Daily Inspiration Quote by Barbara Amiel

Calling totalitarianism "feudalism in the twelfth century sense" is a deliberately jarring downgrade of modern tyranny. Barbara Amiel isn’t comparing paperwork or aesthetics; she’s stripping the twentieth-century state of its technocratic alibi. Totalitarian regimes like to present themselves as the apogee of progress: scientific planning, rational administration, history’s engine. Amiel flips that self-image into something medieval and frankly embarrassing. The point is not that dictatorships are old-fashioned, but that their power structure is ancient: personal, hierarchical, punitive, and grounded in dependence rather than consent.

The feudal reference does real work because it foregrounds the human mechanics of domination. In twelfth-century feudalism, rights aren’t universal; they’re granted. Security isn’t legal; it’s patronage. You survive by attachment to a lord, by demonstrating loyalty, by knowing your place. Translate that into a totalitarian society and you get the party as overlord, the security services as enforcers, the citizen as serf. Employment, housing, safety, even reality itself become conditional favors, revocable at a whim. Ideology, in this reading, is less a blueprint than a liturgy that sanctifies the chain of command.

The subtext is also a rebuke to Western naivete. If you treat totalitarianism as a uniquely modern policy error, you’ll look for policy fixes. If you see it as feudalism with microphones and files, you recognize it as a system of dependency engineered to be permanent. Amiel’s line lands because it reframes totalitarianism from an extreme form of government into a regression of citizenship: the return of subjects.