Bureaucracy, Totalitarianism and the Art of Speech
| MATTIAS DESMETDEC 5 |
Dear friends,
It’s been a while now – it seems like forever. I’m busy writing my next book. That book is about the psychology of truth speech and the end of totalitarianism.
I have to say, it’s nice not to be too absorbed by social media for a while. I like to use that time to anchor my roots more deeply in the earth.
We can learn from nature in that respect. When winter passes over the land and everything above ground comes to rest, trees and plants continue to expand their root systems underground. They work in the unseen; in the dark winter soil, they prepare the arrival of spring.
Writing a book means deepening my roots, changing as a human being. If I didn’t go through such a process as a human being, my new book would not be essentially different from my previous one. In other words, there would be no good reason to write it. No matter how well written a book is, it is worthless if it has not changed the author as a person. And there wouldn’t be a good reason to read it either. I’ll do my best to make sure there is a good reason to read it.
As for now, I want to share an excerpt from my previous book, an excerpt on the wild proliferation of all kinds of rules in our society. The ‘bureaucratization’ of society is a major aspect of emerging totalitarianism – totalitarian systems are always bureaucratic systems. Here is what Hannah Arendt says about this process:
“In a fully developed bureaucracy there is nobody left with whom one can argue, to whom one can present grievances, on whom the pressures of power can be exerted. Bureaucracy is the form of government in which everybody is deprived of political freedom, of the power to act; for the rule by Nobody is not no-rule, and where all are equally powerless, we have a tyranny without a tyrant.” (Hannah Arendt, On Violence).
At the psychological level, it is clear that the ‘regulation mania’ in our society is an indirect consequence of the decline of sincere speech. The less sincere bonds between people, the more rules are needed to regulate the social fabric. And as such, this excerpt is relevant to my new book as well – it describes one of these problematic totalitarian phenomena for which the only cure is to be found in the art of sincere speech. In the next weeks, I will start to present excerpts from my new book as well. I think it’s great to write in resonance with the people who follow me.
Warm greetings to everyone – use the winter well, prepare a beautiful spring!