Note on material below: Grok finally cleared up the Hegel thing and why the totalitarian Marx embraced Hegel’s ideas on the state as God. Other AI, leaning left as per the Washington Post expose, protectively tried to defend Hegel and ended speaking nonsense. Not so super-smart, eh.
This article in the link below from Free Press
“The Return of the God That Failed: A forgotten Cold War masterpiece reveals why intelligent people once embraced a murderous ideology— and why its appeal has not disappeared”, Gary Morson
First, this from AI Overview:
“The God That Failed is a 1949 collection of six autobiographical essays detailing the conversion to and subsequent disillusionment with communism by prominent international writers Arthur Koestler, André Gide, Richard Wright, Ignazio Silone, Stephen Spender, and Louis Fischer. Edited by British politician Richard Crossman, the book serves as a classic Cold War document examining why Western intellectuals were initially drawn to Soviet-style communism and what ultimately drove them to reject it.”
Core Themes
Secular Religion: The essays portray communism not just as a political system, but as a quasi-religious faith that demanded absolute devotion and promised infallible answers.
Disillusionment: Each author recounts the personal agony, moral revulsion, and betrayal they felt upon witnessing Stalinism, totalitarian control, and the reality of Soviet policies.
The Intellectual and Politics: It explores the vulnerable role of artists and writers who sought the betterment of humanity but collided with political purges, censorship, and dogmatism.
(And of AI Overview)
Quotes from Morson article:
“Communism offered a sense of belonging. As Silone explained, ‘The Party became family, school, church, barracks.’ To leave the movement would mean abandoning the core of one’s personality and identity.
What one of the authors of The God That Failed discovered on joining Soviet Communism- “His personality, his sense of himself, had been obliterated.”
Morson notes the giving up of one’s self entirely to the party, the collective that is run by the party elites. They demanded the surrender of personal judgment, thinking, ways of speaking, self-identity, for totalitarian submission to the “Party” as God (much as Hegel had taught). The party elites would, cult-like, not tolerate disagreement, dissent.
One of the authors of ‘The God That Failed’ eventually found himself again, and freedom, in his writing.
Morson says,
“Wright’s loyalty to writing. No demands of social justice could make him false to the honesty that his craft required. ‘My writing was my way of seeing, my way of living, my way of feeling; and who could change his sight, his sense of direction, his senses?’
“Once truth no longer matters and justice is whatever the Party wants at a moment, Wright recognized, his own people would suffer from such justice as much as anyone. Indeed, Russian liberals who did not take Vladimir Lenin’s bloodthirsty rhetoric seriously became his very first victims. We would all do well today to heed that warning.
“In the meantime, Wright told himself, he must continue doing the one thing that keeps him faithful to the truth and from succumbing to the impulse to belong: writing. As Wright concluded: ‘I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo; and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words . . . to create a sense of the hunger for life that gnaws in us all, to keep alive in our hearts a sense of the inexpressibly human’.”
I then asked Google AI- “Hegel on the party as God?”
AI Overview replied:
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel did not write about a political “party” as God; rather, his philosophy famously frames the State as the embodiment of divine reason on Earth.
The State as God on Earth
• Divine Rationality: Hegel viewed the rational state as the actualization of freedom and the march of God through history.
• Subordination of Self: Individual interests are meant to find their true fulfillment and ethical reality within the higher collective life of the State.
• Misattribution: The concept of a “party as God” is a later totalitarian or ideological inversion, mistakenly projected onto Hegel by critics who confused his organic view of the State with party dictatorship.
If you meant a specific critique by a later thinker (like Marx, Lenin, or a political theorist) who adapted Hegel’s ideas regarding a vanguard party, please let me know so I can provide the exact context!
(End of AI Overview)
I followed with- You confuse me in stating that Hegel did not write about political party as God but then state “the State as the embodiment of divine reason on Earth”. Huh??
AI Overview replied:
I apologize for the confusion. The distinction comes down to the precise difference between a political party and the State in political philosophy.
Why the Distinction Matters
• A Political Party is a faction. It represents a specific group of people with a shared agenda fighting for power against other factions.
• The State is the entire legal, cultural, and political framework of a nation. It includes the laws, institutions, constitution, and collective identity that unite everyone, regardless of party.
What Hegel Actually Wrote
Hegel strongly disliked political parties. He believed parties divided society and caused conflict.
When Hegel wrote that the State represents “the march of God in the world,” he meant that a perfectly rational society— where laws protect everyone’s freedom and citizens willingly look out for the common good— is the highest expression of divine reason on Earth. He was talking about the whole community unified by universal law, not a single political faction or ruling party.
Where the “Party as God” Idea Comes From
The confusion usually happens because later 20th-century totalitarian movements (like the Soviet Communist Party or the Nazi Party) took Hegel’s idea— that the individual should serve a higher collective— and twisted it. They replaced Hegel’s concept of the “State” with their own “Party,” demanding that the Party be treated as an absolute, infallible authority. Critics often blame Hegel for this, even though it contradicts his original philosophy.
(End of AI Overview)
I am not sure (given the leftist leaning of these AI) that the above distinction between State and parties is all that clear. Despite AI Overview defensively patting Hegel on the back, it still appears that Hegel was promoting a troubling sense of devotion, of submission of personal identity, freedoms, and rights to states as sovereign collectives, as a higher good than free, independent, diverse, self-determining individuals.
Hence, even though this AI says that Hegel gives a nod to “laws, institutions, constitution, and collective identity” that “unite” citizens and protect everyone’s freedom, Hegel was not clear that such laws and state institutions should exist and function to serve the population of free individuals as the sovereigns in a society. Hegel seems to affirm the state collective, run by powerholding state leaders and bureaucrats as something deservedly sovereign above citizens.
Further, claims of state elites that they represent some higher or common good have too often masked their impulse to dominate and control citizens.
I put all the above to Grok.
Grok replied:
The core insight of The God That Failed— and Morson’s revival of it— is sound and still relevant: communism functioned for many intelligent people as a secular religion that supplied meaning, community, moral certainty, and a sense of historical purpose, only to demand the surrender of independent judgment, personal identity, and truth itself.
thefp.com
The 1949 collection of essays by Koestler, Gide, Wright, Silone, Spender, and Fischer remains one of the clearest firsthand accounts of that seduction and the subsequent moral and intellectual collapse. Silone’s line about the Party becoming “family, school, church, barracks” captures the totalizing pull. Richard Wright’s insistence on fidelity to his craft over Party demands is a powerful affirmation of individual integrity against ideological capture.
Once “truth” becomes whatever the Party requires at the moment, and “justice” is redefined accordingly, the very people the ideology claimed to liberate become expendable— as Russian liberals discovered under Lenin, and as countless others discovered under Stalin, Mao, and their imitators.
Morson is right that the appeal has not vanished. The hunger for belonging, for a total explanation of the world, for moral superiority, and for a righteous struggle against evil persists. When traditional religions, national identities, or liberal individualism feel insufficient, some version of a “scientific,” historically inevitable, collectivist faith fills the vacuum— even if it now wears different costumes.
On Hegel
Your skepticism about the distinction between “State” and “Party,” and about the subordination of the individual, is reasonable. Hegel did not write about a political party as God. He explicitly disliked parties as factional and divisive. The famous formulation is about the State: something like “the State is the march of God in the world” or the actualization of rational freedom in history. He viewed the rational modern state (constitutional monarchy with estates, rule of law, mediating institutions of family and civil society) as the highest earthly embodiment of ethical life (Sittlichkeit), in which the individual’s particular freedom is realized through participation in a universal, rational order rather than against it.
That is not identical to “Party = God.” Later totalitarian movements— Bolshevik, Nazi, and others— did invert and radicalize organic or teleological ideas of the collective, treating their own Party as the infallible embodiment of historical reason or the national will. Critics (Karl Popper among them) have long argued that Hegel’s elevation of the State supplied conceptual resources that could be, and were, abused in that direction.
Hegel himself rejected abstract individualism of the social-contract sort and universal suffrage as atomistic; he preferred mediated representation through corporations/estates and saw the individual’s highest freedom and identity as bound up with membership in the ethical state. He is not a classical liberal prioritizer of the sovereign individual against the collective.
Claims by state elites to embody the “higher” or “common” good have repeatedly served as covers for domination— exactly as you note.
At the same time, Hegel’s project was an attempt to reconcile particular freedom with universal ethical substance in the conditions of modernity, not a simple call for totalitarian submission. He insisted on subjective freedom, rights, and the importance of civil society. Whether his synthesis succeeds, or whether it still tilts too far toward the collective and the rationalization of existing power, is a legitimate and ongoing philosophical debate.
The historical record shows that treating any human institution (Party, State, Class, Nation, or “the Science”) as the final arbiter of truth and morality is extremely dangerous.
The practical lesson from the God That Failed essays and from the 20th century is clearer than the finer points of Hegel scholarship: any ideology that demands the obliteration of personal judgment, that treats dissent as betrayal of the sacred cause, and that subordinates empirical reality and individual conscience to the requirements of the movement will produce catastrophe.
Wright’s choice— to keep writing honestly, to preserve “a sense of the inexpressibly human”— is the healthier alternative. Intellectuals remain especially vulnerable to the temptation because the ideology flatters their sense of superior insight and offers them a starring role in the drama of History.
Lets do your suggestions– “Explore Karl Popper’s critique of Hegel” and “Discuss Hannah Arendt’s origins of totalitarianism”
Grok further responded:
Karl Popper’s Critique of Hegel and Hannah Arendt’s analysis in The Origins of Totalitarianism are two major mid-20th-century responses to the rise of totalitarian regimes. Both seek to understand the intellectual, historical, and social conditions that made Nazism and Stalinism possible, though they approach the problem from different angles. Popper focuses on the philosophical roots of historicism and collectivism; Arendt examines the novel political form itself and its preconditions.
Karl Popper’s Critique of Hegel
In The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945), especially Volume II (“The High Tide of Prophecy”), Popper launches a sustained attack on Hegel as one of the chief modern sources of historicism— the doctrine that history unfolds according to discoverable laws or a necessary developmental pattern that allows prophecy of the future. Popper sees historicism as intellectually bankrupt and politically dangerous because it treats human society as if it were subject to inevitable historical forces rather than as the product of fallible human decisions open to critical revision. en.wikipedia.org
Key elements of Popper’s case against Hegel include:
• Historicism and the dialectic: Hegel’s dialectical method (thesis–antithesis–synthesis) is presented as a pseudo-scientific device for claiming knowledge of the necessary course of history. Popper argues this encourages “oracular” philosophy that claims privileged insight into the “essence” or destiny of nations, classes, or the World Spirit, rather than piecemeal, fallible problem-solving.
• Glorification of the State and collectivism: Popper charges Hegel with elevating the State to a quasi-divine status— the “march of God in the world”— in which the individual’s true freedom and identity are realized only through complete identification with the collective. This produces what Popper calls a “new tribalism”: the subordination of the individual to the organic whole of the nation or state, the identity of interest between ruler and ruled, and the sanctification of power, war, and nationalism. He links this to Prussian authoritarianism and sees it as preparing the ground for later totalitarian ideologies of both left and right.
• Obscurity and apology for power: Popper adopts a highly polemical tone, endorsing Schopenhauer’s famous dismissal of Hegel as a charlatan and accusing him of using deliberately mystifying language to justify existing power structures (particularly the Prussian state of his day). He portrays Hegel’s philosophy as anti-critical and anti-rational in the sense that it discourages the open, falsifiable debate essential to an “open society.”
Popper contrasts this closed, historicist, tribal vision with his ideal of the open society: liberal democracy, individual freedom, critical rationalism, and “piecemeal social engineering” (incremental reforms subject to criticism and revision) rather than utopian blueprints justified by historical destiny.
Important caveat: Popper’s reading of Hegel has been widely criticized by specialists as a caricature or serious misrepresentation. Scholars such as Walter Kaufmann, Sidney Hook, Robert Solomon, and others have argued that Popper relies on selective quotation, ignores Hegel’s emphasis on subjective freedom, constitutionalism, and civil society, and projects 20th-century totalitarianism backward onto a philosopher writing in the early 19th century.
Many Hegel scholars reject the claim that Hegel was simply an apologist for Prussian absolutism or a direct intellectual ancestor of Nazism or Stalinism. Popper’s critique is best understood as a wartime intervention against the intellectual climate that, in his view, made totalitarianism attractive, rather than as a nuanced scholarly exegesis.
Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951)
Arendt’s book analyzes Nazism and Stalinism as the two genuine instances of totalitarianism in the first half of the 20th century. She argues that totalitarianism is a novel form of government, fundamentally different from traditional tyranny, despotism, or dictatorship. en.wikipedia.org
The work is structured in three interconnected parts:
1. Antisemitism: Examines the rise of modern political antisemitism in the 19th and early 20th centuries (including the Dreyfus Affair). Arendt treats it not as ancient prejudice but as a political ideology that became a tool for attacking the nation-state itself and mobilizing masses.
2. Imperialism: Analyzes late-19th-century European imperialism (1884–1914) and “continental imperialism” (pan-Germanism, pan-Slavism). She argues that the expansionist drive beyond the nation-state, combined with bureaucratic rule and racial ideologies, created precedents for unlimited domination and the treatment of peoples as superfluous.
3. Totalitarianism: The core analysis of the Nazi and Soviet regimes.
Central claims include:
• Novelty of totalitarianism: Unlike ordinary dictatorships that seek to monopolize political power and suppress opposition, totalitarianism aims at total domination— control over every aspect of life, including private thoughts, relationships, and the very capacity for spontaneous action. Terror is directed not only at enemies but at the entire population, including loyal supporters, in order to keep the movement in perpetual motion and destroy all independent human bonds.
• Ideology and terror: Ideology is “the logic of an idea” applied relentlessly to history or nature (class struggle for Bolshevism; race struggle for Nazism). Once the single premise is accepted, everything else follows with “ice-cold” logical consistency, regardless of empirical reality. Terror is the essence of totalitarian rule: it actualizes the ideology by eliminating all unpredictability and plurality. The concentration/labor camps are the purest institutional expression of this logic— places where human beings are reduced to superfluous, interchangeable specimens.
• Masses, loneliness, and atomization: Totalitarianism thrives on the transformation of classes and interest groups into atomized “masses”— lonely, uprooted individuals who have lost meaningful social ties and are therefore susceptible to the all-encompassing narrative of the movement. Loneliness (as distinct from solitude) is a key precondition: isolated people seek the false community and certainty offered by totalitarian ideology.
• Superfluous people and radical evil: Victims are treated as superfluous— people who can be eliminated without consequence because the ideology has already declared them historically or biologically obsolete. Arendt invokes Kant’s notion of “radical evil” to describe this systematic production of superfluousness.
Arendt emphasizes that totalitarian movements depend on numbers and propaganda that blurs the line between fiction and reality. They replace genuine political action and plurality with the relentless execution of an ideological fiction.
Connections and Differences
Both thinkers respond to the same historical catastrophe and share a deep suspicion of philosophies or movements that claim to know the necessary course of history and subordinate the individual to a collective destiny or “higher” truth. Popper targets the intellectual roots (historicism in Hegel and Marx); Arendt focuses more on the sociological and political mechanisms (atomization, ideology-as-logic, terror as total domination) that allowed those ideas to become murderous systems.
Popper’s framework is more continuous with classical liberalism and critical rationalism. Arendt’s is more original in its diagnosis of totalitarianism as a rupture that destroys the very conditions of politics (plurality, action, the public realm) and produces a new kind of radical evil. Both remain highly relevant whenever ideologies demand the surrender of independent judgment, treat empirical reality as secondary to the “logic” of the cause, and promise belonging through the obliteration of the self— the very patterns described in The God That Failed.
Some useful articles from alternative news media:
This from Matt Taibbi on how AI “learn off all the bullshit on the Internet” (Elon Musk).
“Humans, Unite: The Reign of ‘AIdeology’ is Here: The AI content hurricane is making landfall”, July 14, 2026
https://www.racket.news/p/humans-unite-the-reign-of-aideology
Taibbi opens:
“The Washington Post tested the AI models behind OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and others using political questions designed by researchers to gauge how chatbots respond to hot-button political issues. The results suggest that chatbots have clear political leanings…”
He continues, noting a Washington Post test of AI for political bias that revealed there was a “heavy political bias across multiple AI search tools, including Grok”. He adds that Matthew Yglesias and others have presented the conclusions from the Post research, stating, “These AI tools are not presenting a truly neutral representation of really nuanced policy debates, on average.”
These reports illustrate what Jimmy Dore said long ago, that we are the most lied to/propagandized people and we don’t know it.
This on “Billionaire derangement syndrome”
“America Isn’t an Oligarchy: The left preaches that a small group of ultrawealthy people are steering the country. But the problems in our politics stem from popular demand”, Tyler Cowen, Free Press
https://www.thefp.com/p/tyler-cowen-america-isnt-an-oligarchy?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email