Reading note on Psychopathology of totalitarianism

Reading note on Psychopathologie du totalitarisme, Psychopathology of totalitarianism in the journal Éléments by Rémi Soulié.

If Plato and Aristotle, according to Pascal, "wrote about politics, it was as if to regulate a madhouse". Pascal did not believe he was right, for want of having known totalitarianism, whose canonical distinction with so-called liberal and representative democracy seems increasingly difficult to maintain for Ariane Bilheran, graduate of the École Normale Supérieure, philosopher, and clinical psychologist.

To understand the contagious deployment of totalitarian madness of which covidism was the accelerating boon, she refers in particular to Hannah Arendt who defines totalitarianism as "the ambition of total domination, international in its organization, universal in its ideological goal and planetary in its political aspirations", and to Sigmund Freud, who shows how paranoia and perversion are in this case always at work. Her demonstration is implacable. The crazy oligarchs of globalism have "led a full-scale attack on the four pillars of civilization to make psyches regress before the Oedipus complex, with hammering, propaganda and acting out": the prohibition of murder (lack of care for the sick, social death of those who refuse to take injections), the prohibition of incest ("psychological confusion of places", where adults unload their anxieties on children), the difference between generations (it is up to the youngest to sacrifice themselves for the oldest), the difference between the sexes ("ideology of the indefinite and the undefined"). Everyone is thus placed in maximum psychic insecurity, guilty in power and in action, vulnerable to all the manipulations and experiments orchestrated by perverts, the only innocents in the theatrical drama. It is no coincidence that Ariane Bilheran refers to writers – André Suarès, Arthur Koestler, Stefan Zweig, Solzhenitsyn – who always know what is going on.

A necessary book.