Every totalitarian state, whether it announces itself openly or cloaks its ambitions in the language of compassion, has the same quiet prerequisite: a population unmoored from meaning.
A people who do not know why they exist are remarkably easy to govern.
They are easily frightened, easily pacified, and easily convinced that the task of living ought to be outsourced. When individuals are morally confused, when they no longer possess an internal hierarchy of values, they begin to look outward for direction.
And the modern state is always eager to oblige.
What the state fears most is not dissent in the streets, but dignity in the soul. A population capable of shouldering the burden of existence is resistant to tyranny in a way no protest movement ever could be. An individual who has accepted the tragic structure of life, its unfairness, its suffering, its demands, does not instinctively reach for the state every time hardship appears. Such people are difficult to tyrannise precisely because they have already said yes to life as it is, rather than as it is promised to be made by bureaucratic decree.
Totalitarianism does not thrive on strength. It feeds on dependency.
A culture that teaches its citizens to pursue pleasure, safety, and comfort above all else trains them for subjugation. A population governed by appetite is governed easily, because appetite is immediate, predictable, and manipulable. When meaning is replaced by expedience, the individual becomes legible to power, and legibility is the precondition for control.
This is why the totalitarian impulse requires a nihilistic population. Not nihilism as a philosophical position held consciously, but as a lived condition: a life without transcendent orientation, without responsibility freely chosen, without something worth sacrificing for. When nothing is sacred, everything becomes negotiable, and the state is always the most aggressive negotiator in the room.
The Western tradition once understood something we seem to be forgetting: that it is the individual who is redeemed, not the group. Groups do not suffer. They do not bleed, despair, or die. Only individuals do. And because suffering is irreducibly personal, the moral unit of society must be personal as well. Any political system that claims to act ‘for the group’ while disregarding the sovereignty of the individual is already halfway to justifying atrocity.
The only enduring armour against suffering is meaning. Not pleasure. Not distraction. Not the endless numbing churn of consumption. Meaning, and meaning alone, makes suffering bearable. And meaning is sustained only through the unrelenting pursuit of responsibility. The individual who takes responsibility for himself, his family, his work, and his word does not need to be managed. He governs himself. And the more people do this, the less moral justification remains for the state to encroach upon their lives.
The equation is unavoidable: responsibility precedes freedom.
When individuals abdicate responsibility, they invite supervision. When they relinquish agency, they forfeit sovereignty. A government that treats its citizens as children does so not merely out of malice, but because too many have agreed to behave like children.
The sacred, then, is not optional. It occupies an a priori seat in the human psyche, whether acknowledged or denied. When a society dispenses with the sacred, it does not eliminate worship, it merely changes its object. If the throne of the ineffable is left vacant, the state will move to occupy it. And because the state deals only in material provision, regulation, and enforcement, it inevitably becomes the highest authority once meaning is reduced to material outcomes.
This is how totalitarianism becomes possible: when life is framed as a problem to be solved rather than a burden to be borne. When meaning is said to reside in material security alone, those who control material conditions become moral arbiters by default.
The state then ceases to be a referee and becomes a god, capricious, punitive, and endlessly expanding.
The healing of the West will not come from programs, movements, or slogans. It will come from individuals who decide, quietly and without fanfare, to live as though their lives matter, because they do. From people who choose responsibility over resentment, truth over safety, and meaning over comfort. From those who stop waiting for permission to live properly.
As another year turns, that choice remains open. If enough individuals stand up and take on the weight of life, its difficulty, its unfairness, its tragedy, they will find something sturdier than comfort: freedom. Freedom not from suffering, but from the desperation that makes suffering exploitable.
That is where the totalitarian state hides: in our abdication of agency, in our hunger for easy answers, in our flight from responsibility. And that is precisely where it loses its power.
Happy New Year.
