I have been enjoying Timothy Snyder’s YouTube

I have been enjoying Timothy Snyder’s YouTube videos. In one of them, he introduced the term “totalitarianism” to a discussion of populism, oligarchy, and authoritarianism. His definition of totalitarianism focused on loss of private life. He said he follows Hannah Arendt’s usage. “Totalitarian regimes seek to dominate every aspect of everyone’s life as a prelude to world domination.”¹ In a totalitarian society all of one’s actions are public. Private life may also be overwhelmed in lesser ways, as in the sentence “politics is a totalizing profession.”

Warning: The internet can promote totalization. When your Facebook friends are not personally close to you, or perhaps not even known to you, documentation of private life is a small step in the wrong direction. Do we really want our private lives to be documented and shared as public discourse? This is not a critique of authorship of books and blogs. On the contrary, authors create fiction and non-fiction designed for public consumption. My concern is that a naked repose upon the information highway will usher Big Brother into our homes.

2017 December 13

I am embarrassed to say that the quote is from Wikipedia: The Origins of Totalitarianism, not the book itself, which I hope to read soon. ↩