The ritual of self-accusation and breast-beating and unconditional surrender to the rules of the elders is part of age-old religious rites. It was based on a more or less unconscious belief in supreme and omnipotent power. This power may be the monolithic party state or a mysterious deity. It follows the old inner device of Credo quia absurdum ("I believe because it is absurd"), of faithful submission to a super-world stronger than the reality which confronts our senses.
Why the totalitarian and orthodox dogmatic ideology sticks to such a rigid attitude, with prohibition of investigation of basic premises, is a complicated psychological question. Somewhere the reason is related to the fear of change, the fear of the risk of change of habits, the fear of freedom, which may be psychologically related to the fear of the finality of death.
The denial of human freedom and equality lifts the authoritarian man beyond his mortal fellows. His temporary power and omnipotence gives him the illusion of eternity. In his totalitarianism he denies death and ephemeral existence and borrows power from the future. He has to invent and formulate a final Truth and protective dogma to justify his battle against mortality and temporariness. From then on, the new fundamental certainty must be hammered into the minds of adepts and slaves.