Fascism — any sort of totalitarian government — brings out the worst in people

When a society has institutions based on agreed principles of fairness, of treating individuals equitably, all can live quite securely within well-understood bounds. The unsettling nature of living in a totalitarian society stems largely from not knowing what behavior or what role in society might suddenly and unexpectedly become punished.

Totalitarian societies are characterized by capricious “official” actions at every level. Individual officials can behave as they like to those beneath them in the hierarchy of power, just so long as they are in favor with whoever is above them in the hierarchy.

In Philip Kerr’s detective-story series, the protagonist Bernie Gunther, a German sometime policeman, describes very authentically how such circumstances bring out the worst in people — in average human beings, in almost all human beings:

“Not to mention what happened before all that, in those comparatively innocent times when people thought the Nazis were the last word in true evil. You tell yourself you can put aside your principles and make a pact with the devil just to keep out of trouble and remain alive. But you do it often enough, and it gets so that you've forgotten what those principles were. I used to think I could stand apart from it all. That I could somehow inhabit a nasty, rotten world and not become like that myself. But I found out that you can't. Not if you want to see another year. Well, I'm still alive. I'm still alive because, if the truth be told, I'm just as bad as the rest of them. I'm alive because other people are dead, and some of them were killed by me. That's not courage. that's just this.” [He] pointed at the antelope head on the wall. “He understands what I'm talking about even if you don't. The law of the jungle. Kill or be killed” [1].

Totalitarian governments tolerate only one set of beliefs, one ideology: whatever the leader happens to decide are the proper ones.

But even in societies that are not totalitarian, damage is inflicted all the time, in various ways and at different levels, by dogmatic, fanatical, belief.

At the most basic level, that of the family, the damage that a single fanatic can perpetrate is illustrated by the father in Tara Westover’s memoir, Educated [2].

The damage done in small groups by fanatical beliefs has been copiously illustrated by innumerable cults, say at Jonestown [3] or Waco [4].

Larger sects and whole religions have illustrated over and over how unmitigated, absolute, fanatical belief can bring about circumstances in which otherwise perfectly normal, decent people harass, persecute, and murder one another: Catholics and Protestants over the centuries, including in Northern Ireland well into the 20^th century, even as both claim to be “Christians”; Sunni and Shia similarly, even as both claim to be followers of Mohammed. Christians and Muslims as a whole have a long history of killing one another, even as the religious beliefs of both claim to be similarly “Abrahamic-based”. And both of those have harassed, persecuted, and murdered, for over a millennium, adherents to the third Abrahamic religion, Judaism, which is in fact the original Abrahamic religion, as even explicitly acknowledged by the many Christians who speak of “Judeo-Christian” heritage.

In all these cases, of course, it is not “the ideology” itself or “the belief” itself that is the trouble, it is that different human beings become absolutely convinced that their particular individual interpretation is the one and only truly correct one; and all these individual, idiosyncratic, fanatical believers have been able, at various times and in various places, to persuade some number of other human beings to believe them and to follow them blindly thereafter.

The fact of the matter is that dogmatic belief causes damage because it is inevitably based on incomplete knowledge or understanding, as cogently described by Jacob Bronowski as he kneels at a pond at the former Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz [5]:

“Into this pond were flushed the ashes of some four million people. And that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance. It was done by dogma. It was done by ignorance. When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave. This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of gods”.

Maybe that’s why Adam had been warned, in the Garden of Eden by the Bible’s God, against eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil?

On the other hand, according to Goethe’s God,
“Ein guter Mensch, in seinem dunklen Drange,
Ist sich des rechten Weges wohl bewusst”
(A good man, no matter his plight, knows right from wrong) [6]; which however, as Bernie Gunther pointed out, does not necessarily bring properly decent behavior, actions.

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[1] Pp. 429-30 in Philip Kerr, If the dead rise not (2010)

[2] Educated: A Memoir by Tara Westover, Random House, 2018

[3] “The Peoples Temple Agricultural Project, better known by its informal name ‘Jonestown’, was a remote settlement in Guyana established by the Peoples Temple, an American cult under the leadership of Jim Jones. Jonestown became internationally infamous when, on November 18, 1978, a total of 918 . . . people died”; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonestown

[4] “The Waco siege, also known as the Waco massacre . . . was the siege by U.S. federal government and Texas state law enforcement officials of a compound belonging to the religious cult known as the Branch Davidians” in 1993; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waco_siege#Prelude

[5] P. 374 In The Ascent of Man, J. Bronowski, Little, Brown & Co., 1973. The book was made into a series of television programs by the British Broadcasting Corporation, and has also been available on video tapes.

[6] Faust, lines 329-30 (in Prologue in Heaven)