New Totalitarianism Led by ‘Dull Bureaucrats and Technocrats’: Psychologist Mattias Desmet
epoch times ^ | 15 September A.D. 2022 | Jan Jekielek & Masooma Haq
Desmet believes the world is now seeing a new form of totalitarianism, spawned in the last couple of decades and fostered by mass formation during the pandemic.
“What you’re dealing with now is not a communist or not fascist authoritarianism. It is the emergence, I think, of technocratic totalitarianism,” Desmet said during a recent interview for EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders” program. This new form of control will not be “led by gang leaders such as Stalin or Hitler, but by dull bureaucrats and technocrats,” added Desmet, citing the work of 20th century political philosopher Hannah Arendt.
It’s pretty much the culmination of what James Burnham described in his “The Managerial Revolution” all the way back in 1941.
“Burnham argued that in the short period since the First World War, a new society had emerged in which a social group or class of “managers” had waged a “drive for social dominance, for power and privilege, for the position of ruling class.”
Burnham helped Buckley found National Review in 1955.