by Rod Dreher
Because digital life, including commercial transactions, is automatically monitored, Chinese with high social credit ratings gain privileges. Those with lower scores find daily life harder. They aren’t allowed to buy high-speed train tickets or take flights. Doors close to certain restaurants. Their children may not be allowed to go to college. They may lose their job and have a difficult time finding a new one. And a social credit scofflaw will find himself isolated, as the algorithmic system downgrades those who are connected to the offender.
The bottom line: a Chinese citizen cannot participate in the economy or society unless he has the mark of approval from Xi Jinping, the country’s all-powerful leader. In a cashless society, the state has the power to bankrupt dissidents instantly by cutting off access to the internet. And in a society in which everyone is connected digitally, the state can make anyone an instant pariah when the algorithm turns them radioactive, even to their family.
The Chinese state is also utilizing totalitarian methods for ensuring the coming generations don’t have the imaginative capacity to fight back.
In his 2019 book, We Have Been Harmonized—China’s term for neutralizing citizens as a threat to the social and political order—veteran journalist Kai Strittmatter, who spent years in Beijing reporting for a German daily, reveals the techno-dystopia that modern China has become. He interviews a Chinese teacher who gives his name as “David,” and who despairs of his country’s future.
“People born in the 1980s and afterwards are hopelessly lost,” David says. He continues:
The brainwashing starts in nursery school. It was different for us. They called us a lost generation because schools and colleges were closed back then, and many of us were denied an education. But in reality, we were probably the lucky ones. We fell through the cracks. The brainwashing didn’t get us. Mao was dead, and everyone was desperate for China to open up, for reform, freedom.15
The state’s information-control apparatus has demolished the ability of young Chinese to learn facts about their nation’s history in ways that contradict the Communist Party’s narrative. The 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, for example, has been memory-holed. This is something that we will almost certainly not have to endure in the West.
But the condition of the youth in consumerist China is more Huxley than Orwell. As the American media critic Neil Postman once said, Orwell feared a world in which people would be forbidden to read books. Huxley, by contrast, feared a world in which no one would have to ban books, because no one would want to read them in the first place. This, says David, is China today. Even though a great deal of information remains available to students, they don’t care about it.
“My students say they haven’t got time. They’re distracted by a thousand other things,” David tells Strittmatter. “And although I’m only ten years older than them, they don’t understand me. They live in a completely different world. They’ve been perfectly manipulated by their education and the Party’s propaganda: my students devote their lives to consumerism and ignore everything else. They ignore reality; it’s been made easy for them.”16
And so, a population that has been wholly propagandized by a totalitarian state, and demoralized by hedonistic consumerism, will hardly be in a position even to imagine opposition to its command-and-control strategies. And even if some dissidents did emerge, the government’s total information system would quickly identify and “harmonize” them before they had the opportunity to act—or even before they had the conscious thought of dissenting.
Unnervingly, Strittmatter’s reporting shows that Chinese officials are applying predictive software to its data culls to identify potential future leaders and possible enemies of the state before awareness of their potential rises to the individuals’ minds.
Can It Happen Here?
Of course it can. The technological capability to implement such a system of discipline and control in the West already exists. The only barriers preventing it from being imposed are political resistance by unwilling majorities and constitutional resistance by the judiciary.
American culture is far more individualistic than Chinese culture, so that political resistance will almost certainly prevent Chinese-style hard totalitarianism from gaining a foothold here. But activating the broad reach of technology, especially the data-gathering technology that consumers have already accepted into their daily lives, and making it work to serve social justice goals is eminently feasible.
If democratic majorities come to believe that transferring social control to governmental and private institutional elites is necessary to guarantee virtue and safety, then it will happen. In the meantime, nothing is stopping immensely powerful corporations from bringing about soft totalitarianism within market democracy.
As of this writing, the global online payments transfer system PayPal refuses to let white supremacist groups use its services. It’s hard to object to that, though First Amendment purists will feel some distress. But PayPal also stigmatizes some mainstream conservative groups. And as we have seen, some major banks now have policies that deny service to firearms manufacturers and sellers—this, even though guns are legal to make and to own under the Second Amendment. Note well that the government did not force these giant financial firms to adopt these policies. What is to stop private entities that control access to money and markets from redlining individuals, churches, and other organizations they deem to be bad social actors by denying access to commerce? China shows that it can be done, and how to do it.
Our changing personal habits accelerate the peril. The collapse of a commonly held belief in guarding online privacy removes the most important barrier to state control of private life. This is something that alarms those with experience under communism.
In Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia, photographer Timo Križka and his wife, Petra, are members of their country’s first postcommunist generation. They were born around the time of the Velvet Revolution that overthrew the communist regime and the Velvet Divorce that peacefully separated the Czech Republic from Slovakia. Neither carries personal memories of communism, of course, but they did grow up in its immediate aftermath—and with parents and other adults who still had the habits developed under totalitarianism.
Petra took some of them with her to the United States when she went as an exchange student in 2005. This was not long after the 9/11 terrorist attack, when a heightened sense of security pervaded the country.
“I saw that people were willing to sacrifice a lot of their personal freedoms for the sake of national security,” says Petra. “There was a lot of talk along the lines of, ‘I don’t care if they listen to my phone calls or read my emails or text messages, because I don’t have anything bad to say.’ So that was really strange for me, because I thought, this is something really personal. And it doesn’t really matter if you do or don’t have something bad to say. It’s just my personal space.”
How strange it was for a teenager to come from a culture just emerging from the reality of one careless word or indiscreet meeting having the potential to destroy a person’s life, only to find herself living temporarily in one where everyone said whatever they wanted to, without a care in the world.
Should it not have felt liberating? Not to Petra, with her background in a society where privacy was precious. Her conflicting feelings highlight a philosophical and psychological dimension to the public-private divide over the meaning of living in truth. In his best-known novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, the Czech writer Milan Kundera contrasts the attitudes of two characters—Sabina, a Czech woman, and her Swiss lover, Franz—on the importance of personal privacy to authenticity.
For Franz, who had always lived in the West, to live in truth meant to live transparently, without any secrets. Yet for Sabina, a lifelong citizen of communist Czechoslovakia, living in truth was possible only within a private life.
“The moment someone keeps an eye on what
we do, we involuntarily make allowances for that eye, and nothing we do is truthful,” Kundera writes, speaking for Sabina. “Having a public, keeping a public in mind, means living in lies.”17
Kundera’s observations, emerging from his own experience of communism, are as relevant as ever. During the past decade or so, since the invention of the smartphone and social media, and the confessional culture they have created, we have gained a great deal of knowledge about how people—teenagers and young adults, mostly—create “Instagrammable” lives for themselves. That is, they say and do things, including sharing intensely personal information, to construct an image of a life that strikes their peers—whether they know them personally or not—as appealing, as desirable. They live for the approval of others, represented by Likes on Facebook, or other tokens of affirmation.
Psychologist Jean Twenge has tracked the astonishing rise of teenage depression and suicide among the first generation to come of age with smartphones and social media. She describes them “as being on the brink of the worst mental-health crisis in decades,” and says that “much of this deterioration can be traced to their phones.”18
Their deep unhappiness comes from the isolation they feel, despite being connected, thanks to smartphone-enabled social networking, to more people than any generation ever has. Smartphone culture has radically increased the social anxiety they experience, as information coming through their phones convinces sensitive teenagers—especially girls—that they are being left out of the more exciting lives others are having.
Of course most of their peers aren’t having more vivid and intense lives; they are just better at curating their images online. Young people today are living in illusions, perhaps none greater than that they are part of a real social network. In fact, this technology and the culture that has emerged from it is reproducing the atomization and radical loneliness that totalitarian communist governments used to impose on their captive peoples to make them easier to control.
And having become habituated to sharing reams of personal data with marketers simply by moving through their daily lives online, these young people are making themselves highly vulnerable to manipulation by corporations and outside entities. To put it bluntly, we are being conditioned to accept a Westernized version of China’s social credit system, which will enforce the tenets of the political cult of social justice. If this ever takes root here, there will be no place to hide. Christians and others who refuse to conform will be forced to pioneer a way to live in truth, despite it all.
This is why the testimonies of those who lived in truth under hard totalitarianism are so urgently needed.
Shelter from the Gathering Storm
In the West today, we are living under decadent, pre-totalitarian conditions. Social atomization, widespread loneliness, the rise of ideology, widespread loss of faith in institutions, and other factors leave society vulnerable to the totalitarian temptation to which both Russia and Germany succumbed in the previous century.
Furthermore, intellectual, cultural, academic, and corporate elites are under the sway of a left-wing political cult built around social justice. It is a militantly illiberal ideology that shares alarming commonalities with Bolshevism, including dividing humanity between the Good and the Evil. This pseudoreligion appears to meet a need for meaning and moral purpose in a post-Christian society and seeks to build a just society by demonizing, excluding, and even persecuting all who resist its harsh dogmas.
Finally, Big Business’s embrace and promotion of progressive social values and the emergence of “surveillance capitalism”—the sales-directed mining of individual data gathered by electronic devices—is preparing the West to accept a version of China’s social credit system. We are being conditioned to surrender privacy and political liberties for the sake of comfort, convenience, and an artificially imposed social harmony.
This is the brave new world of the twenty-first century. Christian dissidents will be unable to mount an effective resistance if their eyes aren’t open to and focused on the nature and methods of social justice ideology and the ways in which data harvesting and manipulation can and will be used by woke capitalists and social justice ideologues in institutional authority to impose control.
It is coming, and it is coming fast. How should we resist it? That is the subject of the second half of this book.
PART TWO
How to Live in Truth
CHAPTER FIVE
Value Nothing More Than Truth
Solzhenitsyn was not the only dissident to make “live not by lies” the core of anti-totalitarian resistance. Czech playwright and future postcommunist president Václav Havel’s most famous injunction to would-be dissidents was to “live in truth.” In his most important piece of political writing, which was secretly passed around by samizdat, Havel wrote about “the power of the powerless,” which was the essay’s title.
Havel knew that he was addressing a nation that had no way to rise up against the might of the Czechoslovak police state. But he also knew something most of them did not: they were not entirely powerless.
Consider, he said, the case of the greengrocer who posts a sign in his shop bearing the well-known slogan from the Communist Manifesto, “Workers of the world, unite!” He doesn’t believe in it. He hangs it in his shop as a signal of his own conformity. He just wants to be left alone. His action is not meaningless though: the greengrocer’s act not only confirms that this is what is expected of one in a communist society but also perpetuates the belief that this is what it means to be a good citizen.
Havel goes on:
Let us now imagine that one day something in our greengrocer snaps and he stops putting up the slogans merely to ingratiate himself. He stops voting in elections he knows are a farce. He begins to say what he really thinks at political meetings. And he even finds the strength in himself to express solidarity with those whom his conscience commands him to support. In this revolt the greengrocer steps out of living within the lie. He rejects the ritual and breaks the rules of the game. He discovers once more his suppressed identity and dignity. He gives his freedom a concrete significance. His revolt is an attempt to live within the truth.1
This costs him. He loses his shop, his salary is cut, and he won’t be able to travel abroad. Maybe his children won’t be able to get into college. People persecute him and those around him—not necessarily because they oppose his stance but because they know that this is what they have to do to keep the authorities off their backs.
The poor little greengrocer, who testifies to the truth by refusing to mouth a lie, suffers. But there is a deeper meaning to his gesture.
By breaking the rules of the game, he has disrupted the game as such. He has exposed it as a mere game. He has shattered the world of appearances, the fundamental pillar of the system. He has upset the power structure by tearing apart what holds it together. He has demonstrated that living a lie is living a lie. He has broken through the exalted facade of the system and exposed the real, base foundations of power. He has said that the emperor is naked. And because the emperor is in fact naked, something extremely dangerous has happened: by his action, the greengrocer has addressed the world. He has enabled everyone to peer behind the curtain. He has shown everyone that it is possible to live within the truth. Living within the lie can constitute the system only if it is universal. The principle must embrace and permeate everything. There are no terms whatsoever on which it can co-exist with living within the truth, and therefore everyone who steps out of line denies it in principle and threatens it in its entirety.2
A Russian Orthodox mystic of the nineteenth century, Saint Seraphim of Sarov, once said, “Acquire the Holy Spirit, and thousands around you will be saved.” In that sense, what the greengrocer has done is a small act of rebellion that may act as the spark of a revolution that saves liberty and humanity.
A person who lives only for his own comfort and survival and who is
willing to live within a lie to protect that, is, says Havel, “a demoralized person.
“The system depends on this demoralization, deepens it, is in fact a projection of it into society,” he writes. “Living within the truth, as humanity’s revolt against an enforced position, is, on the contrary, an attempt to regain control over one’s own sense of responsibility.”3
Václav Havel published that essay in 1978. A year later, the communist government returned the troublemaking writer to prison. Ten years later, Havel led a revolution that peacefully toppled the regime and became the first president of a free Czechoslovakia.
In time, a mere writer willing to suffer for truth took power from totalitarian zealots who marshaled an entire state in the service of lies. In the happy fate of Havel, we see the truth of an old Russian proverb, beloved by Solzhenitsyn: “One word of truth outweighs the whole world.”
It is up to us today to take up this challenge, to live not by lies and to speak the truth that defeats evil. How do we do this in a society built on lies? By accepting a life outside the mainstream, courageously defending the truth, and being willing to endure the consequences. These challenges are daunting, but we are blessed with examples from saints who’ve gone before.
Choose a Life Apart from the Crowd
I am sitting at the luncheon table of Father Kirill Kaleda inside the toasty warm wooden building that serves as his office. A late autumn snow fell outside, over the Butovo Firing Range, the field in the forested far southern reaches of Moscow where, in a fourteen-month period between 1937 and 1938, agents of the NKVD (secret police) executed about twenty-one thousand political prisoners—among them, one thousand priests and bishops. Thanks to the advocacy work of Father Kirill, the field is now a national monument to the dead. On the day I visited, Russian citizens gathered outside in the cold to solemnly read aloud the names of each murdered countryman to honor their memories and to remember what Soviet totalitarianism had done to them.