What is are the effects of totalitarianism on the individual citizen?

Answer 1

A difficult question to answer definitively because, to the best of my knowledge, no study has been conducted on individuals living under totalitarianism with individuals not living under a totalitarian as another variable.

Such a study would be too difficult due to the circumstances of a totalitarian government, and the sheer scale of such a test (it would necessitate the participation of many thousands of people in order to give the test enough statistical power to prove significant in its results).

It's foci would also be difficult to satisfactorally determine due to semantic and structural disagreements from different schools of social science such as Political Science, Psychology, Economics, Sociology, Law, Human Rights, etc. etc.

Opinions would differ on what "totalitarianism" means, whether the people you are studying are indeed from such a system of government, if you are comparing them to people who have been free of any sort of "totalitarianism" in their life. The test would be open criticism as a Propaganda tool in its infancy.

In short, as a quantitative study is not really possible, qualitative observations may provide our best answers to this question.

Such observations can be heard from those working in South Korea with citizens of the DPRK who need to be integrated with the populace of the ROK. Lack of understanding about basic principles of capitalism are a frequent observation; for instance, many from the North do not understand that a credit card must be paid back as it is a debt.

A more scientific understanding may be gleaned however, from Zimbardo's Stanford prison experiment (http://www.prisonexp.org/), where the participants who'd experienced "totalitarianism" in a microcosm "became depressed and showed signs of extreme stress." So distressed were the participants that the test was halted after only six days, despite the original plans to run it for a fortnight.

Due to modern ethical considerations, a test such as this would not be approved present day; so it will not be repeated on a university campus again. The original test however, is being applied to modern day incidents such as the US Military's treatment of prisoners in Abu Graib and Guantanamo Bay. Here, the effects of totalitarianism would be ostensible as the prisoners in these camps have experienced the most complete form of totalitarianism imaginable.