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AnalysisAustraliaLifestyle

Totalitarianism of the mind: how we are losing the freedom to think

Our desire to belong can destroy our capacity to make moral judgements, leading to extreme and polarised discourse
Ronen Kanski
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Pro-Palestinian protesters at a rally against police action during the visit of Israeli President Isaac Herzog in February 2026 (Saeed KHAN / AFP via Getty Images)

Published: 2 June 2026

Last updated: 10 June 2026

Stella Goldschlag, also known as Stella Kübler and by the nickname “Blonde Poison”, was a German Jewish woman who lived in Berlin during the Nazi regime. After being arrested in 1943 and tortured by the Gestapo, she agreed to collaborate with the Nazis in an attempt to save herself and her parents from deportation to the camps. As a “Greifer” (“Jew hunter”), she identified hundreds, possibly up to 3,000, Jews hiding underground in Berlin and handed them over to the Gestapo.

Her story remains one of the most morally disturbing stories of the Holocaust, because she was both a victim and an active collaborator.

It also raises disturbing questions for contemporary life, among them: under what conditions do people lose the ability to think as individuals within the group?

Understanding how the group can subsume our identity and ability to make judgements is essential to deciphering the increasingly polarised and simplified discourse in our cultural institutions and online, not least in debates around Israel-Palestine.

The longing to belong

Human beings rarely experience themselves as entirely separate individuals. Much of human psychological life is organised around the need for belonging – to family, nation, religion, or collective identity. This longing can provide meaning and emotional continuity, but it can also create conditions in which independent thought gradually becomes difficult to sustain.

Mikhail Bakunin captured this tension when he wrote: “I do not want to be Me, I want to be Us”. Within this sentence lies one of the central dilemmas of group life: the desire to merge with something larger than oneself, and the risk of disappearing within it.

This tension becomes especially dangerous when groups stop functioning as spaces of dialogue and begin operating as total structures of identity and meaning.

Stella Goldschlag never expressed remorse for her actions. If we momentarily place aside the unimaginable moral questions involved in her story, as well as possible personality dynamics such as paranoia, identification with the aggressor, or extreme survival mechanisms, we may attempt to understand her actions from a broader group-psychological perspective: the collapse of the ability to think in a complex and independent manner – a condition that may be understood as the “totalitarianism of the mind.”

Totalitarianism of the mind is not merely political. It emerges when questioning reality itself begins to feel dangerous. Under such conditions, thinking becomes binary: us or them, loyalty or betrayal, belonging or annihilation. Complexity becomes emotionally intolerable.

Freud and the crowd

Freud argued that groups weaken the individual’s critical judgment. Inside the crowd, people become more emotional and dependent upon collective identification. Responsibility dissolves, doubt weakens, and the individual merges into a larger emotional organism.

For Freud, groups are held together not only by ideology or force, but by emotional bonds, fear, identification, and the longing to belong. Seen this way, totalitarianism begins long before political regimes. It begins inside ordinary psychological life. As Christopher Browning later demonstrated in Ordinary Men, some perpetrators of mass violence were psychologically ordinary individuals operating within powerful group structures.

The digital crowd

Today, many psychological dynamics once associated with crowds and mass movements increasingly unfold through digital life and social media.

Social media has become a new kind of crowd. Platforms such as Facebook, TikTok, X, and Instagram reinforce existing beliefs and identities. Rather than encountering contradictions or differences, individuals are repeatedly exposed to versions of themselves.

A mind that no longer encounters resistance may slowly lose its capacity for inner dialogue. Political opponents cease to appear as complex human beings and instead become moral categories: dangerous, oppressive, fascist, colonialist, traitorous.

Something similar may also emerge in our relationship with Artificial Intelligence. AI systems often mirror the assumptions and emotional world of the user. Unless consciously challenged, they can become mechanisms that reinforce certainty rather than expand thought.

The danger, therefore, may lie less in the technology itself than in the gradual weakening of inner dialogue.

When dialogue breaks down

Recently, I experienced something that made these questions feel deeply personal.

During one of my training groups, a participant arrived wearing a keffiyeh. For me, as an Israeli-Jewish participant the symbol carried profound emotional and political meaning.

What disturbed me most was not the keffiyeh itself, but the impossibility of dialogue around it.

I asked whether we could openly discuss the meaning of bringing such a symbol into the group space. But the conversation could not happen.

The refusal to discuss the symbol became more significant than the symbol itself. I found myself thinking less about politics and more about the collapse of dialogue in group life. Increasingly, ideological symbols replace conversation itself. Identity becomes rigid and untouchable. Questioning itself is experienced as aggression.

Perhaps this dilemma increasingly defines contemporary group life.

Across the political spectrum, contemporary ideological movements increasingly struggle to tolerate ambiguity and psychological complexity. Although these dynamics manifest differently on the political left and right, both can gradually transform moral and political identities into rigid systems of certainty.

On one side, parts of contemporary progressive culture raise important questions regarding identity and historical injustice. Yet at times, this discourse collapses into rigid forms of identity politics in which individuals are reduced primarily to categories of oppression and privilege.

Concepts such as “settler colonialism,” originally developed as analytical frameworks, can sometimes become total explanatory systems in which human reality is compressed into simplified binaries: oppressor and oppressed, coloniser and colonised, victim and perpetrator.

At times, even academic and intellectual spaces – historically associated with pluralism, ambiguity, and critical inquiry – may become vulnerable to pressures toward ideological conformity and moral certainty. Under such conditions, disagreement is increasingly experienced not as part of intellectual life, but as a moral threat.

This can increasingly be seen in discussions surrounding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, where complexity is often experienced as moral betrayal.

Similar dynamics exist on the other side of the political spectrum.

Across the world, we are witnessing the rise of far-right nationalism, conspiracy thinking, authoritarian politics, and growing hostility toward democratic institutions. Here too, complex realities become reduced to narratives built around fear, loyalty, enemies, and belonging.

Although these political extremes present themselves as opposites, they may at times reflect similar psychological dynamics: the gradual replacement of complexity, ambiguity, and independent thought with ideological certainty.

Hannah Arendt and the destruction of thought

In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt argued that totalitarianism begins when human beings lose their relationship to reality, complexity, and independent thought. The danger is not only political control, but the destruction of the inner conditions necessary for thinking itself.

For Arendt, loneliness and isolation were central conditions for the rise of totalitarian movements. Individuals cut off from meaningful dialogue become increasingly vulnerable to ideological systems that provide certainty, identity, and belonging.

Today, people are more technologically connected than ever, yet often more psychologically isolated. Families stop speaking over politics. Friendships collapse over ideological disagreements. Social media rewards outrage more than reflection.

Even within Jewish communal life, these tensions have become increasingly painful since October 7. Many people no longer feel safe expressing uncertainty if it conflicts with the dominant atmosphere of their group.

Under such conditions, certainty begins functioning as protection against anxiety.

The courage to remain human

Perhaps the central danger of our time is not only political extremism, but the gradual loss of the ability to think independently. When belonging replaces reflection, certainty replaces complexity, and identity replaces dialogue, something essential in human consciousness begins to collapse.

The story of Stella Goldschlag is disturbing because it reveals this possibility within ordinary human psychology. Totalitarianism begins long before camps or regimes – in the moment people stop questioning, stop tolerating ambiguity, and stop encountering others as separate human beings.

In an era shaped by political tribalism, algorithmic reinforcement, and moral certainty, the willingness to sustain complexity, question one’s own side, and remain open to dialogue may itself become a deeply subversive act.

Perhaps this is where resistance truly begins – in the willingness to remain open to doubt and genuine dialogue even when certainty feels safer.

This article was inspired, in part, by ideas discussed in the podcast FreudCast with Dorit Barnea, as well as by psychoanalytic, sociological, and philosophical literature on group psychology, ideology, and totalitarianism. The term “Totalitarianism of the Mind” is based on Dorit Barnea’s formulation and is not considered an established psychoanalytic concept.

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About the author

Ronen Kanski

Ronen Kanski

Ronen Kanski is a group therapist and psychotherapist working with adults and young people. He facilitates therapeutic, reflective, and process-oriented groups, with a particular interest in group dynamics, identity, trauma, and the relationship between the individual and the collective. Ronen is an Associate Member of the Australian Association of Group Psychotherapists (AAGP), where he is training in group psychoanalysis.