Technocracy and Totalitarianism

What follows is an essay adapted from my new book ”The New Abnormal: The Rise of the Biomedical Security State,” originally published in The American Mind.
The Italian philosopher Augusto Del Noce, who came of age in the 1930s and observed with horror the emergence of Mussolini’s Fascist regime in his native country, warned that “the widespread notion that the age of totalitarianisms ended with Hitlerism and Stalinism is completely mistaken.” He explained:
“The essential element of totalitarianism, in brief, lies in the refusal to recognize the difference between ‘brute reality’ and ‘human reality,’ so that it becomes possible to describe man, non-metaphorically, as a ‘raw material’ or as a form of ‘capital.’ Today this view, which used to be typical of Communist totalitarianism, has been taken up by its Western alternative, the technological society.”…