http://mockingbirdnyc.blogspot.com/2009/12/inner-totalitarian.html
The idea that each of us has the capacity to be a totalitarian should appeal to everyone because it is in recognizing our capacity for this totalitarianism and constant suspicion that we acting in totalitarian ways that may be the only way we can avoiding acting in bullying and brutal ways. We have to consider that our quest for justice may be a quest for self-satisfaction, our moral outrage may be.
The greatest hypocrites I know about objecting to tyranny are those most willing to tyrannize if it suits their purposes. I know people who have no problem pulling rank and throwing their weight around when it is their interests at stake who object when things don't go their way and consider it an unpardonable breach of justice. If you don't pay your rent on time and get evicted it's not the landlord who is a tyrant and doing something illegal. If you get yourself to the point of being diabetic because of your eating habits you don't really have any moral high ground to want smoking banned because of health threats because your own eating and exercise habits have done more damage to you than second hand smoke possibly could. If you fire people who disagree with you without batting an eyelash you can't really claim persecution if there are legitimate legal obstacles to you getting the things you want. Reaping what you sow isn't karma, it's more like the social norm of reciprocity. Act like a jerk to people long enough and either they return the favor or find better things to do with their time than spend time with you.
Social groups allow us to make our personal tyrannies normative. During the height of the courtship fad at a church I was at I saw this on a small scale. God forbid you "dated" anyone but courting was okay, though that meant it was advisable that you jump through appropriate hoopes. Supposedly this was not about legalism but about honoring women when, in the end, I think what it was most about was avoiding sin. There was no real teaching about seeking to imitate Christ in that fad, just the avoidance of sin and it will go down as one of the largely unreported by great failures of that church both in terms of ethical teaching and faithfulness to doctrine.
It was a time in which people who went on to cheat on their spouses could still stand as moral police about how modest a woman's attire ought to be. The avoidance of sin is not the same as seeking Christ. It was a time in which men who did not really stand any serious chance of dating attacked the character of other men who suggested that dating was not as inherently sinful as it was being made out to be. It made for the perfect pretext to be standing up for sound teaching when it was little more than a way to vent personal dislike. At length the person who took advantage of this opportunity to rip on someone else became a target himself because of his own combative and self-congratulatory ways. How he was treated was far from ideal but his capacity for vindictiveness may have simply found a foil in a group of people who grew tired of him. Now he is looking after himself and is pretty much where he was ten years ago, except perhaps for being more entrenched in the foolish notion that protecting himself will actually protect him.
The inner totalitarian is what we unleash on others and ourselves when we become uncomfortable with who we are or resent others. It is also, of course, what we unleash when we become TOO comfortable with who we are. Someone who has wide respect, popularity, and confidence in a social setting feels more comfortable throwing his or her weight around and getting behind things that are unjust precisely because there is no doubt his own ethics enough. If you move too far to the left or the right in political thought you end up in some form of totalitarianism. Neither Rand nor Marx had a clue how to prescribe an actual solution to the social and economic problems of their time. I consider Rand and Marx to be two sides of the same coin. You don't entrust the future of your society to grand-standing sociopathic idealists.
The inner totalitarian becomes the outer totalitarian when a person decides to convert their social capital into a moral investment and enlists other people in their community for their cause, a cause of dubious morality, dubious biblical support, and dubious history. There is no need to rely on actual force most of the time because people voluntarily enforce the social outworking of a legalistic or punitive action as a way to preserve their own social investment in a community and their own status within the social network. People act like jerks toward targets because the lead jerks, they believe, will approve of them for it. Let this not happen and the jerks at the lower rungs of the social ladder may feel betrayed and what may have happened is simply that their own jerkiness caught up with them rather than their being victims of circumstance or unjust retribution. The unjust landlord may be exercising perfectly legal rights, the pariah may be a pariah for being a divisive know-it-all jerk who set his or her guns on undeserving targets to prove a point that wasn't worth proving because it was made with dubious reasoning.
People who are not aware of their inner totalitarian or defend it will defend the unspeakable in the end, the indefensible. No matter how willing the spirit the flesh is weak and many times we must concede that our spirit is not particularly willing.
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