OSD 284: Totalitarianism is partly self-inflicted

The final step of totalitarianism is invited, not imposed.

We don’t talk about politics here. For the most part (other than, for example, right now) we don’t even talk about not talking about politics. We talk about laws, court cases, that sort of thing, sure. And gun tech and gun culture, absolutely. But as for specific politicians or specific political movements, we generally avoid even invoking their name, lest we summon their spirit.

There are a couple reasons for that. The first is that tech is upstream of culture and culture is upstream of politics. The higher upstream you focus, the more leverage you have. Great tech and a thriving culture make everything downstream much easier to solve. If the tech is bad and the culture is dying, the politics are doomed no matter how much energy does into them.

But there’s a second reason to avoid politics. Back in 2022, there was an episode of the T.Rex Talk podcast titled “Putting the ‘Total’ in Totalitarianism”. At 1:58, Isaac Botkin explains how he thinks about that term:

The textbook definition is usually this idea that totalitarianism is when one person or one party has control of the government. But that doesn’t actually hold up. A state can be assumed to have total authority over the lives of its citizens even if it is run by multiple parties or by bureaucrats, as is often the case. Totalitarianism is when the state itself has unlimited jurisdiction — when it can control the totality of life. Obviously there will always be physical limits to a state’s power, but totalitarianism is when there are no limits to the scope of its authority.

Isaac goes on to describe how if there are no constraints on a government’s scope of influence, scope creep leads inevitably to his definition of totalitarianism — a situation where government involves itself in every corner of society.

If you grant the premise that government can be involved in everything, that leads inevitably to the idea that government should be involved in everything. That’s how you get the scope creep of “there are a lot of murders in <city> → let’s ban guns in <city> → guns are still showing up → that just means we need to ban guns nationally → guns are still showing up → so we just need to ban more types of guns and magazines → guns are still showing up → let’s make social media companies deplatform gun content → guns are still showing up….”

Totalitarianism turns a local murder problem into a mandatory national program at all layers of society, imposed at gunpoint.

Or take a non-gun-related example, Wickard v. Filburn. The standard history is “It was the Great Depression, and wheat prices were fluctuating wildly. To bail out farmers, Congress decided to centrally control the price of wheat. To do that, they passed a law directly regulating how much wheat each farmer in the country could grow.” The actual story more complicated. It turns out that while wheat prices did drop sharply from 1929 to 1931, there have been plenty of similar fluctuations before and since:

But in any case, Roscoe Filburn, a farmer in Ohio, was fined for growing more than his permitted quantity of wheat. He sued to strike down the relevant law (the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1938), arguing that he grew the extra wheat on his own property to feed his own livestock, and since neither the excess wheat nor the livestock ever entered interstate commerce, Congress had no power to regulate the plants he grew. The Supreme Court unanimously disagreed with Roscoe. They held that because his excess wheat meant he didn’t have to buy quite as much wheat, he had some nonzero effect on the interstate wheat market — and that therefore, the federal government could directly regulate the personal crops of some guy in Ohio.

Remember from above: “If you grant the premise that government can be involved in everything, that leads inevitably to the idea that government should be involved in everything.” By that mechanism, the discrete problem of “some farmers had a few rough years” scope-crept its way to “You will all get a letter from Congress each year telling you which plants you’re allowed to grow in your yard.” And it kept going from there, ultimately reading the Commerce Clause to impose no meaningful limits at all.

Hang on though. The title of this essay is “Totalitarianism is partly self-inflicted”. Roscoe Filburn did his best to stop government’s scope from becoming total. The gun rights advocates in the ban states don’t want the laws they live under. So how is any of this self-inflicted?

It goes back to Isaac Botkin’s definition of totalitarianism: “when the state itself has unlimited jurisdiction — when it can control the totality of life.” When it comes to guns, law and politics control a lot of your life. What you can buy and how, where you can carry it, how you use it, and so on.

But an obsession with politics invites the government into the only thing it can’t control: your mind. Totalitarianism is when there is no corner of your life or society that is apolitical. The government can get partway there by imposing itself on you. But when we invite politics into our lives by engaging with it, talking about it, and making it the focus, we complete the final step of totalitarianism: bringing it to the parts of our life where it cannot be imposed. Where it can only get by being invited in.

The natural objection here is a quote, attributed to various people, that “If you don’t pay attention to politics, politics will pay attention to you.” One version of that concept is a cartoon of a naive guy cheerfully saying, “Oh I don’t really follow politics” while he’s loaded into a guillotine.

But that’s attacking a strawman. There are two pieces to this.

1. Political outcomes matter, of course. Laws matter. Different political ideas will produce different results. Some you’d love and some you’d find disastrous. The point isn’t that the outcomes don’t matter — it’s that they do matter. And since they matter so much, you need to focus on the highest-leverage ways to change the outcomes to your liking. And those ways are mostly upstream of politics.

2. Some people should work on politics, of course. The importance of long-term investors doesn’t mean that there should be zero short-term investors. The importance of outdoor lighting and a good security system doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t have a home defense gun. The importance of diplomacy doesn’t mean that you don’t need Delta Force. And so on.

It’s really just a question of what has primacy. In the long run, what’s the most important thing? If we really believe that tech is upstream of culture and culture is upstream of politics, then that’s the stack rank we should be talking about them in. Giving politics primacy is self-inflicted totalitarianism.

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This week’s links

Turns out the New York Times may not actually have defended its office with Gatling guns during the 1863 NYC draft riots

Thanks to Discord subscriber @Deichgraf for digging this one up. He adds, “Still, I think it's notable that they were willing to claim in 2001 to have done so.”

Garand Thumb on how to evade a first-world military drone

This is a really interesting and fast-evolving area of personal defense. “Drones that will fly in your window and hunt you inside your house” is a threat model that is already live in some parts of the world.

See also:

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