Wednesday, August 21, 2024

Hannah Arendt: Will We Love the World Enough To Take Responsibility For It?

It is not uncommon to hear voices speaking to their difficulty in knowing what to believe and what is true and what is not. And then there is the flip side of that coin related to those among us who are 100% certain that they hold the answers, the facts, the truth about most everything. There is no clarity on the one hand, and the illusion of absolute clarity on the other. And then there is apathy.

It is my belief that discernment, clarity, connection, caring, compassion, courage, and a profound commitment to truth are all crucial in these times. Which motivates me to once again illuminate the wisdom of Hannah Arendt, something which remains deeply relevant to the enormity of the challenges that we face today.

Among the realities which I experience as being in urgent need of illumination, attention, and radical individual and collective action — to name a few — are the American government's funding of the genocide in Gaza, Trump and the rise of authoritarianism-fascism-Christian nationalism-white supremacy, the propaganda and distractions and disinformation that are woven through much of the American corporate funded mainstream media, the Big Money which has infiltrated both major political parties and our highest courts, runaway greed and the ever growing redistribution of wealth upwards, epidemics of poverty and despair and addictions and anxiety and depression, polarization and disconnection and dehumanization and violence, the human caused climate crisis which is threatening the sustainability of a habitable planet, and on and on. 

Out of all of this is the great need for us to be inspired to act. As Bill McKibben and others have wisely said, activism is the antidote to despair. No action is too small. And each of us, if we are not in the midst of our own personal crisis, can play a growing and evolving part in the great universal struggle to birth a caring and sustainable and peaceful world. May it be so. 

We are all connected, all related, all family. 
We are all in this together.
🙏🙏 Molly

Quotes by Hannah Arendt

Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it, and by the same token save it from that ruin which except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and the young, would be inevitable. And education, too, is where we decide whether we love our children enough not to expel them from our world and leave them to their own devices, nor to strike from their hands their chance of undertaking something new, something unforeseen by us, but to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing a common world.
 
When evil is allowed to compete with good, evil has an emotional populist appeal that wins out unless good men and women stand as a vanguard against abuse.
 
Politically speaking, tribal nationalism [patriotism] always insists that its own people are surrounded by 'a world of enemies' - 'one against all' - and that a fundamental difference exists between this people and all others. It claims its people to be unique, individual, incompatible with all others, and denies theoretically the very possibility of a common mankind long before it is used to destroy the humanity of man.
 
The chief qualification of a mass leader has become unending infallibility; he can never admit an error.
 
The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth, and truth be defamed as lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world - and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end - is being destroyed. 

The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.
 
There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous.
 
There is a strange interdependence between thoughtlessness and evil.  
 
The outstanding negative quality of the totalitarian elite is that it never stops to think about the world as it really is and never compares the lies with reality.
 
There is hardly a better way to avoid discussion than by releasing an argument from the control of the present and by saying that only the future will reveal its merits.
 
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.
 
Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.
 
One of the greatest advantages of the totalitarian elites of the twenties and thirties was to turn any statement of fact into a question of motive.
 
True goal of totalitarian propaganda is not persuasion, but organization of the polity. ... What convinces masses are not facts, and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably part.   

In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. ... Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.

Never has our future been more unpredictable, never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and self-interest—forces that look like sheer insanity, if judged by the standards of other centuries. It is as though mankind had divided itself between those who believe in human omnipotence (who think that everything is possible if one knows how to organize masses for it) and those for whom powerlessness has become the major experience of their lives.
 
To them, violence, power, cruelty, were the supreme capacities of men who had definitely lost their place in the universe and were much too proud to long for a power theory that would safely bring them back and reintegrate them into the world. They were satisfied with blind partisanship in anything that respectable society had banned, regardless of theory or content, and they elevated cruelty to a major virtue because it contradicted society’s humanitarian and liberal hypocrisy.
 
The point is that both Hitler and Stalin held out promises of stability in order to hide their intention of creating a state of permanent instability.

Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself. The masses have to be won by propaganda. 
 
Under conditions of tyranny it is far easier to act than to think.  

There is a strange interdependence between thoughtlessness and evil.
 
Politically, the weakness of the argument has always been that those who choose the lesser evil forget very quickly that they chose evil. 
 
The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil. 

Evil thrives on apathy and cannot exist without it.

Caution in handling generally accepted opinions that claim to explain whole trends of history is especially important for the historian of modern times, because the last century has produced an abundance of ideologies that pretend to be keys to history but are actually nothing but desperate efforts to escape responsibility.

Forgiveness is the only way to reverse the irreversible flow of history. 

Factuality itself depends for its continued existence upon the existence of the nontotalitarian world.
 
This inability to think created the possibility for many ordinary men to commit evil deeds on a gigantic scale, the like of which had never been seen before. The manifestation of the wind of thought is not knowledge but the ability to tell right from wrong, beautiful from ugly. And I hope that thinking gives people the strength to prevent catastrophes in these rare moments when the chips are down. 

As citizens, we must prevent wrongdoing because the world in which we all live, wrong-doer, wrong sufferer and spectator, is at stake. 

The presence of others who see what we see and hear what we hear assures us of the reality of the world and ourselves.

One must think with the body and the soul or not think at all. 

The history of humanity is not a hotel where someone can rent a room whenever it suits him; nor is it a vehicle which we board or get out of at random. Our past will be for us a burden beneath which we can only collapse for as long as we refuse to understand the present and fight for a better future. Only then — but from that moment on — will the burden become a blessing, that is, a weapon in the battle for freedom. 
 
- Hannah Arendt,  
From The Origins of Totalitarianism

No comments:

Post a Comment