The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies

by Ryszard Legutko

An intellectual’s sharp eye and perceptiveness will always recognize what is politically dangerous: a sentence, a metaphor, a proverb, an incorrect text on the bulletin board, a work of fiction—a seemingly little thing and yet shamelessly undermining the liberal-democratic rules. And because liberal democracy, like communism, produced large numbers of lumpen-intellectuals, there is no shortage of people who ecstatically become involved in tracking disloyalty and fostering a new orthodoxy. It happens that both systems never suffered from a shortage of people willing—often without being asked—to survey the political purity in communities, institutions, groups, and all types of social behavior.

In one sense, this person may think that he performs something particularly valuable to humanity; in another, the situation helps him to develop a sense of power otherwise unavailable to him; and in a third, he often cannot resist the temptation to indulge in a low desire to harm others with impunity.

The warriors of political correctness think of themselves in the category of the struggle between David and Goliath. Nothing can be further from the truth. They belong to the mainstream, having all instruments of power at their disposal. On their side are the courts, both national and international, the UN and its agencies, the European Union with all its institutions, countless media, universities, and public opinion. The illusion they cherish of being a brave minority heroically facing the whole world, false as it is, gives them nevertheless a strange sense of comfort: they feel absolutely safe, being equipped with the most powerful political tools in today’s world but at the same time priding themselves on their courage and decency, which are more formidable the more awesome the image of the enemy becomes.

Bringing pleasure to the center of life engendered a different image of human nature. Human beings, in this view, no longer think of themselves in terms of the whole of their existence, but in terms of moments and episodes. It could not be otherwise because there is no such thing as the pleasure of life. One can talk about pleasures and pleasant moments that happen in life, and one can even encourage people to collect those pleasures and pleasant moments, the more the better. But the latter strategy, even if successful, does not predetermine whether this or that particular life in its entirety is or is not happy. It may have many pleasant moments, but these do not automatically translate themselves into a unifying moral scenario, nor make a life fulfilled.

This does not mean that we are all slaves of our time. There are those who see more clearly than others, not because they are free from a historical entanglement, but because their minds have a better grasp of the world to come. It is these people who speak in the name of the future and are the purveyors of a revolutionary spirit. Both these types of consciousness—the one mystified by its false claim to timelessness, the other anticipating a new era—Marx and Engels called ideology. The concept vaulted to unprecedented popularity, primarily because it proved to be a most convenient tool in political conflicts: it allowed discrediting one’s opponent without entering into a substantive argument. There was no sense in analyzing the opponent’s views on their merits, such an analysis being usually inconclusive and politically inefficient. It was much better to show that his views represented his interests and were conditioned by his social and economic position.

Ideology is always inherently simplistic and simplifying as its function is instrumental, not descriptive. The purpose of ideology is not to disclose intricacies and ambiguities but to make a clear statement: this and this reflect the interests of capitalism, and that and that reflect the interests of communism. Lenin called it, very aptly, the principle of partisanship. One is either for something or against something. Whoever is trying to find a middle-of-the-road position, or to evade the dichotomy, automatically passes to the enemy side. All philosophy—to give a well-known example—is either materialistic, or idealistic. Whoever wants to go beyond this distinction becomes—whether he means it or not—a traitor of the materialist cause and slouches toward idealism.

Anything that existed, not only materially, but also as thought or a seemingly harmless folly of imagination, could be non-mistakenly identified as correct or incorrect, bourgeois or proletarian, revolutionary or counterrevolutionary, socialist or antisocialist, materialistic or idealistic, progressive or regressive. This practically put an end to any form of intellectual argumentation. No one argued, but either accused someone of ideological treason or defended himself against such a charge.

The transition from ideology as a false consciousness to ideology as a true insight into the future of historical development, from the mind full of self-deception to the mind permeated with truth, was quite puzzling. How is it possible, one would ask, that the same person can be, on the one hand, suspicious of all ideas as arising from particular conditions and having no truthful content of their own, and on the other, be dedicated body and soul to a set of ideas that he finds mandatory and compelling? The answer is already included in the question. Ideology is a mental structure that allows a combination of conflicting traits—an extreme distrust of ideas and a blind dogmatism.

The feeling that a new utopia was around the corner lasted a few years and then began to subside. But the ideology did not loosen its grip on the Western mind, though the coarse language of the Paris barricades was softened. The flower children quietly retreated from the stage, and so did the Age of Aquarius and the counterculture manifestos. But the society never returned to a pre-protest identity, and there was neither a scenario nor a desire to move away from ideology. Soon the ideology reasserted itself, this time in less menacing form. Now it was the ideology of liberal democracy, slightly more complicated than that of communism, but comparably simplistic and equally impoverishing people’s range of thought. The ideological man has colonized a vast part of the public life and private thought, and his conquests are not yet over. As did his communist predecessor, he exhibits a mixture of suspicion and enthusiasm, which gives him a comparable sense of self-righteousness.

For those who lived in these countries it was clear that slowly—too slowly, of course—the ideological vigilance weakened, the crude dichotomies were losing their clarity, the new was fighting the old with less zeal. With the disappearance of the ideological smokescreen reality began to disclose itself in all its richness and complexity. The world, in short, was becoming more and more interesting. In liberal democracy we have been, unfortunately, observing a reverse trend. The ideological smokescreen is becoming more dense and more impenetrable than before.

Today’s ideology is so powerful that almost everyone desires to join the great camp of progress. This omnipresent urge to seek refuge in this great liberal-democratic church somewhat contradicts the very ideology to which so many have been drawn. If ideology by definition expresses particular interests of particular groups, then the world in which we live should be full of conflicts, or at least of debates in which we would hear the ideological claims of the male part of the population, of Eurocentrists, of heterosexuals, etc. But these claims are not to be heard. Individuals and groups seem to behave contrary to the ideologies they were expected to espouse, but indulge in adulation of the other side; moreover, they seem to do it quite selflessly, out of pure love for the idea, completely ignoring their own alleged self-interest, condition, race, class, and gender.

Once we understand how strikingly the liberal-democratic artists and intellectuals are, mentally, a mirror reflection of their communist counterparts, we will notice that the resemblance also extends to the way they behave. In each system the artists and intellectuals willingly gather in herds; they treat dissenters and outsiders with contempt and enmity; they shamelessly enthuse over idiocies that bear the stamp of modernity and exhibit a revolting temerity in the face of what they consider to be the imperatives of the times. Their cowardly behavior they call dignity, and their dishonorable adulation—stupidity, a conscious act of attunement—the spirit of the times.

We were surrounded by entities whose reality seemed precarious but whose power of influence was enormous. “Party,” “working class,” “revisionists,” “Zionists,” “antisocialist forces,” “extremist elements,” “five-year plan,” “work stoppages,” “forces of imperialism,” “socialist renewal,” “leading role of the party,” “fraternal Parties,” “domestic export”—all these terms, and many others impossible to translate into English, were supposed to describe real facts, processes, and institutions, but were actually political declarations. It was impossible to conduct any serious debate about the real issues, because the language served to conceal rather than to reveal.

The mere description of the world, sincere and truthful, had an electrifying effect on people’s souls: discovering the richness of human experience, bringing back to the memory long-forgotten facts, the old ideas being revived and restored to their former nobility, recognizing a variety of styles and forms of expression, all of these awakened people from their ideological slumber. Many of them also understood that their newly rediscovered desire to see the world as it was needed to be preceded by the cleaning away of all the contaminating dirt that the decades of ideology had left on their souls.

The person accused of a reactionary attitude under communism could not effectively defend himself because once the accusation was made it disallowed any objection. Even the best counterargument to the effect that the charge was ill-stated, and that being a reactionary does not mean that one is necessarily wrong just as being a progressive does not mean that one is necessarily right, only sank the accused person deeper. Any such argument was a confirmation of his belonging to the reactionary camp, which was clearly reprehensible if not downright criminal. The only option that the defendant had was to admit his own guilt and submit a self-criticism as self-downgrading as possible, but even that did not have to be accepted.

Today, when someone is accused of homophobia, the mere fact of accusation allows no effective reply. To defend oneself by saying that homosexual and heterosexual unions are not equal, even if supported by most persuasive arguments, only confirms the charge of homophobia because the charge itself is never a matter of discussion. The only way out for the defendant is to submit a self-criticism, which may or may not be accepted. When the poor daredevil is adamant and imprudently answers back, a furious pack of enraged lumpen-intellectuals inevitably trample the careless polemicist into the ground.

And so, in the absence of social custom and the hierarchy that such custom usually brings about, it is the opinions that today have become the major way of manifesting one’s presence in the world. But because we live in a democratic society, the surest way to achieve that goal is to join a large group of people united by having the same opinions. Even if such opinions are stereotyped, expressed in terms of deceptive concepts and in vulgar language full of stale banality that distorts the picture of reality and has a paralyzing effect on our faculties of thinking and perceiving, it is enough that they are shared by a sufficiently high number of people living in the absolute certainty that these ideas are fresh, innovative, and controversially feisty and that their brilliance is worthy of the brilliant minds that emitted them.

One does not have to be overly acute to see a strong resemblance between a communist activist on the one hand, and a feminist, a homosexual activist, and a liberal-democratic lumpen-intellectual on the other. Their opinions have the same tedious predictability, their arguments are based on similarly crude syllogisms, their styles are similarly vulgar, and their minds are equally dogmatic, unperturbed by any testimony from outside and prone to the same degree of zealousness. On both sides we also see what the Marxists called the unity of theory and practice, which translates into clear language meaning the total subordination of thinking to the ideological precepts of political action; this subordination, instead of being a cause of shame, is proudly held up as an achievement of the new times.

It is true that both—those in the communist countries and those throughout the Western world after the demise of communism—were and still are quite frequently an object of jokes, sometimes quite deadly, but at the same time their presence evoked, and the latter case are still evoking, feelings of fear or at least a sense of the clear message that opposing those people is not safe. Finally, both sides had spectacular victories among the intellectual and artistic elites; this is particularly puzzling because one would think that the people endowed with artistic and intellectual talents would be the first to reject with contempt something whose repulsive primitivism only persons with serious mental deficiencies could miss.

The crucial fact that has been widely ignored is that what gave the anti-regime movements the strongest impetus to resist the seemingly irresistible communist power, and what the communists had tried to eradicate from the very beginning but, to their doom, failed, had little to do with liberal democracy. These were patriotism, a reawakened eternal desire for truth and justice, loyalty to the imponderables of the national tradition, and—a factor of paramount importance—religion. People rebelled because the regime deprived them of what they held the most precious.

In any highly political society, as a liberal society is, whatever lacks political legitimacy to appear in the public square loses its raison d’être altogether. Internal religion, regarded as the only form of religion that could be tolerated if it wanted to retain this quasi-protection, had to seek some political respectability, and the only way to do it was, first, to dispel any suspicion that it might undermine liberalism in human souls, and furthermore, to prove that it motivates people to do things that are politically useful, such as bringing about peace, preaching the attitude of toleration, and inspiring philanthropy. In other words, religion was to demonstrate that it supported the liberal order and helped the liberal state to perform its functions. Religion in a nonpolitical sense should be confined to the church and the inner life, or, better yet, exclusively to the inner life and family life because, for example, a politician ostentatiously going to church could be accused of encroaching on the secularity of the state. Those Christians who took this view did not put up a heroic fight against the liberal state usurping the role of the legislator of morality. The usurper seized his power almost unopposed, and his victorious army did not even bother to take prisoners.