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COPYRIGHT 2003 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
A chapter from OTale of the Devil,O by Riccardo Orizio
Few puzzles in political philosophy are more daunting than the Problem of the Loyal Henchmen. The Problem of the Loyal Henchmen is a subset of the more familiar Problem of Authority. Why does authority command obedience? A man who tells you to pick your gum wrapper up off the sidewalk is generally ignored; a man in a uniform who makes the same request, even if it's the uniform of a bus driver, is instinctively obeyed. People wearing white lab coats and carrying clipboards, with no other evidence of expertise, have succeeded in persuading subjects in psychology experiments to act in the belief that they are torturing other human beings. In these cases, people can persuade themselves that the authorities they obey are benign--that picking up litter and torturing other human beings in a laboratory are in the interests of civic order and scientific progress. The Problem of the Loyal Henchmen arises when people willingly obey authorities everyone knows to be evil. Why, after the villain has fled in his private submarine, and while the high-tech palace crashes and burns, does the last unincinerated member of the villain's private militia risk his life to take a shot at James Bond? Loyalty to Blofeld? Loyalty to the principles of Blofeldism? What could that mean?
Some distinctions are helpful. First, there are dictators and there are dictators. Political science has distinguished two types, totalitarian and authoritarian ("t. & a.," in foreign-policy shorthand). The definitions were established in 1956 by a Harvard professor, Carl Friedrich, and his co-writer, a recent Harvard Ph.D., Zbigniew Brzezinski; their book, "Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy," was for many years the authority on authoritarianism. Friedrich and Brzezinski identified six criteria that a regime must meet in order to qualify as "totalitarian": an official, chiliastic ideology; a single political party; a centrally directed economy; party control of mass communications; party control of the military; and a secret police. Authoritarian dictatorships are bad, but totalitarianism is the more dangerous phenomenon. Friedrich and Brzezinski's classifications lost favor in the nineteen-sixties, when they began to seem a hypocritical way of distinguishing between dictatorial regimes (generally right wing) that were friendly to American interests and dictatorial regimes (generally left wing) opposed to those interests. The terms were revived, to much attention, in 1979, in an essay in Commentary by Jeane Kirkpatrick, who went on to become Ronald Reagan's first Ambassador to the United Nations.
No doubt the American government operates with a double standard when dealing with autocratic regimes, tolerating Saudi abuses of human rights while condemning Cuban abuses, for example. But Friedrich and Brzezinski's distinction was not meant to be a distinction simply between degrees of oppressiveness. They considered authoritarian and totalitarian states to be different types of regimes--to be, in some sense, antithetical. As Friedrich put it in an early article, "Totalitarianism is precisely the opposite of authoritarianism. . . . In a totalitarian society true authority is altogether destroyed." He meant that a key feature of totalitarian societies is the absence of any reliable legal or political structure. Totalitarian rule is experienced as arbitrary rule: the citizen never knows when the knock on the door may come. Another name for this is "terror."
One writer who identified terror as the essence of totalitarianism was Hannah Arendt. Arendt started writing "The Origins of Totalitarianism" in 1945, the year Nazi...
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