoning — courage, numbers, the willingness of ordinary people to finally stand up. If only enough of us were brave enough, the wall would come down. ...