The Primary Key

Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State.

Benito Mussolini

This approach makes it easy enough to escape misleading political language by classifying it as secondary or tertiary. It is equally easy to see how political language commonly seeks to focus on secondary or tertiary keys, on the difference between movements rather than similarities. Perhaps political language does that to avoid primary keys.

To my mind, the use of Mussolini’s dictum as a totalitarian primary key is particularly useful when we consider the political nature of the climate change movement. Looked at in this way, the climate change movement clearly shares the same primary key as communism, fascism and socialism. For example, we could reformulate the whole movement in this way –

Everything in the Planet, nothing outside the Planet, nothing against the Planet.

Yet it could be made more general such as –

Everything in the Schema, nothing outside the Schema, nothing against the Schema.

Where Schema could be anything from a political movement to the planet to political correctness generally. It highlights how political correctness shares the primary key derived from Mussolini but in a more general sense.

A useful aspect of this approach is that the Schema itself becomes a series of political secondary keys, but the essential primary key is still there. The primary key says there is to be no political escape route. You are ours it says and the message is unmistakably totalitarian.

And COP26 is a totalitarian political rally.