In trying to come to grips w the psychic paralysis i sometomes feel, i ran accross an interesting article on the use of fear in totalitarion regimes. I clipped some excerpts for you.
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The leaders of Totalitaria rule by intimidation; they prefer loyalty through fear to loyalty through faith. Fear and terror freeze the mind and will; they may create a general psychic paralysis. In the panic caused by totalitarian terror, men feel separated from one another, as by an impassable vacuum, and each man becomes a lonely, frightened soul. Even panicky hovering together could be suspected of being conspiracy against the state. Separated from any real emotional contact with his fellow men by his own inner isolation, the citizen of Totalitaria becomes increasingly unable to fight against its dehumanizing influences.
Totalitaria is constantly on the alert for social sinners, the critics of the system, and accusation of dissent is equivalent to conviction in the public eye. Insinuation, calumny, and denunciation are staples of the totalitarian strategy.
In Totalitaria, jails and concentration camps by the score are built in order to provoke fear and awe among the population. They may be called "punishment" or "correction" camps, but this is only a cheap justification for the truth. In these centers of fear, nobody is really corrected; he is, as it were, expelled from humanity, wasted, killed -- but not too quickly, lest the terrorizing influence be diminished.
In Totalitaria man is always caught by some form of official planning. He is always conscious of control and surveillance, of spying, leering powers lying in wait to chase him and to punish him. Even leisure time and holidays are occupied by some official program, some facts to be learned, some political meeting, some parade. Quiet and solitude no longer exist. There is no time for meditation, for pondering, for reminiscing. The mind is caught in a web of official thinking and planning. Even the delights of self-chosen silence are forbidden.
The emphasis on more production by individuals, factories, and agricultural enterprises also can become a weapon
The purge reflects another characteristic of life in Totalitaria. It dramatizes the fiction that the party is always on the alert to keep itself pure and clean.
It makes the inhabitants of Totalitaria feel like babies
The more fear there is in a society, the more guilt each individual member of the society feels, the more need there is for internal scapegoats and external enemies.
The strategy of wild accusation is used not only against Totalitaria's citizenry, but also against the rest of the world. Totalitaria needs the images of outside enemies -- imaginary cruel monsters who spread plague and disease -- to justify its own internal troubles. The remnants of the individual citizen's conscience are calmed and held in check by a paranoiac attack on the rest of the world.
The boredom of Totalitaria's automatic patterns of living leads the deluded citizens to welcome the adventure of war and crime and self-destruction.
The formulation of big propagandistic lies and fraudulent catchwords has a very well-defined purpose in Totalitaria, and words themselves have acquired a special function in the service of power, which we may call verbocracy. The Big Lie and the phoney slogan at first confuse and then dull the hearers, making them willing to accept every suggested myth of happiness. The task of the totalitarian propagandist is to build special pictures in the minds of the citizenry so that finally they will no longer see and hear with their own eyes and ears but will look at the world through the fog of official catchwords and will develop the automatic responses appropriate to totalitarian mythology.
The whole vocabulary is a dictated set of slowly hypnotizing slogans. In the semantic fog that permeates the atmosphere, words lose their direct communicative function. They become mrerely commanding signs, triggering off reactions of fear and terror. They are battles cries and Pavlovian signals, and no longer represent free thinking.
Instead of aiming at true understanding, people listen to thoughtless repetition, which gives them THE DELUSION OF UNDERSTANDING.
We can say that verbocracy turns them into what psychology calls symbol agnostics, people capable only of imitation, incapable of inquisitive sense of objectivity and perspective that leads to questioning and understanding and to the formation of individual ideas and ideals. In other words, the individual citizen becomes a parrot, repeating ready-made slogans and propaganda catchwords without understanding what they realy mean, or what forces stand behind them.
The citizens of our mythical country have no access to sources of facts and opinions. They are not free to verify what they hear or read. They are the victims of their leader's "labelomania" -- their judgments are determined by the official labels everything and everybody bears.
The criminal in Toatlitaria can be an accidental scapegoat used for release of official hostility, and there is often need for a scapegoat. From one day to the next, a citizen can become a hero or a villain, depending on strategic party needs.
He is a criminal if he doesn't LOOK happy, for then he is guilty of what the Nazis called physiognomic insubordination.
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For those that made it this far, and would like to read more, the entire chapter is at:
http://www.ninehundred.net/control/mc-ch7.html
The rest of the book at:
http://www.ninehundred.net/control/