Why are so many people (including Christians) so committed to totalitarianism?

Given that it is intrinsically evil; why are so many people so keen on totalitarianism; being actively supportive in practice, if not necessarily in theory? 

I think the answer is related to the unacknowledged reality of changes in human consciousness. 

Changes in human nature have led to mass alienation - with the loss of that largely-unconscious "groupishness" of human consciousness which used to be a spontaneous source of social cohesion and inter-personal consensus. 

Through most of history until recent generations; people did not experiences themselves as wholly-separate individuals. Everybody (even, to an extent, rulers) was part-of "public opinion". 

There was a Group Mind, operating at a spiritual level. 

Because the group and the individual were not wholly separate, group norms did not need to be - and were not - experienced as having been imposed on individuals in a one-way fashion. 

When an individual experiences life as part of a group, he is himself a part of all group aims and decisions - the individual participates in the group as a matter of spiritual reality. 

In other words, in the past (to a significant, although not complete, extent) aims and decisions arose from the Group Mind; in which all individuals participated. 

 

But that spontaneous and unconscious groupishness has now all-but gone.

Individuals no longer participate spiritually in group aims and choices. Leaders do not feel themselves a part of, and in service to, a real "public opinion". 

Aims and decisions typically arise from the most powerful level of the social system - without participation of "the masses" - and these aims and decision are imposed-upon the lower levels. 

Top-down power has replaced the Group mind.   

This loss of participation has generated a visceral (and significantly valid) fear of the consequences of untrammelled individual agency. It has also enabled the one-sided manipulation of the masses by elites - with such phenomena as pervasive dishonesty, top-down propaganda, PSYOPS, and the use of terror, hatred and induced-despair as instruments of social control. 

Social cohesion nowadays must be totalitarian: material, procedural and enforced. The dangerous consequences of individualism are a problem that must be combatted. 

This is done by the integration of all human institutions, of all society (politics, churches, economics, media, law, military, police, education, science, arts etc); all social institutions are mandatorily-united under a single and all-pervasive ideology - with any opt-out regarded as actively hostile. 

The difference between modern totalitarianism and ancient theocracy is that totalitarianism is an ideology, not a religion; atheist not deist nor theist; materialist not spiritual. 

While theocracy explicitly purports to derive authority from transcendental sources (e.g. God or the gods); totalitarianism instead (but implicitly) regards goodness as impersonal, an abstraction - ideological. 

For totalitarianism; implicitly, goodness is a consequence of the system itself - a product of bureaucracy, committees, and procedures such as voting - and, especially, totalitarian goodness arises from those parts of the-one-system that are concerned with strategy, planning, long-term aims. 

So, under totalitarianism; goodness (as understood by mainstream modern people) is to be found near the top of the bureaucratic system, where it inheres abstractly; independently of the actual people involved.

And therefore this ideological faith is invulnerable to the high levels of selfish nastiness and many types of corruption of the actual people involved; invulnerable too to even extreme degrees of failure, counter-productive activity, or atrocities done by the higher bureaucracy.

For example "democracy" - which is a form of bureaucratic procedure - is regarded as good; whoever are the people involved, whatever their character or behaviour, and despite the outcomes. 

Goodness has become wholly abstract - detached from people and actuality.  

Thus for many mainstream totalitarians, goodness flows from top-level bureaucratic institutions downwards; and therefore the highest moral authority of this world inheres in strategic organizations such as the United Nations, the World Health Organization, the European Union, the Supreme Courts, and the various Courts of "Human Rights", or Truth, or Reconciliation; large charities and NGOs, the most wealthy and prestigious universities and "think tanks"... and so forth. 

For Christian totalitarians; their church is simply one of these high-level bureaucracies, organizations that both respond-to and contribute-to the ruling consensus that is enforced upon individuals by the propaganda of mass media, regulations of corporations, and laws of the lands. 

The totalitarian conceptualization is that Men are good only to the extent that they are made good by these top-down and procedural influences; and Men cohere and have common purpose only to the extent that they are part of the vast and interlinked System. 

Christian totalitarians accept the inevitability and indeed basic virtue of this model of human life and society; but desire to place the church (i.e. their church) at the pinnacle of the bureaucratic institutions. 

They envisage a world that is still totalitarian, and the individual is still to be manipulated and controlled; but they imagine a totalitarianism in which their church stands atop the UN, EU, SCOTUS, major mass media, the legal system, universities - so that church-originated ideas, rules, laws etc. will permeate all the major social institutions - and thus human life will cohere and have purpose.  

However... If totalitarianism truly is intrinsically evil (as I believe), then any such vision or hope for society cannot actually be Christian. 

It can only simulate Christianity - can only use Christian terminology to "justify" what are actually totalitarian (hence evil - i.e. on the side that is against God and creation) procedures and goals.  

For many people - insofar as they think about it at all - there is a sense that totalitarianism is inevitable; and therefore the only genuine value-choice is between a secular or a religious totalitarianism. 

The Big Question is whether this is a real choice - or whether, instead, religious/church and atheistic/ ideological totalitarianism are not, in truth, variations on The Same Thing. 

My personal understanding is that totalitarianism is indeed evil in all its forms and variants; so Christianity can only exist outwith The System -- in individuals primarily; and only in such non-institutional groups as cohere from love* primarily.

*By which I mean the kind of inter-personal and mutual love found in the best families, marriages, and friendships - at their best.