The powerful are always fearful about losing power. Once power is abused, the powerful realise that the abused, if they ever get a taste of power, will use that to get back at their abusers.
A regime holding absolute power tries to keep their grip on power by feeding ideology (even dogma) to the masses; they use the entire arsenal at their disposal: The administration, the law enforcers, the media, the money of the state coffers.
If the power-holders are unable to feed the masses what they consider would allow them to quash dissent and make people amenable to the rage of their power, they resort to coercion.
When they try to enforce their will by any means possible, lawlessness becomes inevitable and then rampant, the justice system suffers, and a culture of impunity develops. Because the powerful will never accept any legal sanction for their misdeeds, “they dine on the most rarefied delicacy of all: Impunity.”
The inevitable result of an existing culture of impunity within a state is all out fascism.
Fascism is often considered far-right within the traditional left-right spectrum, although there are some academics who call that description insufficient.
When a state becomes fascist, people’s democratic rights become a victim; so does freedom of speech and expression, the right to hold a contrary view.
Fascists also advocate a mixed economy with a goal to achieving autarky to preserve national self-sufficiency and a protectionist and interventionist policy to keep independence. The state becomes over-regulating, and private entrepreneurship suffers -- the state invades the private space of the citizens.
A totalitarian state also predetermines roles for all citizens and people are meant to act as cogs in a machine and that policy inevitably eats away at individual freedom. Fascism is deemed as anti-democratic and quite often like tyranny in practice.
When a “culture of impunity” starts to take root in society, the tendency seeps into the upper echelons of power.
When corruption becomes a random affair, people get away with massive crimes with unlawful uses of money. And, of course, nepotism, where the law and order agencies start to guard the few instead of the majority, and most policies are directed with the aim of benefiting only a few and not the masses, and an oligarchy is formed.
The economy becomes an oligopoly. The oligarchs are often seen holding posts of power and they have no choice but to resort to policies reminiscent of fascism; they have to quell all voices of protest, crush them if need be. The state loses all semblance of being the least bit democratic.
And the ghost of George Orwell rises to haunt us. We are reminded of his doomed predictions of absolute power games. I quote from 1984:
“Down in the street little eddies of wind were whirling dust and torn paper into spirals, and though the sun was shining and the sky a harsh blue, there seemed to be no color in anything, except the posters that were plastered everywhere. The black mustachioed face gazed down from every commanding corner. There was one on the house-front immediately opposite. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption said, while the dark eyes looked deep into Winston’s own. Down at street level another poster, torn at one corner, flapped fitfully in the wind, alternately covering and uncovering the single word INGSOC.”
Ingsoc (Newspeak for English Socialism or the English Socialist Party) is the political ideology of the totalitarian government of Oceania in George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984.
The state takes up the role of “Big Brother,” keeping an eye on everyone’s activity but as is the nature of the beast, overlooking all misdeeds of the cronies holding power. History is what the power-holders tell people and not what actually happened.
The misdeeds of past regimes are invoked at every opportunity and draconian measures are taken to clamp down on people in the name of protecting the state from anarchy. They conveniently overlook “the fact that a crime might have been committed with impunity in the past may make it seem more familiar and less gruesome, but surely does not give it any greater legitimacy.”
Under such a rule, the state as a whole may become wealthy but the income disparity between the ruling class and the ruled keeps widening. It is diabolical that a state may get wealthy but the majority remains in hard struggle to keep body and mind together.
And to keep the people from revolting, they are constantly fed state propaganda and they are told what a citizen should or should not do. Citizens often resign to this fate of subservience and the hydra headed totalitarianism makes life for them “hell on Earth.”
Let us once again visit Orwell and 1984:
“The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power … The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.”