Totalitarian Regimes and the Psychology of Violence

Totalitarian regimes based on violence need a powerful narrative to maintain their functionality. This is because the best and most primal way to gather people around the same fire is to create a common story.

These regimes create a misleading consciousness among the public under the guise of ideology. Through this method, the state provides individuals with a story through which they can exist within society. This created story is accepted by individuals because, while living within it, they find an opportunity to escape the realities of their own difficult lives.

This ideology can be based on a belief system or an epic narrative. However, these narratives contradict rational knowledge and scientific methods. It is much easier to persuade, mobilize, and incite to violence a community that acts with irrationality and rejects scientific methods.

In communities that are distanced from rational thought and deprived of education, financial resources cannot be expected to be distributed homogeneously; therefore, in the totalitarian state concept, the chasms between layers are much deeper. The ideology that people are persuaded to believe in to the point of faith is created for the lower layer. Those in the upper layer have no emotional concern about believing in this story.

Ideologies created especially through belief systems also contain psychological violence within them. Faced with an ideology that comes into being through the sanctified commands of religion or traditions, the ordinary citizen feels guilty and indebted both for this world and for the life after death. When the storyteller says, "I want you to die for the sacred things I have told you about now," they do not hesitate for even a second.

They know very well that the master who writes the story will not fight alongside them on the front lines, but knowing this is not enough to wake them from their ideological sleep.

There are two basic elements that a community of people gathered around an ideology whose narrative is based on violence needs to make itself visible. One is a common enemy accepted by everyone; the other is acts of violence to be organized against this enemy. Otherwise, this community experiences an existential problem. When the enemy shows a tendency to stop fighting them, they attack the enemy with all their might, offering them new justifications to fight.

Due to rational reason, when people are asked to choose between war and peace, they are expected to prefer peace over war. However, in fundamentalist violent organizations, it should not be forgotten that the operating system is irrationality and the mechanism that sets its gears in motion is not wisdom and reason, but money and spoils, which are the blessings of a crime economy.

Nevertheless, we have come to understand that separating events with sharp lines, creating definitive definitions about states and organizations, and declaring one group black and the other white has not worked as a result of the practices we have been engaged in for many years, and has not been enough to stop these events that affect the whole world.

It is necessary to rearrange the history of the nations living through these events, the traumas they have experienced, the defense mechanisms they have created, the political and economic interests of other countries, foreign interventions—in other words, all the pieces of the scattered puzzle—starting from the corners. Psychology, sociology, history, economics, and other relevant disciplines form the structural stones of this puzzle. We need to start somewhere…

While watching the events of recent days, the question that kept echoing in my mind was: Can people go mad as a community? Can a group of people have a collective breakdown at the same time?

According to Sigmund Freud, when individuals enter such masses, they lose some characteristics of their selves, such as the superego. The superego is a structure in which the individual internalizes moral values and social norms. This structure teaches the individual what is right and what is wrong, enabling them to control their instinctual drives.

In mass violence events, this mechanism can temporarily weaken or be disabled. In such terrorist organizations, the role of the group leader is very important.

For the individual whose superego has weakened, every word of the organization leader, to whom they are libidinally attached with love, is perceived as an order, and these orders are obeyed with submission. Even while becoming part of an act of violence that disregards their own life, the lives of their family, and the people around them, no reasoning mechanism is activated.

Furthermore, individuals who commit crimes collectively within a community, because they are anonymous, fall into a sense of impunity and do not hesitate to increase the level of violence.

While the behaviors of those who carry out such acts of violence can be explained in theory with a few very simple sentences, the casualties resulting from massacres carried out on the verge of madness can be the triggers of wars between nations whose effects will last for centuries.

Wars change the dynamics of nations through radical interventions. A format is practically installed in the minds of the people of war. Everything is erased. The character that existed in the past is broken, and a new memory shaped by severe traumas is formed.

Among the individuals exposed to these character fractures, the most sensitive victims are children. With severe damage inflicted on their souls, they grow up to shape the future of the society in which they live. In the complex chain of reactions of human psychology, victims can take their perpetrators as role models and adopt their methods of action.

This is a subconscious trauma-processing method, and they pass this behavioral model on to their own victims. In the traumatic events they constantly relive in their minds, they want to turn the control in their favor by transforming into the strong and evil one instead of being a weak character. And these children who are victims of violence eventually turn into perpetrators.

This irreversible situation, which creates a terrible sadness mixed with a feeling of helplessness in us, is an unmissable opportunity for terrorist organizations in many parts of the world.

Children who experience fragmentation due to the trauma they have lived through turn into living weapons in their hands. These children, whose superegos have been damaged, no longer have any self-censorship regarding violence. We never know what this dark seed planted in the mind of a child who has seen war will turn into in the future.

Nevertheless, we should not fall into deep despair; not every victim turns into a perpetrator, of course. Sometimes these children turn into great thinkers and great scientists who can analyze the situation from the inside, and they pave the way for the paths that will build the new world.

Hannah Arendt, one of the leading philosophers of the twentieth century, witnessed a period when power and violence were often accepted as inseparable elements. When she was stripped of her citizenship by the National Socialist regime in 1937, she lived as a stateless person until she received US citizenship in 1951. Arendt, despite being on the side that was subjected to violence during a period when the idea that a strong state is a state with the capacity to use violence was idealized, put forward an argument in the exact opposite direction of this belief.

"Macht und Gewalt sind Gegensätze: wo die eine absolut herrscht, ist die andere nicht vorhanden." That is, "Power and violence are opposites: where one rules absolutely, the other is absent."

After the Second World War, in which three percent of the world's population, approximately 80 million civilians and soldiers, were killed, Arendt and philosophers, politicians, and scientists who thought like her determined the cornerstones of what principles the new world ideal being created should be based on, with this perspective.

They dreamed of a new world based on the understanding of a social state where human life, rights, and freedoms are placed at the center of the constitutional order, and ethnic differences do not turn into an element of oppression. Countries that have chosen science, rationality, and reason as state policy have covered considerable distances in this direction.

Now, we are living in a period where we are facing the reality that the world population is increasing at an incredible speed and that infinite needs can no longer be met with scarce resources. The world is entering a period where ethnic and religious groupings are increasing and far-right tendencies are rising. This scenario is not unfamiliar at all.

And we know very well that, despite the distances covered on the path to being civilized, human psychology contains both peace and violence at the same time. When our lives are at stake, we can make very rapid transitions between these two opposites.

In these days when we are talking about acts of violence that have taken the world under their influence, if world politics has reached a level that requires re-examining all its cards on the same table, we must read the signs correctly this time.

When evaluating the effects of state violence on world politics, trying to understand events by basing them only on the present time only distances us from the solution. It is necessary to seek solutions by taking into account the deep traces on the social memory and collective identities of nations shaped under the influence of totalitarian regimes. Politics is not a discipline that can be sufficient on its own in this regard.

Humanity is going through a time interval where we once again need the guidance of thinkers such as Hannah Arendt, Sigmund Freud, Immanuel Kant, Albert Einstein, Karl Marx, Simone de Beauvoir, Michel Foucault, and of course, living philosophers and scientists.

We must not allow the noisy and multi-faced voices of politics to drown out the voice of rational human reason once again...