As the totalitarian society increases in power and scope on a weekly basis, we need to ask whether an underlying reason for totalitarianism is actually that this is precisely what modern people actively want for themselves, as well as others.
If we judge people by what they say, what they do, how they vote, whom they criticize and persecute - it becomes clear that modern people desire a totalitarian system of total surveillance and micro-regulation*. A wholly un-free society in which anti-social behaviour becomes un-thinkable.
And the reason that so many modern people want this, is that modern people want, more than anything else, to evade responsibility.
This is, I believe, an existential life-decision, that goes very deep. By their revealed preferences, we may infer that modern people want to regard themselves as helpless victims, want to be protected, want to be favoured systematically. They want Not to be blamed for anything; they want it never to be 'my fault'. They want always to be able to say 'I couldn't help it'.
And they want it to be the case that any person who does try to assert responsibility or blame, any person who believes in human agency and freedom - be punished, eliminated, silenced, reprogrammed.
In a world where evasion of responsibility is primary, a totalitarian system promises the perfect excuse of being thought-controlled.
This desire to be able to plead helplessness goes all the way to the top, where individual responsibility is replaced by committees and votes; so that nothing can ever be pinned on anyone. It includes the vast, global, bureaucracy-of-everything - so that every nation, corporation, group and individual can always claim that their decisions and behaviours were compelled, that they were merely following orders.
In sum, modern man is a willing servant of the demonic spirit of Ahriman - this kind of cold, anti-personal, reductionist, pseudo-scientific, systematised evil is dominant. And, ultimately, it is dominant because of the decisions and desires of the millions upon millions of mainstream modern people who collaborate and make careers from The System.
Mainstream typical modern Man (say, the ordinary - female - middle managers in an institution) viscerally reject the reality of their own existential freedom, deny their responsibility for their own beliefs, claim helplessness against the evil-intending propaganda they so eagerly embrace and so diligently implement and defend.
These want a totalitarian system and assert themselves to be powerless innocents. But they cannot in fact evade responsibility for their positive choice of an evil system that claims to eliminate responsibility.
Because thought cannot really be controlled - to 'be' thought-contolled is therefore a decision; and all claims of oneself being thought-controlled and therefore not-responsible are a dishonest excuse. Anyone capable of making that excuse is lying. Humans just are free in their thinking.
Instead, these people actually-are actively-evil - they are in a state of willing evil upon themselves and upon everybody else. They will totalitarianism, and totalitarianism is intrinsically evil.
And this has been their choice, it is what they want.
*It might be asked how I know what most modern people want? My answer would be as above - I am simply assuming that what people want is what they say they want - as confirmed by how they behave - with a high (but not complete) level of consistency, and over several decades.
Anyone who disagrees and says that modern people really want something different - e.g. want to be free and responsible and others to be likewise, want to live in a world that encourages and sustains human agency... well, such claims go beyond objective appearances, and are asserting deep knowledge of the hearts of Men below the surface and despite contrary actions.
I am simply suggesting that as we descend into evil totalitarianism, people are - broadly speaking - getting exactly what they want; and are therefore personally responsible for what they (and we) get. To put it differently - our problems go very deep indeed, and they are far more wide-spread; much much deeper and more pervasive than most people realise.
