Live Not by Lies
Rod Dreher, a senior editor at The American Conservative, talks about his new book, "Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents."
I recently invited senior editor at The American Conservative and author of Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents, Rod Dreher, on the podcast. Rod’s book warns that America is headed for what he calls “soft-totalitarianism.”
Click here to listen to our full conversation.
Here’s a lightly edited excerpt:
Rod Dreher: In my book, Live, Not by Lies, I talk about Hannah Arendt and her 1951 book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, in which she went back and looked at the Soviet Union and looked at Nazi Germany, to see what was it about those two separate societies that caused them to open themselves and accept totalitarianism of the right and the left. When you read Hannah Arendt's book, and you think about our own society, it's scary as hell to be honest …
Matt: Arendt argues that loneliness and isolation leads to totalitarianism. Why is that?
Rod: Well, because the person who is lonely, who feels disconnected from the society around him, is easier to manipulate and is easier for him to fall for a leader or a scheme for a politics that promised to return to him what he's lost, right? So, this is what the Bolsheviks did in Russia, they appealed to people who felt completely at odds with the traditional institutions. They promised them a sense of solidarity and a sense of purpose. They would make Russia great again, so to speak. And this is the sort of thing that people who have been alienated look, being alienated and alone and isolated is not the human condition. We don't want to live that way. We don't thrive that way. And when people offer us a way out an easy way out, we'll take it. And that is where you get how you get totalitarianism.
Matt: You got a scary phone call that alerted you to this problem. Talk about that.
Rod: Yeah, this was, this is the reason the book exists. This phone call I got back in 2015, from a physician at the Mayo Clinic. I didn't know this guy; we have a mutual friend who gave him my number, and he called me to introduce himself and said, “Listen, you don't know me, but I've got to tell somebody this, I think it's important”. He said, “My mother is an immigrant to this country. She was born and raised in Czechoslovakia. She spent six years in a prison camp under communism, for her Catholic faith. She lives here now with me and my wife, and she said, ‘some of the things I'm seeing happen in this country now in America now remind me of what it was like when communism first arrived in my country’”. And it scared the doctor, as you might imagine. But I thought that seemed really kind of alarmist. I mean, my mother is a little old lady and she watches a lot of cable news and she's scared all the time, too. So, I figured that was probably that so I got on the phone and called on this couple I know in the UK Béla and Gabriella Bollobás. They defected from Hungary in the 60s and Béla became one of the world's great mathematicians at Trinity College, Cambridge. I said, “Hey, Béla, what this Czech woman said, is there something to that?: He said, “Oh, absolutely, every day Gabby and I are reading the papers and watching the news thinking, ‘this is just like our youth’”. So, because I know Béla, and I know that he wouldn't make something up, I said, there's something here. And I made a habit, Matt, every time I would go out to a conference or to give a speech, if I would meet somebody who had grown up in the Soviet Union, or in Eastern Europe and the Soviet block, I would just ask them, “are the things you're seeing happen nowadays that remind you of the old days?” Without fail, they said, “yes”, they couldn't believe they were being asked this question. And then if you talk to them long enough, they would say how angry they were that Americans wouldn't pay attention to them. And so your next question would be, “what kind of things are we talking about?” And their first thing is speech codes, and then having to be terrified for anything you say that it might be turned against you that you can lose your job for violating orthodoxies that didn't exist the day before yesterday, and it goes on and on from there. So that's the book, the first part of the book talks about how we got into this situation, this pre-totalitarian situation where I think it's going. The second half is based on a lot of interviews I did with people in the Eastern Bloc and the former Soviet Union, who resisted it, who lived with it, who resisted it, who survived it, and what their advice is for what we in America, how we should be thinking about what's happening right now. And the things we should do to prepare for a situation that might become actually totalitarian.