What happens when a society decides en masse to give up being human and become cattle

Powerful, powerful Michael J. Totten piece at World Affairs Journal on the collective psychic scar upon Cuban society after 55 years of Marxist-Leninist hell:

I met another Cuban woman who is considerably older than I am. She told me she was in East Germany when the Berlin Wall fell.

“What did you think about that at the time?” I said.

I expected her to say she was thrilled, but instead she said she was terrified.

“I thought it was brought down by enemy action,” she said. “You have to understand, I was ideologically conditioned. But that didn’t last. I was stunned to see that on the other side of the wall were not enemy soldiers, but friends and relatives of the East Germans.”

“Why didn’t the same thing happen here?” I said.

She paused before answering and lowered her voice. “The government had total control,” she said. “It still has total control. It has more control over Cuba than the Stasi had in East Germany. Of course, the government didn’t want us to know the Wall fell. I only knew because I was there. The government treats us like babies.”

She looked at me with quiet desperation. I could read it in her eyes and on her face. Body language is the same across cultures and time. She is no longer ideologically conditioned. Her facial expression saidhelp. She’s trapped, possibly for the rest of her life, and she knows now what’s on the other side. But I can do nothing, and my hands shook when we parted.

Humans disagree with each other constantly. There’s no avoiding it. Mature societies design mechanisms for handling it—political parties, scheduled elections, the separation of powers, civil society organizations, trade unions, space for public debate, impartial courts that uphold the Rule of Law rather than the rule of a man or a junta. Cuba has none of these. It has an omnipotent overlord with his minions and his army.

Here's the the thing that slugs one in the gut.  This is not so f---ing far from where post-America is, and I suppose that's something Totten intends for us to take away.

It doesn't take that much to impose totalitarianism on a populace.  Fierce determination is the basic ingredient. And I am now utterly convinced that th post-American left has that level of determination, as well as a vision that is basically in sync with the reality that the Cuban woman speaking above experiences every day of her tragic existence.