Not the free individual but the lost individual; not Independence but isolation; not self-discovery but self-obsession; not the conquer but to be conquered; these are major states of mind in contemporary imaginative literature.

We may regard totalitarianism as a process of the annihilation of individuality, but, in more fundamental terms, it is the annihilation, first, of those social relationships within which individuality develops. It is not the extermination of individuals that is ultimately desired by totalitarian rulers, for individuals in the largest number are needed by the new order. What is desired is the extermination of those social relationships which, by their autonomous existence, must always constitute a barrier to the achievement of the absolute political community. The individual alone is powerless. Individual will and memory, apart from the reinforcement of associative tradition, are weak and ephemeral. How well the totalitarian rulers know it. (…) To destroy or diminish the reality of the smaller areas of society, to abolish or restrict the range of cultural alternatives offered individuals by economic endeavor, religion, and kinship, is to destroy in time the roots of the will to resist despotism in its large forms.

In a highly popular statement, we are told that the family has progressed from institution to companionship. But, as Ortega y Gasset has written, “people do not live together merely to be together. They live together to do something together”. To suppose that the present family, or any other group, can perpetually vitalize itself through some indwelling affectional tie, in the absence of concrete, perceived functions, is like supposing that the comradely ties of mutual aid which grow up incidentally in a militar unit will along outlast a condition in which war is plainly and irrevocably banished . Applied to the family, the argument suggests that affection and personality cultivation can somehow exist in a social vacum, unsupported by the determining goals and ideals of economic and political society.

Marxism, like all other totalitarian movements in our century, must be seen as kind of secular pattern of redemption , designed to bring hope and fulfillment to those who have come to feel alienated , frustrated, and excluded from what they regard as their rightful place in a community. In its promise of unity and belonging lies much of the magic of totalitarian mistery, miracle, and authority. Bertrand Russell has not exaggerated in summing up the present significance of Marxism somewhat as follows: dialectical materialism is God; marx the Messiah; Lenin and Stalin the apostles; the proletariat the elect; the Communist party the Church; Moscow the seat of Church; the Revolution the second coming; the punishment of capitalismo hell; Trotsky the devil; and the communist commonwealth kingdom come.

The historical emphasis upon the individual has been at the expense of the associative and symbolic relationship that must in fact uphold the individual’s own sense of integrity. (…) “When the relation between man and God is subjective, interior (as in Luther) or in tímeles acts and logic (as in Calvin) man’s utter dependence upon God is not mediated through the concrete facts of historical life”, writes Canon Demant. And when it is not so mediated, the relation with God becomes tenuous, amorphous, and insupportable.

If all human beings in a population either are declared equal in their native strengths and rights, or else are persuaded to believe this, then the eventual realization of the hard truth of the matter that no amount of redistribution of wealth and status can ever obliterate inequality in one form or another must often take the form of covetousness mixed with resentment: that is, envy. ....The only remedy for the poisons created by egalitarianism in a society is emphatically not ever-greater dosages of political redistribution of wealth and status, for such dosages worsen the disease, producing fevers of avarice and envy. No, the sole remedy for this pathology is the introduction and diffusion of individual liberty as a sovereign value. Respect for individual liberty makes it possible for human beings to live in and be aware of differentiation a condition that, in biology, is recognized for what it is, the basis of progressive evolution, but which, in its social manifestation, receives no such recognition because of both the inequality intrinsic to all social differentiation and the ideology of equality that has spread so widely and so devastatingly in the twentieth century.