Totalitarian Cringe

The Aesthetics of Medical Authoritarianism

In Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being, the depicted experiences of the art-student Sabina provide a narrative framework through which Kundera can discuss the aesthetic aspects of totalitarianism. Kundera describes the world depicted in Soviet-era propaganda as a “world of grinning idiots,” or to put it more succinctly, kitsch. Kundera describes kitsch as a self-congratulatory form of sentimentality, consisting of “two tears”:

The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass!

The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass!

It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch.

Kitsch is a sterilized vision of reality, “the aesthetic ideal of the categorical agreement with being in a world in which shit is denied,” an ideal which “excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence.” It must eradicate

every display of individualism (because a deviation from the collective is a spit in the eye of the smiling brotherhood); every doubt (because anyone who starts doubting details will end by doubting life itself); all irony (because in the realm of kitsch everything must be taken quite seriously); and the mother who abandons her family or the man who prefers men to women.

As interesting as Kundera's notion of totalitarian kitsch is, it isn't quite sufficient to describe what's happening today, and not just because the last two examples of 'unacceptability' have been often completely inverted in contemporary Western propaganda... although the man who prefers men to women might have a bit of a hard time if he happens to prefer biologically-defined men, taking us back to wherever Kundera was speaking from.

It's more because the digital propaganda campaigns coming out of the totalitarian-humanist regime are much better described as totalitarian cringe. We're far beyond the grinning idiots of Communist propaganda, the happy workers and families; at least the smiles on their gormless faces weren't covered up by blue plastic. At least the military parades showed some discipline and precision. All we get is this:

Senger's thread generated some interesting responses. I'm not sure anyone can fully answer the question of why, but a good start could be to look at what this particular form of propaganda expresses.

First of all, the parades of uniformed goose-steppers common across 20^th century totalitarian regimes took place in the public sphere. People gathered to watch, shout slogans, salute and do all that old-school totalitarian stuff.

TikTok videos, however, can be produced anywhere, at any time. The audience is virtual, and potentially global. You, too, can participate! Get involved by uploading a stupid and embarrassing video of yourself dancing like a 14 year old girl with your lamewad colleagues! Thank you, NHS!

Furthermore, these videos predominantly featured medical professionals, revealing the regime's preferred vectors of power; the classical totalitarian regimes made use of soldiers, indicating to the masses that their power was enforced through straight-forward military strength. Don't fuck with us, or we'll shoot you.

While that sort of threat isn't entirely absent from contemporary Western politics – the Fresh Prez of D.C. has remarked more than once that 'Americans need F-15s not AR15s to fight against the government’ - it doesn't come across as all that convincing when the wokification of your military is starting to make Monty Python's camp squadron look pretty intimidating by comparison.

Hence, the focus on hospital workers. The visible apparatus of social control was shifted from the military to the medical sector. The war is on an invisible enemy, even more invisible than the terrorists that were allegedly responsible for hijacking those planes, and flying them into those buildings that definitely weren't subsequently blown up. Even countries that are ostensibly rattling sabres at one another are collaborating at the level of transnational medical authoritarianism, as evidenced by the Russian media hysteria over the “latest variant”, Arcturus. That the US and Russia are rejecting the WHO's Global Pandemic Treaty is an irrelevant bureaucratic detail when both countries are so thoroughly contaminated with the organization's technocratic idiocy.

At the emotional level, the use of medical workers is intended to indicate the sense that the State really cares about you, and your health. It doesn't want to have to detain you indefinitely, unless it's for your own good. It doesn't want to have to threaten, bully, bribe, and blackmail you into taking the clot-shot.

The inane frivolity is more puzzling, when hospitals were ostensibly being overwhelmed. Theodore Dalrymple's observation that the purpose Communist propaganda was “not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate” is perhaps relevant here; indeed, the entire apparatus of industrial healthcare has that quality built into it. Researchers have known for years that the gowns forced on patients are psychologically dehumanizing; that may well have been the point all along.

Just as empires reach their maximum extent just before they collapse, so it seems fitting that modern industrial medicine has become entwined with an unprecedented global control system just at the point where it is beginning to fail. The overprescription of antibiotics has created superbugs that may render antibiotics obsolete; the experimental gene-therapies may eliminate public trust in conventional medicine; and the institutional collapse of healthcare is showing no partisan bias towards public or private systems.

Rather than scraping at some miserable barrel of state-socialism in the desperate hope that increased government bureaucracy can possibly make anything more functional, it may be worth turning back to a time just before Big Pharma coagulated out of Big Oil, like some hideous monster in a 1980s sci-fi film, and investigating the decentralised approach to healthcare that used to be the norm. An intriguing chapter in the history of modern British medicine was the Peckham Experiment, which

put into practice on a voluntarist ‘social medicine’ approach quite different to that of the NHS. After first opening in 1926, it was relaunched in 1935 in a purpose-built home (which you can see on film here). London’s second-largest swimming pool was at the heart of this new building, where members could also use a two-floor gymnasium, a self-service cafeteria, a theatre and a long gallery designed for dancing, as well as spaces intended for playing billiards, darts and table tennis or listening to the wireless.  

From 1938 members could also buy milk, eggs and vegetables grown on an organic farm in Bormley in Kent, which had been leased a few years earlier. Consulting rooms and a medical laboratory were located in the middle of this hub of healthy activity. This was a private community centre, membership of which required a modest weekly family subscription of 6d. (half of what the average working-class family spent on newspapers) and agreeing to a regular ‘health overhaul’ for each family member.

Their holistic approach was based on a level of medical intervention we would have trouble tolerating today, earning founders George Williamson and Innes Pearse the nick-name of the ‘Peckham Biologists’. Meanwhile their voluntary ethos set them at odds with the National Health Service and difficulty in raising funds forced the Centre to close in 1950.

If, amidst the shattered ruins of the NHS and other centralised health institutions, a thousand Peckham Experiments could bloom, the future may not be quite as bleak as I often fear. It's a long shot, but it's worth launching into the ether.