Totalitarianism's Gravity
ยท 2 min read
Reading Hayek's Road to Serfdom is topical given that the Trump administration by many measures is not only the most corrupt we have had, but increasingly "socialist" or totalitarian. I prefer the latter as the former is too muddled a concept while totalitarianism is a newer and clearer concept, especially given the popularity of Arendt's work.
Hayek admires the UKs and America's commitment to freedom and classical liberalism while warning the totalitarians that there desire for centralized planning of the economy is a slippery slope to gulags and concentration camps.
Hayek's work is mostly coming from a political-economic perspective, the type similar to Smith or Marx. I think if Hayek was coming at this problem from a philosophical perspective, he would have highlighted the other important factor in the dialectic between liberalism and totalitarianism, that of self-government.
Liberalism tries to be a negative philosophy as much as it can, and the United States constitution embodies this quite well. The federal government is authorized a narrow sphere of power, while the remainder is up to the states entirely.
Self-governance is where one willingly legislates restrictions upon oneself, literally to give one's self laws. This is also the essence of positive freedom. The constitution says the federal government cannot do a great many things, but it also gives the federal government certain positive powers.
The ability for self-governance opens up the possibility for more and more positive legislations, which are all done freely. But as Hayek warns, many small things can add up to a big thing over time. There is no preventing entirely totalitarianism, it is a constant struggle that arises from the desire for self-governance, which will always butt heads with the free market.
Hayek says the main cause of it is an impatience to wait for long process of human spontaneity through trial and error to arrive at a correct solution. Couple this with the right of self-governance, you have the base for any totalitarian ideology. For the Trump movement, it was obvious that the ideology was dangerous in 2015: resentment, anger, a sense of crisis, and the desire for someone to cut through the slowness of bureaucracy and fix things now.