Totalitarian government relies on an epistemic error
A system of government that assumes epistemic certainty will always get into trouble
Across a variety of political perspectives, an increasingly common response to ongoing, seemingly intractable crises, is to argue for more totalitarian and less democratic forms of government. Totalitarian government offers the promise of decisive action, longer-term leadership and a focused effort on the issues that matter most. These arguments continue despite the promise of totalitarian government regularly failing in reality. The rapid abandonment by the Chinese Government of their centralised, no compromises Zero Covid policy is a good recent example. To make sense of the ongoing appeal - and practical failures - of totalitarian governments it helps to understand the epistemic attitudes involved.
Totalitarian government requires epistemic certainty
A totalitarian government is “a centralized government that does not tolerate parties of differing opinion and that exercises dictatorial control over many aspects of life.”1 Or, put differently, it is one that “prohibits all opposition parties, outlaws individual and group opposition to the state and its claims, and exercises an extremely high if not complete degree of control and regulation over public and private life.”2
Totalitarian government, by definition, does not allow its views to be challenged and prevents opposition to the single organisation that is in control. For such a government to provide good or effective governance, that one organisation needs to have the intellectual framework, skills and knowledge within it to enable it to consistently make good decisions. By definition, no external checks or challenges are allowed.
For this to work, the government (and those supporting it) need to be confident it has achieved genuine and reliable knowledge (about important topics) that no-one can reasonably doubt. Otherwise, others outside the government will be justified in criticising or opposing it. In other words, the government and its supporters must invest it with epistemic certainty.
This helps explains the appeal of totalitarian government today. As argued previously, our modern cultures habitually presume epistemic certainty about a wide range of topics, whether based on science or particular ethical frameworks. For those who are confident they can rule definitively on misinformation (given their own knowledge is accurate and unquestionable), totalitarian approaches seem natural and attractive.
We cannot be so confident in our knowledge
While totalitarian approaches assume epistemic certainty, there are many reasons why a single organisation, no matter how sophisticated or organised, should not be certain about its own knowledge or that its ways of gathering knowledge are reliable. There are a range of historical and philosophical reasons to doubt that epistemic certainty is ever possible or justified, but we can focus on three more practical reasons.
Modern psychology has demonstrated and codified the existence of many cognitive biases that limit our ability to get things right and make good decisions. Notably, there are very often group processes, as belonging to a group of like-minded people typically leads humans to be less reliable in their thinking than otherwise. Not only is a totalitarian government as subject to these factors as anyone else, but it provides an organisational environment ideally suited to the development of groupthink and other biases.
Recent work on the science of complexity has clarified another reason to question epistemic certainty: many real world systems and processes are impossible to map and predict. There are too many intersecting dynamics to tease them out and we will necessarily get surprised by what happens from time to time. The complexity of the world means we need to remain somewhat humble about what we know.
A third issue is more directly relevant to governance: humans and human organisations have limited bandwidth to process information reliably.3 No individual organisation can process and keep track of accurate knowledge about everything they might need to know, especially as they need to work within a single intellectual framework to make the organisational decision-making tractable. Even a small country will have millions of people, buildings and relationships; hundreds of thousands of businesses, crimes and care providers; thousands of courts, educational facilities and security providers; and so on. It is beyond the ability of any centralised organisation to continually process and make good decisions that incorporate all of this information.
Totalitarianism is based on unsound epistemology
These three reasons illustrate why no single human or organisation can reasonably claim epistemic certainty, especially when dealing with a large complex system like a country. A totalitarian government, like any other organisation, will necessarily make epistemic mistakes. It will (eventually) get its facts wrong and, as there is no easy method to test or correct these, make poor decisions. The epistemic deficit created by the lack of challenge explains why totalitarian governments routinely fail to deliver on the promises of efficiency and effective decision-making. They cannot provide sufficiently reliable knowledge to underpin good decisions over the longer term.
As an aside, totalitarian forms of governance are routinely used, often to great effect, by businesses. Companies are often run by a single hierarchical system with a person at the top with large, and sometimes total, control. However, businesses differ in important ways from governments. For a start, they operate within competitive markets, under government oversight and do not have an ultimate monopoly of power and force. It is also common for them to incorporate business practices to disrupt assumptions and test their knowledge - often in ways that are not possible for governments. The Silicon Valley 'fail fast and iterate' mantra is a good example.
In all situations, good governance and decision-making depends on a reliable knowledge base. If you put a single organisation in complete control, as occurs in a totalitarian system of government, you need to completely rely on that organisation’s epistemic tools and authority. However, no organisation can have epistemic certainty, and so faith in the effectiveness of totalitarian government relies on an epistemic error.
Note a more detailed version of this argument was advanced by Friedrich Hayek in favour of market based approaches in comparison to centrally planned economies.
Hmmm, an interesting thought. My sense is that your longer line of argument would suggest that decision making in all forms of government relies (unreasonably) on epistemic certainty. I wonder whether the problem of totalitarianism (in this sense) is less about the presence and level of epistemic certainty but the lack of contest between the thinking of different schools of thought (all of whom might have high levels of certainty within their own construct). The advantage of democracy is not that it is less epistemically certain but that it allows contest between these epistemically-certain schools of thought and therefore avoids the group think problem endemic in totalitarianism.
Thanks for the kind wishes - much appreciated!
You put it succinctly –a dominant 'world view' can't envisage that it is wrong. This links with systems of education and training that assume, I hazard a guess, not so much that 'we' know everything, but that there is a credible method, the ‘objective’ method, for obtaining and propagating 'knowledge'. This has put a huge premium on relying on that curious place, 'the future'. A long ago friend once said he thought The Future was become a modern Religion.
Very recently Eric Topol has written a professional appraisal of the arrival of AI in medicine. The AI machinery/tech facility is growing exponentially, doubling in as little as every 6 months, led initially by huge corporate entities in the West, but with significant innovation in government supported institutions worldwide.
Leaving aside the common tendency to ignore the inevitable trajectory of any 'exponential growth', we see an 'arms-race' across all sorts of different fields, all looking at the role of 'knowledge', and focussed on methods for 'control' for the future, which in my view must relate to governance. The limit in the medical example for AI pattern recognition is seen to be the quality of large data-bases. For this AI approach to succeed, data acquisition in medicine and more generally will need to be 'totalitarian', which lends credence perhaps to Kingsnorth as well as your thesis?
Hagens talks about a scattered archipelago of discussion, and perhaps a different kind of knowledge, even wisdom. I agree with you about epistemic certainty and trouble. To my mind any certainty particularly about the 'objective' method means trouble. We have already an existing and trending disaster ongoing.