9 ms·

For Hannah Arendt, totalitarianism is rooted in loneliness

148 points by ALee 6y ago

motohagiography 6y ago
That aspect of her thesis was called political "atomization," which was the creation of this lonely state by isolating people from each other, and ultimately from truth, so that they become neutralized to the totalitarian agenda. The destruction of communities, families, and social connections is a totalitarian process and agenda. It was the result of a campaign of arbitrariness and farcical lying because the real target and conquest of totalitarianism is truth itself. When nothing can be believed, all opposition is neutralized. This neutralization and eventual liquidation is the totalitarian process. Activists project this as "stochastic terror," these days, but the technique goes back over a couple hundred years. What was exceptionally notable about that book, and is a bullet point in the article, is that the very idea of history as progress itself is the initial condition of ideology. The final chapter "ideology and terror," is the distillation I think people should read today, but the whole book, particularly the initial chapters that are an unblinking view of antisemitism, colonial thinking, and the nation state are sound foundations for thinking about the 20th century.
- Ygg2 6y ago
  > When nothing can be believed, all opposition is neutralized. I'm gonna recommend watching Hypernormalization by Adam Curtis. In it he talks about Vladislav Surkov basically turning the Russian political scene into a bizarre post modernist theater, where he would publicly proclaim to fund left wing, right wing or other, centrist parties and NGOs, to give the impression that everyone is working for Putin.
- aphextron 6y ago
  >That aspect of her thesis was called political "atomization," which was the creation of this lonely state by isolating people from each other, and ultimately from truth, so that they become neutralized to the totalitarian agenda. The destruction of communities, families, and social connections is a totalitarian process and agenda. You can see this so clearly in any video of Trump rallies, or their protests. There is no conversation, conviviality, or sense of community happening between the attendees. It's a collection of completely disconnected individuals taking selfies and angrily screaming platitudes to the general crowd. It's quite disturbing to see. A prime example: https://youtu.be/L5hksM_R59M https://youtu.be/L5hksM_R59M
  - Matticus_Rex 6y ago
    That is not what I've seen from the crowd except during speeches. I, too, naturally tend to believe the worst about these people but there's definitely a sense of Trump supporter community there.
    - pavlov 6y ago
      There is a community there, but for many the process of joining this new community has involved the destruction of their existing links to family and local society. QAnon is the most extreme example of this kind of cultish separation among Trumpists.
      - gabereiser 6y ago
        This. A slow toxic rot of self that erodes the family and community links until their thoughts and actions seem alien to the outside. Sounds like my ex-wife (fell victim to QAnon). :/
        s1artibartfast 6y ago
        Since you brought it up, what factors do you think made you ex-wife susceptible to qanon ideas?
        gabereiser 6y ago
        She was always susceptible to misinformation. When we moved to Central Florida a decade ago, they have what’s called “Love Bugs”. An invasive flying beetle from Central America. While on the job as a barista, someone told her they were genetically engineered at UCF. She believed him. Arguing with me that was the truth until I pointed her to science articles and Wikipedia. Fast forward a few years and the thought of sex-trafficking rings took root. She was convinced that girls were being abducted for sex slavery and that people in government were supporting them. This twisted even further when I confronted her about it, told her that what she thinks is real isn’t, and she immediately jumped on me for gaslighting her. Needless to say, it was she that filed for divorce. I’m way happier now. Those that downvoted my comment above because my ex-wife, you should meet her, she’s completely crazy now.
- hirundo 6y ago
  It would be nice if public health agencies formally considered the public cost of such atomization from covid lockdowns. They may find in the end that the cost is worth paying, but it should be part of the analysis. But what kind of study could yield valid, reproducible data about how much atomization is caused by how much lockdown, and how much authoritarianism is caused by how much atomization?
  - medium_burrito 6y ago
    Useful data points I think would include: - Suicides, attempted and successful - Calls to suicide hotlines - Overdoses - Phone call data, assuming a sufficient database of people's relationships -> anecdotally, people are calling each other way less - Following what people are watching online- I bet youtube and facebook have an extremely good measure of how many general segments of viewing population there are, and I bet these have increased. Amazon book sales might do the same. - Alcohol sales, obviously. Friends in the industry say volume has quadrupled while unit price has dropped by a similar magnitude.
- platz 6y ago
  It should be recognized that the left, especially neoliberals, has played just as much a role in atomization of the public as the right. Indeed, it is usually conservatives that actually, in practice, attempt to promote community and family values. Although portions of the right have contributed to atomization via the 'free market', the left's project of scientism and eschewing of tradition arguably has also contributed significantly to this.
  - rusk 6y ago
    > the left, especially neoliberals It seems kind of funny to see these two lumped together ... I don’t think neoliberalism would be considered left by left people ... I think the confusion arises from the different interpretation of liberalism on either side of the Atlantic. Neoliberalism is an economic movement rather than a social one (unlike neoconservatism, the political ideology that funnily enough advocates neoliberalism) and it’s an iteration of classical economics aka “economic liberalism”. Liberal economics is actually more like libertarianism which is paradoxically more closely aligned with the “right wing” mindset. Neoliberalism does incorporate some notes about redistribution of wealth for reasons of economic expedience but this is rarely seen in practice. This all goes to show that words are slippery and labels are bullshit and you’re far better off trying to understand where the people you’re disagreeing with are coming from than be lazily painting them as this or that.
    - platz 6y ago
      I'm not sure what the point you're driving at is; it seems you did understand the gist of my point. It seems like you want a semantics debate about how neocons and neolibs are are equivalent terms? Sorry, not the conversation for me, nor the main point I was making.
      - rusk 6y ago
        You didn’t make it very well it seems.
      - flagrant 6y ago
mLuby 6y ago
Some passages that stood out to me: > Isolation and loneliness are not the same. I can be isolated – that is in a situation in which I cannot act, because there is nobody who will act with me – without being lonely; and I can be lonely – that is in a situation in which I as a person feel myself deserted by all human companionship – without being isolated. > Totalitarianism uses isolation to deprive people of human companionship, making action in the world impossible, while destroying the space of solitude. > One is taught to distrust oneself and others, and to always rely upon the ideology of the movement, which must be right. But in order to make individuals susceptible to ideology, you must first ruin their relationship to themselves and others. > Amid the chaos and uncertainty of human existence, we need a sense of place and meaning. We need roots. And ideologies, like the Sirens in Homer’s Odyssey, appeal to us. But those who succumb to the siren song of ideological thinking…can’t confront themselves in thinking because, if they do, they risk undermining the ideological beliefs that have given them a sense of purpose and place.
keiferski 6y ago
What this analysis misses is the role of individualism. Probably because individualism = unquestionably good is perhaps the single most foundational belief of modern Western civilization. Twentieth-century totalitarianism could only have arisen from an industrial world in which the local social networks of family, village, and church were destroyed in the process of urbanization. Subsequently the less local social bonds one has, the more one becomes susceptible to mass political movements and extremist ideologies. Unfortunately the internet has only exacerbated this, where it’s not uncommon to have more social interaction (even if it’s only watching someone else) online than in person.
- api 6y ago
  This misses other major factors including the role of ideology itself. People are thinking beings and ideas drive a great deal of human behavior. The 20th century saw the rise of collectivist utopian ideologies. Last but not least it's important to remember that humans have always been fighting and trying to control one another. 20th century war, genocide, and totalitarianism is new only in its scale.
- Matticus_Rex 6y ago
  The American style of individualism in its traditional form is hardly anti-family/village/church. In fact, one of its notable characteristics for early observers used to European values was that Americans were prolific joiners. Want to do something? Start a club for it! That has broken down over the last decades, but blaming it on individualism seems questionable at best.
  - keiferski 6y ago
    Nowhere in my comment did I say American. The point is that urbanization and industrialization encouraged individualism. Today, the market itself does so.
    - Matticus_Rex 6y ago
      Right, and individualism isn't necessarily what you describe it as.
8fhdkjw039hd 6y ago
Growing up, the internet did not feel real to me. Just a collection of memes fighting each other, fire-walled from reality. It seemed like an entertaining farce but not real. This was relatively true for the internet I grew up with, but it is certainly not true now. What happened in the capital was quite a wake up call. And much of the blame for it does look to be the result of things like click-through maximization and engagement maximization pushing people towards extremes, things like karma and likes allocating status to those staking out extreme positions. It is a terrifying thing to think about, but if you start thinking of social media influencers and followers as a sort of client-patron relationship, the historical precedents are not comforting. For myself, I am coming to terms with the fact that I cannot really trust any opinions that have been inculcated in me during the wild years of social media. I have deleted my Reddit and Facebook accounts, have diligently trained the YouTube algorithms to avoid any even remotely political content. I no longer trust myself to develop sensible opinions in such an adversarial environment and am doing my best to just not have political opinions and focus on simple things like maths and programming. Steve Omohundro had a talk recently where he described the need for "personal AIs" to help individuals resist manipulation from corporate AIs maximizing engagement. Perhaps once such things like this exist, I will allow myself to have opinions. But until then, I don't think I have any hope of making sense of this cacophony tuned for my engagement. Until I get such a thing, this will be my last post on HackerNews.
- Bakary 6y ago
  You are making a political statement and following a defined political outlook without realizing it. In any case, I would not worry as the chance of being in a situation where political opinions actually matter is quite low for most people
- jacobobryant 6y ago
  > Steve Omohundro had a talk recently where he described the need for "personal AIs" to help individuals resist manipulation from corporate AIs maximizing engagement. This reminds me of The Big Promise of Recommender Systems (2011) [1]: > However, when we look at the current recommender systems generation from the point of view of the “recommendee” (users’ side) we can see that recommender systems are more inclined toward achieving short-term sales and business goals. Instead of helping their users to cope with the problem of information overload they can actually contribute to information overload by proposing recommendations that do not meet the users’ current needs or interests. ... > The window of opportunity is now open to innovate in a third generation of recommender systems that act directly on behalf of their users and help them cope with information overload. I'm working on something in this space myself[2] (an essay recommender system). I think part of the solution is having recommender systems that are decoupled from publishing; e.g. a video recommender that suggests videos across multiple, unaffiliated sites, instead of the recommender that's built into YouTube. [1] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Marc_Torrens/publication/220604928_The_Big_Promise_of_Recommender_Systems/links/5b60278f0f7e9bc79a7071b2/The-Big-Promise-of-Recommender-Systems.pdf https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Marc_Torrens/publicatio... [2] https://essays.findka.com https://essays.findka.com
PaulHoule 6y ago
"Mother should I build the wall?"
- motohagiography 6y ago
  Such a poignant song about that generation and it foretold how they would run things.
hexxiiiz 6y ago
"But in order to make individuals susceptible to ideology, you must first ruin their relationship to themselves and others by making them sceptical and cynical, so that they can no longer rely upon their own judgment" As much as I am sure this does happen quite a lot, something that does not get enough emphasis is how much people's relationships to themselves erode under the very ordinary conditions of quotidian life with its stresses, indignities, and disappointments. Nothing so deliberate as a propaganda campaign is needed for this first step to already take hold of people through the subtle misery of their personal relationships. This is not to say that institutions and ideologies are not involved with this process, but I think the unconscious subtleties of this all too easily get overlooked when we culturally take a normative view of what it means to be mentally healthy as successfully living a normal life. Arendt, in the same book, also argued that personal resentments fueled the rise of fascist regimes. I think in general, if, as a society, we want to curtail the rise of totalitarian politics, we have to really address the very personal individual antagonisms that arise in people's everyday lives; loneliness among them, but not alone as the sole culprit by a longshot.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- motohagiography 6y ago
  I'm over-commenting on this thread, but this is a pet topic of mine. A controversial observation of hers was that both fascism and communism were mere national movements, limited to their nation states, where what distinguished totalitarianism as a new form itself was using those nations as stepping stones and vessels for global domination. She gives some examples of totalitarian leaders rejecting both of these ideologies as not sufficiently ambitious, after using them as stepping stones. My own interpretation is that it begins by inculcating an identity of shame and powerlessness, which respectively create the necessary righteous cruelty and infinite appetite for power to get a totalitarian movement going and neutralizing opposition to its aims, e.g. "for good men to do nothing." It is systematized, and simple enough to iterate and scale, because what it truly was is directed chaos. Defeating it is also simple set of rules, and is in fact related to defeating loneliness as well, but that's a much longer topic.
totemandtoken 6y ago
Interesting this is trending on hackernews when a few days ago an article on using Tulpas to alleviate loneliness was trending. Hackernews zeitgeist - are you alright?
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
jimmyvalmer 6y ago
I read Origins two weeks ago. Talk about couching overstatement in wordy layers of psychobabble. This piece is similarly long-winded and "in my feels" speculative.
- everybodyknows 6y ago
  For a treatment of the subject that remains firmly grounded in examples from history -- Martin Luther, Napoleon, Hitler -- try Eric Hoffer's The True Believer.
matz1 6y ago
Probably why government around the world like lockdown so much.
- hh3k0 6y ago
  You are aware that the vast majority of countries are democracies, right?
  - matz1 6y ago
    Yes, lockdown gives them the power to be little totalitarian.
    - hh3k0 6y ago
      Sorry, but you make no sense.
      - toomim 6y ago
        The lockdown gave leaders emergency authorization to make decisions without waiting for votes. In other words, leaders got authorization to bypass democracy.
        triceratops 6y ago
        Do governments put every single decision they make to a general vote? You're confusing representative democracy with direct democracy. How many countries postponed or cancelled elections due to the pandemic? Only those would be considered to have "bypassed democracy".
        tharkun__ 6y ago
        You mean like the German state of Thuringia? https://www.faz.net/aktuell/politik/corona-pandemie-thueringen-verschiebt-landtagswahl-17146574.html https://www.faz.net/aktuell/politik/corona-pandemie-thuering...
billfruit 6y ago
Didn't Rebecca West also write about Authoritarianism about the same time as Arendt did? How did they view the topic differently?
erichocean 6y ago
It is disappointing Arendt is considered to be some kind of authority on totalitarianism (or worse still: evil). Unsurprising, though: TPTB find her conclusions useful, almost like she works backwards, telling powerful people what they want to hear… Make of that what you will.

148 points by ALee 6y ago

That aspect of her thesis was called political "atomization," which was the creation of this lonely state by isolating people from each other, and ultimately from truth, so that they become neutralized to the totalitarian agenda. The destruction of communities, families, and social connections is a totalitarian process and agenda. It was the result of a campaign of arbitrariness and farcical lying because the real target and conquest of totalitarianism is truth itself. When nothing can be believed, all opposition is neutralized. This neutralization and eventual liquidation is the totalitarian process. Activists project this as "stochastic terror," these days, but the technique goes back over a couple hundred years. What was exceptionally notable about that book, and is a bullet point in the article, is that the very idea of history as progress itself is the initial condition of ideology. The final chapter "ideology and terror," is the distillation I think people should read today, but the whole book, particularly the initial chapters that are an unblinking view of antisemitism, colonial thinking, and the nation state are sound foundations for thinking about the 20th century.

Ygg2 6y ago
> When nothing can be believed, all opposition is neutralized. I'm gonna recommend watching Hypernormalization by Adam Curtis. In it he talks about Vladislav Surkov basically turning the Russian political scene into a bizarre post modernist theater, where he would publicly proclaim to fund left wing, right wing or other, centrist parties and NGOs, to give the impression that everyone is working for Putin.
aphextron 6y ago
>That aspect of her thesis was called political "atomization," which was the creation of this lonely state by isolating people from each other, and ultimately from truth, so that they become neutralized to the totalitarian agenda. The destruction of communities, families, and social connections is a totalitarian process and agenda. You can see this so clearly in any video of Trump rallies, or their protests. There is no conversation, conviviality, or sense of community happening between the attendees. It's a collection of completely disconnected individuals taking selfies and angrily screaming platitudes to the general crowd. It's quite disturbing to see. A prime example: https://youtu.be/L5hksM_R59M https://youtu.be/L5hksM_R59M
- Matticus_Rex 6y ago
  That is not what I've seen from the crowd except during speeches. I, too, naturally tend to believe the worst about these people but there's definitely a sense of Trump supporter community there.
  - pavlov 6y ago
    There is a community there, but for many the process of joining this new community has involved the destruction of their existing links to family and local society. QAnon is the most extreme example of this kind of cultish separation among Trumpists.
    - gabereiser 6y ago
      This. A slow toxic rot of self that erodes the family and community links until their thoughts and actions seem alien to the outside. Sounds like my ex-wife (fell victim to QAnon). :/
      - s1artibartfast 6y ago
        Since you brought it up, what factors do you think made you ex-wife susceptible to qanon ideas?
        gabereiser 6y ago
        She was always susceptible to misinformation. When we moved to Central Florida a decade ago, they have what’s called “Love Bugs”. An invasive flying beetle from Central America. While on the job as a barista, someone told her they were genetically engineered at UCF. She believed him. Arguing with me that was the truth until I pointed her to science articles and Wikipedia. Fast forward a few years and the thought of sex-trafficking rings took root. She was convinced that girls were being abducted for sex slavery and that people in government were supporting them. This twisted even further when I confronted her about it, told her that what she thinks is real isn’t, and she immediately jumped on me for gaslighting her. Needless to say, it was she that filed for divorce. I’m way happier now. Those that downvoted my comment above because my ex-wife, you should meet her, she’s completely crazy now.
hirundo 6y ago
It would be nice if public health agencies formally considered the public cost of such atomization from covid lockdowns. They may find in the end that the cost is worth paying, but it should be part of the analysis. But what kind of study could yield valid, reproducible data about how much atomization is caused by how much lockdown, and how much authoritarianism is caused by how much atomization?
- medium_burrito 6y ago
  Useful data points I think would include: - Suicides, attempted and successful - Calls to suicide hotlines - Overdoses - Phone call data, assuming a sufficient database of people's relationships -> anecdotally, people are calling each other way less - Following what people are watching online- I bet youtube and facebook have an extremely good measure of how many general segments of viewing population there are, and I bet these have increased. Amazon book sales might do the same. - Alcohol sales, obviously. Friends in the industry say volume has quadrupled while unit price has dropped by a similar magnitude.
platz 6y ago
It should be recognized that the left, especially neoliberals, has played just as much a role in atomization of the public as the right. Indeed, it is usually conservatives that actually, in practice, attempt to promote community and family values. Although portions of the right have contributed to atomization via the 'free market', the left's project of scientism and eschewing of tradition arguably has also contributed significantly to this.
- rusk 6y ago
  > the left, especially neoliberals It seems kind of funny to see these two lumped together ... I don’t think neoliberalism would be considered left by left people ... I think the confusion arises from the different interpretation of liberalism on either side of the Atlantic. Neoliberalism is an economic movement rather than a social one (unlike neoconservatism, the political ideology that funnily enough advocates neoliberalism) and it’s an iteration of classical economics aka “economic liberalism”. Liberal economics is actually more like libertarianism which is paradoxically more closely aligned with the “right wing” mindset. Neoliberalism does incorporate some notes about redistribution of wealth for reasons of economic expedience but this is rarely seen in practice. This all goes to show that words are slippery and labels are bullshit and you’re far better off trying to understand where the people you’re disagreeing with are coming from than be lazily painting them as this or that.
  - platz 6y ago
    I'm not sure what the point you're driving at is; it seems you did understand the gist of my point. It seems like you want a semantics debate about how neocons and neolibs are are equivalent terms? Sorry, not the conversation for me, nor the main point I was making.
    - rusk 6y ago
      You didn’t make it very well it seems.
    - flagrant 6y ago

mLuby 6y ago

Some passages that stood out to me: > Isolation and loneliness are not the same. I can be isolated – that is in a situation in which I cannot act, because there is nobody who will act with me – without being lonely; and I can be lonely – that is in a situation in which I as a person feel myself deserted by all human companionship – without being isolated. > Totalitarianism uses isolation to deprive people of human companionship, making action in the world impossible, while destroying the space of solitude. > One is taught to distrust oneself and others, and to always rely upon the ideology of the movement, which must be right. But in order to make individuals susceptible to ideology, you must first ruin their relationship to themselves and others. > Amid the chaos and uncertainty of human existence, we need a sense of place and meaning. We need roots. And ideologies, like the Sirens in Homer’s Odyssey, appeal to us. But those who succumb to the siren song of ideological thinking…can’t confront themselves in thinking because, if they do, they risk undermining the ideological beliefs that have given them a sense of purpose and place.

keiferski 6y ago

What this analysis misses is the role of individualism. Probably because individualism = unquestionably good is perhaps the single most foundational belief of modern Western civilization. Twentieth-century totalitarianism could only have arisen from an industrial world in which the local social networks of family, village, and church were destroyed in the process of urbanization. Subsequently the less local social bonds one has, the more one becomes susceptible to mass political movements and extremist ideologies. Unfortunately the internet has only exacerbated this, where it’s not uncommon to have more social interaction (even if it’s only watching someone else) online than in person.

api 6y ago
This misses other major factors including the role of ideology itself. People are thinking beings and ideas drive a great deal of human behavior. The 20th century saw the rise of collectivist utopian ideologies. Last but not least it's important to remember that humans have always been fighting and trying to control one another. 20th century war, genocide, and totalitarianism is new only in its scale.
Matticus_Rex 6y ago
The American style of individualism in its traditional form is hardly anti-family/village/church. In fact, one of its notable characteristics for early observers used to European values was that Americans were prolific joiners. Want to do something? Start a club for it! That has broken down over the last decades, but blaming it on individualism seems questionable at best.
- keiferski 6y ago
  Nowhere in my comment did I say American. The point is that urbanization and industrialization encouraged individualism. Today, the market itself does so.
  - Matticus_Rex 6y ago
    Right, and individualism isn't necessarily what you describe it as.

8fhdkjw039hd 6y ago

Growing up, the internet did not feel real to me. Just a collection of memes fighting each other, fire-walled from reality. It seemed like an entertaining farce but not real. This was relatively true for the internet I grew up with, but it is certainly not true now. What happened in the capital was quite a wake up call. And much of the blame for it does look to be the result of things like click-through maximization and engagement maximization pushing people towards extremes, things like karma and likes allocating status to those staking out extreme positions. It is a terrifying thing to think about, but if you start thinking of social media influencers and followers as a sort of client-patron relationship, the historical precedents are not comforting. For myself, I am coming to terms with the fact that I cannot really trust any opinions that have been inculcated in me during the wild years of social media. I have deleted my Reddit and Facebook accounts, have diligently trained the YouTube algorithms to avoid any even remotely political content. I no longer trust myself to develop sensible opinions in such an adversarial environment and am doing my best to just not have political opinions and focus on simple things like maths and programming. Steve Omohundro had a talk recently where he described the need for "personal AIs" to help individuals resist manipulation from corporate AIs maximizing engagement. Perhaps once such things like this exist, I will allow myself to have opinions. But until then, I don't think I have any hope of making sense of this cacophony tuned for my engagement. Until I get such a thing, this will be my last post on HackerNews.

Bakary 6y ago
You are making a political statement and following a defined political outlook without realizing it. In any case, I would not worry as the chance of being in a situation where political opinions actually matter is quite low for most people
jacobobryant 6y ago
> Steve Omohundro had a talk recently where he described the need for "personal AIs" to help individuals resist manipulation from corporate AIs maximizing engagement. This reminds me of The Big Promise of Recommender Systems (2011) [1]: > However, when we look at the current recommender systems generation from the point of view of the “recommendee” (users’ side) we can see that recommender systems are more inclined toward achieving short-term sales and business goals. Instead of helping their users to cope with the problem of information overload they can actually contribute to information overload by proposing recommendations that do not meet the users’ current needs or interests. ... > The window of opportunity is now open to innovate in a third generation of recommender systems that act directly on behalf of their users and help them cope with information overload. I'm working on something in this space myself[2] (an essay recommender system). I think part of the solution is having recommender systems that are decoupled from publishing; e.g. a video recommender that suggests videos across multiple, unaffiliated sites, instead of the recommender that's built into YouTube. [1] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Marc_Torrens/publication/220604928_The_Big_Promise_of_Recommender_Systems/links/5b60278f0f7e9bc79a7071b2/The-Big-Promise-of-Recommender-Systems.pdf https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Marc_Torrens/publicatio... [2] https://essays.findka.com https://essays.findka.com

PaulHoule 6y ago

"Mother should I build the wall?"

motohagiography 6y ago
Such a poignant song about that generation and it foretold how they would run things.

hexxiiiz 6y ago

"But in order to make individuals susceptible to ideology, you must first ruin their relationship to themselves and others by making them sceptical and cynical, so that they can no longer rely upon their own judgment" As much as I am sure this does happen quite a lot, something that does not get enough emphasis is how much people's relationships to themselves erode under the very ordinary conditions of quotidian life with its stresses, indignities, and disappointments. Nothing so deliberate as a propaganda campaign is needed for this first step to already take hold of people through the subtle misery of their personal relationships. This is not to say that institutions and ideologies are not involved with this process, but I think the unconscious subtleties of this all too easily get overlooked when we culturally take a normative view of what it means to be mentally healthy as successfully living a normal life. Arendt, in the same book, also argued that personal resentments fueled the rise of fascist regimes. I think in general, if, as a society, we want to curtail the rise of totalitarian politics, we have to really address the very personal individual antagonisms that arise in people's everyday lives; loneliness among them, but not alone as the sole culprit by a longshot.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
motohagiography 6y ago
I'm over-commenting on this thread, but this is a pet topic of mine. A controversial observation of hers was that both fascism and communism were mere national movements, limited to their nation states, where what distinguished totalitarianism as a new form itself was using those nations as stepping stones and vessels for global domination. She gives some examples of totalitarian leaders rejecting both of these ideologies as not sufficiently ambitious, after using them as stepping stones. My own interpretation is that it begins by inculcating an identity of shame and powerlessness, which respectively create the necessary righteous cruelty and infinite appetite for power to get a totalitarian movement going and neutralizing opposition to its aims, e.g. "for good men to do nothing." It is systematized, and simple enough to iterate and scale, because what it truly was is directed chaos. Defeating it is also simple set of rules, and is in fact related to defeating loneliness as well, but that's a much longer topic.

totemandtoken 6y ago

Interesting this is trending on hackernews when a few days ago an article on using Tulpas to alleviate loneliness was trending. Hackernews zeitgeist - are you alright?

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

jimmyvalmer 6y ago

I read Origins two weeks ago. Talk about couching overstatement in wordy layers of psychobabble. This piece is similarly long-winded and "in my feels" speculative.

everybodyknows 6y ago
For a treatment of the subject that remains firmly grounded in examples from history -- Martin Luther, Napoleon, Hitler -- try Eric Hoffer's The True Believer.

matz1 6y ago

Probably why government around the world like lockdown so much.

hh3k0 6y ago
You are aware that the vast majority of countries are democracies, right?
- matz1 6y ago
  Yes, lockdown gives them the power to be little totalitarian.
  - hh3k0 6y ago
    Sorry, but you make no sense.
    - toomim 6y ago
      The lockdown gave leaders emergency authorization to make decisions without waiting for votes. In other words, leaders got authorization to bypass democracy.
      - triceratops 6y ago
        Do governments put every single decision they make to a general vote? You're confusing representative democracy with direct democracy. How many countries postponed or cancelled elections due to the pandemic? Only those would be considered to have "bypassed democracy".
        tharkun__ 6y ago
        You mean like the German state of Thuringia? https://www.faz.net/aktuell/politik/corona-pandemie-thueringen-verschiebt-landtagswahl-17146574.html https://www.faz.net/aktuell/politik/corona-pandemie-thuering...

billfruit 6y ago

Didn't Rebecca West also write about Authoritarianism about the same time as Arendt did? How did they view the topic differently?

erichocean 6y ago

It is disappointing Arendt is considered to be some kind of authority on totalitarianism (or worse still: evil). Unsurprising, though: TPTB find her conclusions useful, almost like she works backwards, telling powerful people what they want to hear… Make of that what you will.