The Rise of Tyranny

The Analects of Dawoud Kringle part 27

The quickest way to turn a free society into a totalitarian state has always been the same: get rid of the middle class.

Depending on the time and place, it was the aristocracy, recalcitrant samurais, top bureaucracy, Jews, merchants, the dreaded Deep State, fill-in-the-blank. All it takes is to eliminate the people who operate and maintain the state machinery. 

The downside is that you’re stuck without people who actually know how to run the machine. But as long as you have power, who cares? 

However, there's a more subtle way to accomplish this. Threaten the middle class by making them afraid of descending into the lower depths of the proletariat. This is sufficient to make them follow any "strong" leader. This way, the middle class becomes the backbone of the consensus to the regimes and contributes to the formation of fascist-style militias.

This principle is applicable anywhere. Find a population of poor, uneducated, frustrated, disenfranchised, and oppressed people, provide some means of material comfort, tell them how “special” they are, point to an enemy (real or imaginary) and say, “It’s all their fault!”, give them weapons, and you have an army. This has happened over and over in history.

Any totalitarian ideology is maintained the illusion of self-sufficiency. It sells the idea of strengthening the individual yet does so not through an actual refinement of individual qualities, but by the submission of the individual will to the will of the state. It is the stern father figure for people who lack the qualities of self-determination and independent thought and spiritual evolution in themselves. The state provides the illusion that the individual has actually achieved this station, when the reality is the antithesis.

In this, it is almost completely indistinguishable from communism, except in the realm of economics (fascism concentrates wealth within a corporate oligarchy, while communism concentrates it in a stateist bureaucracy).

Both are ruinous to the human spirit. 

Any system of government that seeks to assimilate the individual will and offer nothing but the glorification of the state in return (please see chapter 11 of "Also Sprake Zarathustra" by F. W. Nietszche for more clarification) seeks only its own power. Those who willingly submit to that power have not attained it themselves; they have sold their souls for a miserable price. When the state collapses - as it is an unworkable idea - it will take the individual with it.