Kurt Vonnegut on the totalitarian mind

It's missing teeth

One of those writers almost universally respected and often revered, and most famous for the antiwar novel Slaughterhouse-5, Kurt Vonnegut had a strong and humanistic moral sense. His books “do not argue in favor of wildness of any kind. They beg that people be kinder and more responsible than they often are,” he explained when his books were being taken out of libraries. This is taken from his novel Mother Night.

I have never seen a more sublime demonstration of the totalitarian mind, a mind which might be linked unto a system of gears where teeth have been filed off at random. Such snaggle-toothed thought machine, driven by a standard or even by a substandard libido, whirls with the jerky, noisy, gaudy pointlessness of a cuckoo clock in Hell.

The boss G-man concluded wrongly that there were no teeth on the gears in the mind of Jones. 'You're completely crazy,' he said.

Jones wasn't completely crazy. The dismaying thing about classic totalitarian mind is that any given gear, though mutilated, will have at its circumference unbroken sequences of teeth that are immaculately maintained, that are exquisitely machined.

Hence the cuckoo clock in Hell — keeping perfect time for eight minutes and twenty-three seconds, jumping ahead fourteen minutes, keeping perfect time for six seconds, jumping ahead two seconds, keeping perfect time for two hours and one second, then jumping ahead a year.

The missing teeth, of course, are simple, obvious truths, truths available and comprehensible even to ten-year-olds, in most cases.

The willful filling off a gear teeth, the willful doing without certain obvious pieces of information — . . .

That was how Rudolf Hess, Commandant of Auschwitz, could alternate over the loudspeakers of Auschwitz great music and calls for corpse-carriers —

That was how Nazi Germany sense no important difference between civilization and hydrophobia —

That is the closest I can come to explaining the legions, the nations of lunatics I've seen in my time.

The narrator describes his own mind.

[I] will say I never tampered with a single tooth in my thought machine, such as it is. There are teeth missing, God knows — some I was born without, teeth that will never grow. And other teeth have been stripped by the clutchless shifts of history —

But never have I destroyed a tooth on a gear of my thinking machine. Never have I said to myself, “This fact I can do without.”

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