Totalitarianism: Ancient Origins

The State as Religion

I just wrote a short article about how much I dislike the attempt to basically turn religion into politic and politics into religion, and even though I just wrote that, I’d like to expand on that. I don’t like to wait to publish things either when I see it as being like the rice checkerboard game, the sooner I get my ideas out the better, there are still people who like old music and old books better than new music or new books so I might as well just get things out when they come to me rather than dripping content to people regardless of what some researchers might think is optimal.

I’ve read a lot about how totalitarianism is a distinctly modern phenomenon, and while I think fascism and Soviet style communism (which many people consider fascism anyway) basically represent a more modern kind of totalitarianism, I don’t think totalitarianism in the sense that the state controls all of life is remotely new. I think that’s been the predominant government for all of human history, though probably not human prehistory since I think there were too many fundamental cognitive changes between human prehistory and human history for prehistoric humans to have been totalitarian even if there were probably other problems for them. I’m thinking of the first governments in recorded history, such as Ur in Mesopotamia and similar governments in other parts of the world at about the same time such as the ones in Mesoamerica and China.

One common characteristic in such governments is the leader is seen as a god or as the representative and messenger of the gods. Another common characteristic is that the various religious were considered equivalent to ethnic groups and by extension the old states: the Greek gods were the gods of the Greeks, the Norse gods were the gods of the Norse, the Aztec gods were the gods of the Aztecs, the Egyptian gods were the gods of the Egyptians, the Chinese gods were the gods of the Chinese, etc. That’s a lot of how “ethnic paganism” today also is. Religion and the state were essentially considered synonymous and the conflicts between different states were essentially the conflicts between different religions.

Another important element of such religions seems to be the normative definition of humanity in their religious contexts, which should be familiar to everyone from 40k and ties back into how I read The Chrysalids recently at someone’s recommendation which seems like where 40k largely got that idea seeing as the book literally says “Heresy!” and “Accursed is the Mutant!” In real life, the state religion of Ur was going out and defining what humans were and the differences between humans and gods, notably that humans had a lifespan of around 100 years and Gilgamesh shouldn’t be trying to find immortality which was the basis of the plot to Gilgamesh, and there was also Enkidu who was like an animal person with animal friends who ended up losing his status which a lot of people see as being the basis for the idea of the Fall in the Bible. Hey, there’s the real Beastmen! Gilgamesh tries to go find a fountain of youth and then it just says no, immortality is for gods and humans have to die and that’s basically the plot, and other normative ideas about humanity are also defined by comparing humans to monsters as well as the gods, and it’s basically the Chaoskampf against Tiamat where chaos is seen as inherently bad, even if Tiamat is originally sadly not a dragon lady, but apparently that part got added on late enough there are actually depictions of Tiamat as the dragon lady for us and I’m going to use that because it’s more interesting and dragons basically are the opposite of the idea of normative humanity as well.

Maybe after going through the list of untrendy science fiction and science fantasy books that inspired Warhammer such as Dune, A Canticle for Leibowitz, Elric Saga, and now The Chrysalids, the ultimate thing we can read is just The Epic of Gilgamesh, which is probably really relevant to both religious ideas and “sci-fi” ideas after all. The Bible probably was commenting on Gilgamesh even if the Bible is true. “Oh, here’s the real version of events compared to that fake version which you might better know” basically. The ironic part is probably that modern people still know Gilgamesh better than the Bible for cultural reasons even in this modern day and age and just see the world through the Chaoskampf (speaking of Elric too!) lens of Gilgamesh vs. Tiamat and Gilgamesh representing a normative idea of humanity, the state, and the champion of the gods, while God seems to favor more of a balance of order and chaos (hey, again!) with all the promotion of tricksters in the Bible like Jacob who literally became Israel, Lot’s daughters, David who fought Goliath, etc.

So as I see it ancient states were by definition totalitarian even if modern totalitarianism is also a distinct phenomenon. Even when you look at modern totalitarianism, it’s generally considered synonymous with fascism and the fascists based their government on Rome with the fasces symbol. The Roman emperors were generally worshipped as gods and Mussolini, Hitler, even Stalin, Lenin, Mao, and the communists basically wanted you to worship them. So that’s not a new phenomenon at all, it’s more of the reemergence of an older model in modern times with some differences due to how the modern world has changed with modern technology, modern political and social structures, and the like.

So I largely consider totalitarianism to more or less be the default government for states based on observed historical trends and anything above that is a vast improvement that we need to work hard to maintain. The fact neither Trump nor Biden, no matter how unpopular and probably literally demented they are, are remotely totalitarian is something I am very thankful for. The US has 99 problems, there’s corruption everywhere, there are a lot of things that cause real issues and which really need to be fixed and fast but most governments from Mesopotamia to Rome to the Nazis were totalitarian states with "Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State" in the words of Mussolini and the leaders being worshipped as gods or goddesses or being the high priests or priestesses of the gods and goddesses, and ours isn’t. That at least gives us a good place to start.

Whenever you see other people politicizing things or maybe you politicize everything, I think that’s just the old impulse to make everything into the state due to the state being the religion for most states in most of recorded history. Old habits die hard, especially habits that long predate you actually being born. There are brain structures which are inherited which sort of gets into Julian Jaynes’s bicameral mind theory and there are also environmental factors which are often unchanged over thousands of years which also encourage the sort of totalizing impulse. What I don’t see, however, as the totalizing impulse as somehow being anything new, rather than the fact they just replaced Pharoah’s magicians and priests of the temple with Hitler’s ministry of propaganda and Nazi scientists for modern totalitarianism.

One concerning trend I see now is the attempt to try to subsume the old state cults into AI. People like Elon Musk’s endgame is literally to put an AI in their brain and yours with a brain chip, after he tries to buy the entire Internet via X.com first, and then go send his artificial deity throughout the Universe with his SpaceX and Starlink projects. People such as Bill Gates also seem to be in the same club, so it’s not all just him no matter how big his ego is and no matter how many of his opponents buy into it either. I’m not all that intimidated to be honest, because the mind is the root of the conflict and the mind can end the conflict. I call them the Brittle Boys and the Brittle Boys’ Club and similar epithets because that is what they are. I read a couple of articles a while back that points out they just want to solve everything with, essentially, a gadget: “Oh, if we had electric cars the problem would be solved! Oh, if we had a chip in our brains the problem would be solved!” The solution is never ever seen as something organic and natural, even within an organic or natural science context, hence calling them brittle. Problems are not to be solved by, say, restructuring society, or changing the methods for agriculture, or the infrastructure of the Internet or anything else even remotely organic, it’s always by just throwing more gadgets at things.

One example I read in the original article was in the book The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein: the conflict in the plot of that book is solved because the Moon decides to catapult a big rock at Earth. They don’t just starve Earth or whatever, there’s specifically the catapult. The solution to problems is always a gadget. The Brittle Boys might have all the gadgets and money and power and whatever, but I have psychology and biology and cognitive sciences, I have artificial intelligence and real intelligence, they own a lot but it’s for nothing if I can effectively own their minds when it comes to that point. And that’s how I think the solution to this really goes. In the meantime they are desperately, desperately trying to throw their minds away since they don’t see the use of them and replace them with a computer chip that will think for them and insert them into a video game for bread-and-circuses entertainment and otherwise give them a prosthetic bicameral mind since modernity otherwise worked very well and broke the original one. Go figure.