Delsol bump. She helps one think.
“Twentieth century totalitarianism treated those it ruled as a multitude of faceless individuals. They were not considered persons, but were denied their dignity and forbidden from developing true relationships with others. Admonitions against close family ties or close friendships were the essence of this particular form of dehumanization. Nor were individuals considered subjects. They were deprived of freedom of thought and the freedom to shape their own destinies.”“Western society in late modernity is reminiscent of holism in its effacement of the subject: the individual confirms the common conscience and avoids personal responsibility. It is reminiscent of totalitarianism in that it has in common the construction of collectives or masses and its weakening of the person-subject, who has trouble dealing with difference and participating in heterogeneous groups. Neither communitarian nor totalitarian, yet sharing common characteristics with both, the society of late-modern individuals is one of spontaneous gregariousness. It is merely a renewed form of the age-old phenomenon of involuntary servitude.”
Chantal Delsol, Unlearned Lessons of the Twentieth Century - An essay on Late Modernity, pp.135
Delsol's acute observations regarding modern Western societies at times fail to take into account that the old totalitarianism that she references have not completely given way to and been supplanted by the soulless and hollowed out nature of the modern individual. The 'old totalitarianisms,' informed and fueled by the modern will-to-power have been merely biding their time until there were sufficient numbers of empty human beings to make their comeback definitive, final and fatally complete.