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

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.

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.