Anti-individualism, in any form, is a straight pathway to hell. It may not seem so temporarily for the socialist, communist, feminist—any collectivist, really—but the longer they remain in or delve deeper into the group-think, the less they will be able to think anything against the group, starving their own vitality and intellectual curiosity for this monstrosity, eventually amounting to little more than another singular diseased cell crammed into whichever vast social leviathan it may be as it drags others into its gaping, unrelenting maw.

In Totalitaria, the citizen no longer knows the real core of his mind. He no longer feels himself an I, and ego, a person. He is only the object of official barrage and mental coercion. Having no personality of his own, he has no individual conscience, no personal morality, no capacity to think clearly and honestly. He learns by rote, he learns thousands of indoctrinated facts and inhales soma and slogans with every breath he draws. He becomes and obedient pedant, and pedantry makes people into something resembling pots willed with information instead of individuals with free, growing personalities. Becoming wiser and freer implies selective forgetting and changes of mind. This we accept, this we leave behind. Alter adjustment requires a change of patterns, the capacity to be reconditioned, to undo and unlearn in order to become ripe for new patterns. The citizen of Totalitaria has no chance for such learning through unlearning, for growth through individual experience. Official oversimplifications induce the captive audience into acceptance and indoctrination. Mass ecstasy and mass fanaticism are substituted for quiet individual thought and consideration. Hitler taught his people to march and to do battle, and at the end they did not know wherefore they marched and battled. People become herds—indoctrinated and obsessed herds—intoxicated first with enthusiasm and happy expectations, then with terror and panic. The individual personality cannot grow in Totalitaria. The huge mass of citizens is tamed into personal and political somnambulism.

— Joost Meerloo, The Rape of The Mind 1956