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In the essay, "Totalitarianism: Defunct Theory, Useful Word" (2010), the historian John Connelly said that totalitarianism is a useful word, but that the old 1950s theory about totalitarianism is defunct among scholars, because "The word is as functional now as it was fifty years ago. It means the kind of régime that existed in Nazi Germany ...
According to Encyclopedia Britannica, the Soviet Union during the period of Joseph Stalin's rule was a "modern example" of a totalitarian state, being among "the first examples of decentralized or popular totalitarianism, in which the state achieved overwhelming popular support for its leadership."
Syncope: omission of parts of a word or phrase. Symploce: simultaneous use of anaphora and epistrophe: the repetition of the same word or group of words at the beginning and the end of successive clauses. Synchysis: words that are intentionally scattered to create perplexment. Synecdoche: referring to a part by its whole or vice versa.
Climax – an arrangement of phrases or topics in increasing order, as with good, better, best. Colon – a rhetorical figure consisting of a clause that is grammatically, but not logically, complete. Colloquialism – a word or phrase that is not formal or literary, typically one used in ordinary or familiar conversation.
Sic semper tyrannis is a Latin phrase meaning "thus always to tyrants". In contemporary parlance, it means tyrannical leaders will inevitably be overthrown. The phrase also suggests that bad but justified outcomes should, or eventually will, befall tyrants. It is the state motto of the U.S. state of Virginia.
The phrase "to fish pearls" uses metonymy, drawing from "fishing" the idea of taking things from the ocean. What is carried across from "fishing fish" to "fishing pearls" is the domain of metonymy. In contrast, the metaphorical phrase "fishing for information" transfers the concept of fishing into a new domain.
The language of the totalist environment is characterized by the thought-terminating cliché. The most far-reaching and complex of human problems are compressed into brief, highly reductive, definitive-sounding phrases, easily memorized, and easily expressed. They become the start and finish of any ideological analysis.
The phrase, and variations on it, appear to have been common in this period, and probably trace back to an older legal principle, that everything which is not forbidden is allowed. Since White did not use the phrase in any published work until two years after Gell-Mann's paper, White cannot have been Gell-Mann's source.