The Tyrannical Tendency

On the preconditions for the extinction of freedom

I'd love to gain complete control of you
And handle even the heart and soul of you

Cole Porter

What do you say we get alliterative for a moment around here and theorise the tyrannical tendencies of technocracy?

And I’ll go you one better in the alliteration game: let’s frame our discussion around a certain Canadian gentleman going by the name of Trudeau, who - entirely unintentionally - exhibits those tendencies in a deeply illustrative way. Justin Trudeau, let me make clear from the outset, is no tyrant in the traditional sense and it would be hyperbole to describe him as such. Love him or loathe him, he is a constitutionally legitimate premier. But, as we shall see, the form of government which he represents is nonetheless in inchoate form the purest tyranny yet envisaged. This is because it combines the characteristics of tyrannical government as the ancients understood it with conceptual and technological conditions which are genuinely novel, and which in fact perfect those characteristics. The result is that Trudeau unwittingly heralds the coming of a kind of apogee or apex of tyranny - and we ought therefore to pay careful attention to the image of the future that he appears to foreshadow.

Let’s begin at the beginning, though, with Aristotle. In the Politics, we find an interesting passage in which Aristotle stakes out a series of what he calls ‘measures…tending to the preservation of tyranny’. These include:

• ‘Prohibiting common meals, clubs, education, and anything of a like character’ so as to ‘adopt a defensive attitude against everything likely to produce…mutual confidence and a high spirit [in the population]’

• Forbidding ‘societies for cultural purposes, and any gathering of a similar character, and to use every means for making every subject as much of a stranger as possible to every other’

• Requiring ‘every resident in the city to be constantly appearing in public, and always hanging about the palace gates’, such that they ‘will come to have a low opinion of themselves as a result of being continually in the position of slaves’

• Ensuring ‘nothing which any of [the tyrant’s] subjects says or does escapes his notice’ so that men lose the desire to ‘speak their minds’ out of fear

• Sowing ‘mutual distrust and…discord’ between classes

• ‘Impoverishing’ the population so as to ‘prevent them having the means for maintaining a civic guard’ and to ‘keep them busy with their daily tasks’ so that they have no time for plotting

For Aristotle, in other words, tyranny inhered in the dominance of governmental practices having the effect of what Foucault calls ‘individualisation and totalisation’: every member of the society atomised and divorced from familial, communal and social ties; and the total ownership of all individuals by the State, such that they have no private lives, no private opinions, and no private property. The result of course is their complete enervation and passivity, with the consequence that there is no prospect of ‘overthrow’ and the existing system of government is preserved indefinitely.

Aristotle’s choice of words is important. These are measures that ‘tend’ to preserve tyranny. Note, then, the absence in the picture being painted of the tyrant himself or any deliberate plot or thoroughly worked-out schema; Aristotle’s understanding of tyranny is functional or instrumental. It is the label to be attached to governmental frameworks which produce the effects that he identifies, whether deliberately or not. No plan as such is required; tyranny is a mode, or even an outcome, rather than a form of government. It exists wherever the cultivation of passivity among the population is achieved through processes, to repeat, of individualisation and totalisation. The particular model that the government takes (dictatorial, monarchical, technocratic, parliamentarian, etc.), and the intentionality of the measures and policies put into effect, is in other words less important in establishing a tyranny than what government happens to do, and how it does it.

Tyranny is always then latent in the exercise of governing as a kind of inherent risk that might at any point be realised. But modernity has brought with it some conditions which have allowed the tyrannical tendency to intensify and deepen, such that indeed we are now witnessing an unprecedented acceleration in the potential scope and scale of this mode of government - albeit in a manner which has not yet fully been realised.

The first set of such conditions is technological. It will be uncontroversial, I think, to observe that digital technology in particular exhibits a marked tendency to facilitate precisely the features of tyranny which Aristotle identified. We can all see around us the effects that the ubiquity of smartphones and tablets is having in terms of mutual estrangement and the sowing of ‘mutual distrust and…discord’; we can also see how it builds pressure, particularly on the young, to be ‘constantly appearing in public’; we all know, increasingly viscerally, what it feels like to be afraid to ‘speak [our] minds’, or to feel as though nothing that we say or do ‘escapes notice’; we can all observe the haunted look that so many young people now have, and how ‘high spirits’ have been kicked out of them by the unrelenting banality, inanity and cruelty of the screen-based culture of the 2020s.

And, while it would be wrong to attribute the decline in civil society (putting civility itself to one side) and community life that we are all witnessing to anything deliberate, it is undoubtedly the case that technology is accelerating that decline (and here TV is as much to blame as smartphones) such that the physical gathering together of people is itself becoming increasingly difficult to arrange, and increasingly viewed as a chore - unless of course some commercial incentive is involved.

The second set of such conditions is cultural (I am tempted to instead use the word ‘spiritual’). A secular society is one which almost inevitably exhibits a drive towards the twin ends of equality and liberation. This is because, to an individual who sees nothing above or beyond himself, the supreme spiritual value can only be that of recognition: a desire to have all personal inequalities, inadequacies, misfortunes and unfairnesses taken into account and transcended by what I have elsewhere called a ‘vast, regulatory, liberating power that would free us from all constraint, from all wrongs, and for good’.

The secular State can only promise, in other words, to govern, and the only legitimate ends of government for such a State can be the equalisation and liberation of its subjects. A society of secular individuals, then, is a society in which all demand to be liberated to pursue their personal goals and desires, and in which as a consequence all demand to be rendered substantively equal at all times, lest inherent characteristics of one individual or another lead them to a position of inequality vis-à-vis the rest in some direction or other, and hence diminished their freedom. The consequence of this is a predominant sibling aesthetic defined by a constant petty rivalry between any and all individuals demanding at all times to be the most equal among equals. This has very little to do with the conditions of formal equality (which nobody would seriously oppose) and more to do with a feeling that the ends of government as such should be a constant adjudication or modulation to ensure that nobody (least of all oneself) should miss out on precisely the same share of the pie as everyone else (and ideally get a share that is ever-so-slightly bigger).

What we appear to face, then, is a mutually-reinforcing dynamic in which technological and cultural conditions buttress one another in facilitating whatever pre-existing ‘individualising and totalising’ features exist in our form of government, such that we see an intensification and broadening of the phenomena of social atomisation; mutual distrust and discord; diminution of privacy; the inability to become self-reliant and prosperous; and the relegation of all human relationships to a position lesser in importance than that between individual and State. The result of this is, of course, is that our government increasingly takes on a tyrannical mien, not because there is any identifiable tyrant or set of tyrants twirling their moustaches in a War Room anywhere, but simply by dint of the way in which modern life has developed and what it permits governments to achieve.

And this is where Justin Trudeau comes in. Trudeau’s name has become a byword in centre-right circles both for his hypertrophied ‘wokeism’ and his transparently authoritarian impulses - which are made manifest in almost everything that he does. This is a man, let us recall, who admires the rule of the Chinese Communist Party. He is a man who thinks nothing of mandating the use of vaccines and using emergency legislation to freeze the assets of protestors he dislikes when they object. He is a man whose government is currently tabling legislation (in the form of the Online Harms Act) to permit the imposition of life sentences on people convicted of speech crimes, and giving the green light to enforcement authorities to engage in what is to all intents and purposes the punishment of ‘pre-crime’.

And it bears emphasising that in all of this he more-or-less perfectly personifies precisely the dynamic which I earlier identified, in which technology and culture combine to produce an acceleration and reinforcement of tyrannical tendencies as Aristotle understood them. His self-consciously exaggerated obsession with political correctness, and his at times ham-fisted alignment with the cultural drive towards equality and liberation, is plain. And so is his deployment and manipulation of digital technology to atomise and alienate, sew mutual distrust and fear, and impoverish; in the latter regard, it is worth noting that amongst its many other sins, the Online Harms Act, if it becomes law, will permit individuals to bring complaints against other individuals regarding ‘hate speech’ to the Canadian Human Rights Commission, which will have the power to impose charges of up to $50,000 as punishment.

I hardly need to spell out how well this all fits into Aristotle’s framework of tyranny as I earlier described it. And I likewise hardly need to spell out how it builds upon and even accentuates the individualising and totalising technological and cultural conditions which I have here identified. It is almost as though Trudeau’s government floats upon, and is borne along by, the social currents which are flowing beneath the surface of modern life - and whose ultimate destination appears to be a complete confluence or merger between society and State.

In this respect Canada is very much the harbinger of what is to come as those self-same technological and cultural conditions themselves grow stronger: its Online Harms Act, and the way in which the trucker convoys were dealt with, are mere amuse-bouches for the feast which awaits us across the developed world. And Canada’s predicament helps to shed light on how the contours of tyranny take shape in modernity. Remember, for Aristotle, tyranny is understood in a functional rather than ideological or intentional sense: it is a description for how government might operate rather than of its formal makeup. Understood in this light, it can be seen to be perfectly possible for a governing framework which bears all of the trappings of democracy, constitutionalism and the rule of law to exert tyrannical consequences and have tyrannical effects. And these are, to repeat, the slow but sure erosion and erasure of private lives, private opinions, and private property, and the gradual reduction of the sphere of the social to a desultory rump over which the State exerts total oversight. These phenomena can be seen everywhere; they are I am afraid the climactic conditions to which we will all likely have to accustom ourselves as technology, culture and government integrate with each other around the ‘tendency’ Aristotle described for us. We can reassure ourselves with a very small crumb of comfort in that Aristotle thought that tyranny would always be ‘short-lived’. But in the meantime it is important to make arrangements in our personal, financial and social lives with an eye on where the tyrannical tendency is likely to take us.