As we dive deeper into the study of authoritarian ideas there are a few things it is crucial to bear in mind. The first is that the ideas we will be looking at are not some alien intellectual tribe, menacing the frontiers of civilization. Rather, they are inside the city walls, on the shelves of our libraries, addressing us from the pulpits of our churches and the lecture hall podiums of our universities. Like the deadly, flesh-eating bacilli that enter the bloodstream of some unfortunate who scratches his finger in garden or garage, the ideas that led to Auschwitz and the Soviet Gulag are all around us; they are literally everywhere.
The philosophic logic that facilitated the Holocaust and the establishment of the Soviet Union is, sad to say, an ordinary aspect of the intellectual heritage of Western civilization. The vast majority of our greatest philosophers and theologians were fascists and Bolsheviks in a fundamental, though not in a literal, sense of the words. Only a handful of the historical figures we think of as the intellectual founders of the liberal West actually contributed to the creation of the relatively decent societies we are so fortunate to enjoy today. Most Western “thinkers” would have ripped Britain’s Magna Carta and the Constitution of the United States of America to pieces if they’d had the opportunity.
But to grasp why this is so we must peer into the mists of political history and try to understand how formal political ideologies developed in the first place. We must remember that most of what we think of as Western philosophy and theology developed under the auspices of the authoritarian regimes that dominated the history of Western politics before political liberalism was legally institutionalized under the articles of the United States Constitution in 1789. These philosophies and theologies survived and flourished under authoritarian regimes because, as a rule, they were useful to and/or supportive of these systems. When they were not, or when they were actually dangerous to them, they were usually suppressed.
This means that most of what we are studying when we survey the history of Western philosophy and theology is a body of ideas that served to sustain authoritarian regimes—and almost certainly were developed for that purpose. Although a handful of heroic intellectuals risked their lives to offer the peoples of the West a philosophic alternative to the dogmas of tyranny, the influence of these dogmas has remained pervasive, even dominant, within the West’s intellectual establishments. As recently as the last two generations liberal civilization fought off two gigantic assaults by these ideas’ most virulent practical manifestations: Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. But although defeated materially these systems’ founding concepts continue to menace us.
And so we must study authoritarian ideas—“know your enemy”—in order to defeat them. We must learn to recognize these ideas when they infect our own minds so that we may reject them personally, and we must expunge them from our national and international institutions of education, journalism, and art. To facilitate these aims this philosopher has released Flowers From the Garden of Evil: Everyone’s Guide to the Elements of Authoritarian Dogma. This arsenal of ideas will arm you to the teeth with the knowledge you need to win your private battle against malevolent ideologies, and allow you to fight more effectively as an intellectual paladin of liberal civilization.
Authoritarianism 101 