Isegoria

The 20th Century created the system we have come to call totalitarianism:

Invented by Lenin, and then imitated by Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, Kim Il Sung, and others, it came to dominate some 40 percent of humanity. It also captivated intellectuals in traditionally free societies — not in spite of, but because of, its unprecedented violence. When Stalin was succeeded by the much milder Khrushchev and Brezhnev, intellectuals lost interest in the USSR and idolized Mao instead.

Before the 20th century, the Spanish Inquisition was the Western exemplar of political repression, but the 30,000 or so who died at its hands in its 300-year history was exceeded approximately every two weeks in Stalin’s Soviet Union. The collectivization of agriculture alone took well over 10 million lives. In the opening paragraph of his classic 426-page study of this episode, The Harvest of Sorrow, Robert Conquest observed that “in the actions here recorded about twenty human lives were lost for, not every word, but every letter, in this book.”

Only one major thinker foresaw this turn of events: Fyodor Dostoevsky. He not only predicted that oppression would grow, he also outlined in detail what forms it would take. These predictions occur in a book usually considered the greatest political novel ever written, The Possessed — more accurately translated as The Devils. After Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin’s murders (some of them, anyway) in 1956, the prominent literary scholar Yuri Karyakin, who had once been a true believer, experienced the revelations as “an earthquake,” saying, “We read The Devils and the notebooks [Dostoevsky kept while writing] the novel…and did not believe our eyes…. We read and interrupted each other almost on every page: ‘It can’t be. How could he have known all this?’”

How indeed? The short answer is that Dostoevsky was not only a keen observer of the revolutionary movement but had been a revolutionary himself. Arguably the greatest psychologist who ever lived, he probed, partly by introspection, the revolutionary mind-set and recognized with horror that, in the right circumstances, he, too, could have participated in revolutionary killings.

The Devils, published in 1873, is a fictionalized account of a sensational murder committed three years earlier by the terrorist Sergei Nechaev—a fanatic committed to the idea that literally anything was justified to promote “the cause.” Lenin, who greatly admired Nechaev, agreed.

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“I want to speak out as passionately as I can,” he wrote to one friend. “All the Nihilists and Westernizers will cry out that I am retrograde. To hell with them. I will speak my mind to the very last word.”

Like Nechaev, Pyotr Stepanovich Verkhovensky, the novel’s central character, has convinced everyone in the provincial town where the novel is set that he represents a vast revolutionary organization, with its central committee in Switzerland and countless followers throughout Russia. Also like his model, Pyotr Stepanovich masterfully spreads exciting myths about himself. Young men looking for a romantic hero are flattered by his attention.

Pyotr Stepanovich organizes his followers into “quintets,” groups of five whose only contact with other quintets is through Pyotr Stepanovich himself, a structure supposedly insuring that even if the members of one quintet are arrested, they cannot betray any others. It is actually designed to maximize Pyotr Stepanovich’s power to spread disinformation.

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And indeed, that is how it always is with modern revolutionary movements: The promise of absolute liberty leads to the worst possible slavery, just as the call for fraternity leads to the guillotine, and the ideal of equality to the domination of the few over the many.

Reading this passage, Dostoevsky’s contemporaries would surely have thought of the example of the Jacobins who brutalized the French a few years after their revolution in 1789. But Shigalyov advocates a much more ambitious tyranny closely resembling modern totalitarianism. His admirer, “the lame teacher,” explains: “He suggests as a final solution of the [social] question the division of mankind into two unequal parts. One-tenth enjoys absolute liberty and unbounded power over the other nine-tenths. The others have to give up all individuality and become, so to speak, a herd, and through boundless submission, will by a series of regenerations attain primeval innocence, something like the Garden of Eden.” As Dostoevsky well knew, intellectuals naturally favor governments where educated “experts” (themselves) wield power. The Soviets called such an arrangement “true” democracy, much as today’s elites embrace undemocratic means to “preserve democracy.”

One radical objects to Shigalyov’s paradise: “If I didn’t know what to do with nine-tenths of mankind,” he explains, “I’d take them and blow them up into the air instead of putting them in paradise. I’d only leave a handful of educated people, who would live happily ever afterwards on scientific principles.” To be sure, this solution would entail “cutting off a hundred million heads.” But the real-world version of Shigalyov’s vision eventually devoured even more than that. Mao used this very argument when advocating nuclear war. A hundred million heads: As several commentators have pointed out, that is the number that appears in The Black Book of Communism, a painstaking 1997 effort to document the destruction of humanity in the name of Marxism-Leninism, as the bare minimum of Communist killings.

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It is telling that Dostoevsky directs his most savage attacks in The Devils not at the radicals but at the liberals who fawn on them. Here, too, he proved prophetic. In the years leading to the Bolshevik takeover, the liberal party known as the Kadets (Constitutional Democrats) refused to condemn terrorism and other violence completely at odds with their own professed values as long as the barbarities came from parties to their left. They became the Bolsheviks’ first victims.

The CIA was shocked to the core by the fall of the Soviet Union, Martin Gerri notes:

I was there. Our biggest strategic antagonist for 45 years seized up and died, and we had no idea it was happening. The CIA missed the initial test of the Soviet atom bomb — and India’s bomb, and Pakistan’s as well. 9/11, the sort of disaster the Agency was erected to prevent, came as a complete surprise. In hindsight these episodes appear inevitable and thus predictable, but in fact most historic discontinuities are extreme low-probability events. Place the filter of Platonic truth over them, and they disappear from sight. It would have been career suicide for an analyst to brief, “Mr. President, we estimate there’s a 1 in 1,200 chance that terrorists will crash airliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.” Money and glory attend to the immediate and obvious.

Trapped in an impossible situation, analysts developed survival mechanisms. For one, they wrote too much. A blizzard of classified material blew out not just from the CIA but the entire Intelligence Community. Nobody read the stuff, but if something unforeseen occurred, we could be sure that at least one document had mentioned the possibility. The analytic style was also a hedge against failure. Robert Gates, then head of the directorate of analysis and later director of CIA and secretary of defense, commissioned a logician to scrutinize the language of the President’s Daily Brief, or PDB. The logician discovered a large measure of unclarity in the PDB. The same words had different meanings across time. It was frequently hard to tell whether a prediction was being made or not. The analysts who did the writing tended to be brilliant wielders of the English language. It was the blessed Sherman Kent who contorted their work.

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The most meaningful improvement at scale for the Agency would be to kill the cult of secrecy and redirect resources towards the dominant information structures of our century: the web and AI. The government will never lose its appetite for secrets. While technology can satisfy much of this hunger, we aren’t about to pension off our spies. It’s a question of perspective. “Stealing secrets” is expensive and carries great human and diplomatic risk. Covert sources can play us false — that’s what happened in Iraq. The culture must be liberated from an addictive dependence on classification; Top Secret should never correlate to great authority. This is particularly true in the age of sexting and performative elites, when enough secrets get spilled online to make a grown spy cry.

As Robert Redford’s character in Three Days of the Condor would remind us, even before the internet the immense majority of intelligence material was collected from “open sources” — news media, books, government and corporate publications, etc. After the arrival of the web, the disproportion ballooned exponentially. Open information is faster, nimbler, cheaper, and much less dangerous to obtain. The Agency knows this, and occasionally will acknowledge it with a wave of the hand. But it has never acted on it, never put its money there. Although criticism after 9/11 and Iraq forced the establishment of an Open Source Center — my home turf — the unit was ridiculously underfunded and subservient to operations.

If the CIA’s business is to understand the world, then a major part of that mission should be to understand the web at great depth. For every digital utterance, the analyst must be able to penetrate beyond author and site to provider, location, funding, ideology, past history, connection to similar posts elsewhere, affiliation with state and non-state actors. Analyzing video should have primacy over text — this is alien to government thinking but it’s the way of the web. The digital universe is a huge and shifting target. Powerful AI applications will keep track of billions of moving parts, constructing a dynamic map of digital space in the manner of the 16th century explorers, placing the warning when appropriate, “Here be monsters.”

Skeptics will argue that all online material is horribly tainted — that the internet is the mother of lies. That would be accurate and all to the good. To the propaganda analyst, disinformation is a moveable feast. Among many benefits, it can provide an answer to the most difficult intelligence question to ascertain: intent. The point, after all, isn’t to strive after Platonic truth but to extract knowledge about how the world works.

Ioannes Chountis de Fabbri presents a global history of power:

Engelbert Kaempfer (1651-1716), a German physician in the service of the Dutch East India Company, spent two years at the trading outpost in Nagasaki at the close of the 17th century. His posthumous History of Japan, published in London in 1727, gave European readers one of the earliest sustained accounts of Japan’s political order and society. What struck Kaempfer was its structure. Power was divided – though far from equally – between an emperor who reigned in ceremonial seclusion and a military ruler who governed in his name. Japan, Kaempfer wrote, was a state in which ‘mutual checks, jealousies, and mistrusts of persons invested with power are thought the most effectual means to oblige them to discharge their respective duties’. He described a long and unbroken line of ‘ecclesiastical hereditary Emperors, all descended from one family… still keeping their title, rank, and grandeur’, yet ‘dispossessed of their sovereign power by the Secular Monarchs [whom he elsewhere styled ‘Crown-Generals’]’. Kaempfer’s English translator made the duality plain: ‘as affairs now stand in Japan, there are properly two Emperors, an Ecclesiastical and a Secular’. To readers familiar with the ceremonial supremacy of the Pope and the contested authority of the Holy Roman Emperor, the analogy spoke for itself.

Across history, sovereignty has rarely been a simple matter of one ruler holding unchallenged power. States and polities have found countless ways to divide, disguise, or distribute authority, sometimes to reconcile rival claims, sometimes to preserve the dignity of an office while transferring its powers elsewhere. In the modern age, these arrangements became ever more diverse. Constitutional monarchies, papal-imperial compacts, shogunal governments, and national churches each offered their own solutions, blending local traditions with pressures that were often global in scope. The variety is striking, but so too is the shared instinct: to root political change in forms that felt ancient, even when the reality they concealed was new.

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Patterns recur: ceremonial figureheads beside working rulers, religious authority coexisting with political command, and elaborate rituals designed to cloak change in the garments of continuity.

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Crucially, the Tokugawa shogunate did not seek to abolish the imperial court, the aristocracy, or the great religious foundations. Instead, it drew them into Edo’s orbit, binding court, temple, and nobility through ritual, law, and fiscal oversight. Like Hideyoshi before them, the Tokugawa ruled as ‘first subjects’, acting on behalf of the emperor while retaining the substance of powers in their own hands. They upheld the language of deference, preserved the rituals of subordination, and confirmed their appointments through court ceremony.

It is evident, then, that at the core of the Tokugawa settlement lay an unbroken allegiance to the emperor. As Kaempfer noted, even after the ‘Crown-Generals wrestled the Government of secular affairs entirely out of their hands’, the emperors retained ‘their rank and splendour, their ancient title and magnificent way of life, their authority in Church affairs, and one very considerable prerogative of the supreme power, the granting of titles and honours’. In constitutional terms, the shogun ruled not by independent right but as the emperor’s delegate; there had been no interregnum, no break in dynastic legitimacy. In 1615 the emperor’s movements were restricted, his household placed under surveillance, and senior courtly and ecclesiastical appointments required shogunal approval. The throne retained the dignity of appointing each new shogun and performing the rites that placed him, in Confucian language, as mediator between Heaven and Earth, or, in Shinto terms, between divine ancestors and the people of Japan. But it did so under supervision, confined to Kyoto much as a Pope might be enclosed within the Vatican after the unification of Italy – mutatis mutandis.

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Beyond preserving peace, the Tokugawa system cultivated a distinctive style of governance in which policy was cautious, aims were publicly stated, and means were governed by precedent. There were no grand reforms, yet the architecture of government was rational in form and moderate in ambition. If modernisation entails the growth of civil administration, the regularisation of authority, and the displacement of charismatic rule by procedure, then Tokugawa Japan belongs to the modern age, even if it arrived there by other paths.

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Kaempfer, who described the country’s dual order, was himself a subject of the Holy Roman Empire – a polity equally defined by negotiated authority, layered jurisdictions, and the careful accommodation of rival powers.

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The fiction of harmony began with Charlemagne (748-814). On Christmas Day 800, Pope Leo III (d.816) placed the imperial crown on the Frankish king’s head, reviving a western title dormant since the fall of Rome. The act was theatrical and ambiguous: Leo claimed the right to make emperors; Charlemagne, in practice, would act without papal leave. Over the centuries the office acquired its own institutional weight yet never shed its dependence on papal legitimacy. Until the 16th century, no emperor was truly crowned until anointed in Rome; no pope stood securely without the backing of secular arms.

Like in Japan, this uneasy compact shaped the fortunes of both offices. The Investiture Controversy of the 11th century (ostensibly a dispute over the right to appoint bishops) was in truth a clash of cosmologies. Pope Gregory VII (1020-85) insisted that spiritual authority must direct the temporal; Emperor Henry IV (1050-1106) claimed that his right to govern extended to the Church within his lands. Their struggle produced enduring symbols: the emperor’s excommunication, his barefoot penance at Canossa, and the long wars that followed. Beneath the doctrinal quarrel lay the more urgent question: who would command, and under whose sanction?

Maximilian I (1459-1519), elected King of the Romans in 1486, secured in 1508 the pope’s permission for kings of the Holy Roman Empire to call themselves ‘elected emperors’ and to use the imperial title without being crowned in Rome. From this point onwards, the title was used for the ‘emperor in waiting’, elected and crowned in his predecessor’s lifetime to ensure succession – a system not entirely unlike that followed by the early Tokugawa shoguns. Even at its height, imperial authority was partial and fragmented. By the time of Charles V (1500-58) the Empire was less a polity than a constellation of jurisdictions. Charles ruled vast territories (Spain, the Low Countries, parts of Italy and the Americas) but could not command the princes of the Reich without their consent. His coronation in Bologna in 1530 was the last performed by a pope.

The Reformation soon destroyed what unity remained between altar and throne. Sovereignty within the Empire became increasingly plural, claimed by electors, bishops, and cities alike. The emperor remained the fountain of honour and law, but enforcement passed to local hands. Emperors and princes effectively checked one another. Neither side wished for a strong government at the centre, lest it diminish their own standing. The emperor was indispensable for opening the imperial diet, advancing an agenda, and exercising a veto; yet for any measure to become law, it required his assent as well as the approval of the diet’s three separate colleges – electors, princes, and imperial cities. Above these temporal arrangements stood the pope, whose authority, spiritual in nature, was in theory supreme. As Martyn Rady has observed, ‘the Holy Roman Empire remained at best a policing institution that existed to curb excesses of violence. Day-to-day power was exercised by the great lords and princes in their territories [whilst] the Empire fulfilled only the most basic functions, operating as a security organisation of last resort’.

Here, the parallel with Tokugawa Japan becomes crystal-clear. The emperor in Kyoto resembled the pope in the Vatican: supreme in dignity, guardian of tradition, essential to the conferral of legitimacy, yet distant from the machinery of rule. The shogun, like the Holy Roman Emperor in relation to the pope, governed in the sovereign’s name, wielding temporal authority while invoking a higher, sacral source.

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Though the Enlightenment celebrated the ideal of separated powers, in practice most societies found it elusive. What endured instead was a dance of authority: sovereigns who held titles without command, ministers who ruled under borrowed names, and institutions whose strength lay precisely in their ambiguity. The common reflex in these systems was the art of clothing change in the familiar – weaving new settlements into the fabric of the old and drawing legitimacy from the very traditions they were reshaping. Such arrangements remind us that the making of modernity owed as much to artful accommodation and layered compromise as to any decisive rupture with the past.