Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Authoritarianism
For those of us on the other side of Donald Trump, let us try to rediscover the validity of truth that transcends wish-fulfillment and value as entertainment. Let us remember that words have meanings, and that the millennia of discovery of basic and irrefutable truth have come to Humanity at great expense and that might have to be relearned at great expense should people abandon them for something convenient but catastrophically false.
America has a hard lesson in basic civics awaiting it. So did Russia in 1917 and Germany in 1933.
Quote:Like the earlier mob leaders, the spokesmen for totalitarian movements possessed an unerring instinct for anything that ordinary party propaganda or public opinion did not care to touch. Everything hidden, everything passed over in silence, became of major significance, regardless of its own intrinsic importance. The mob really believed that truth was whatever respectable society had hypocritically passed over, or covered with corruption … The modern masses do not believe in anything visible, in the reality of their own experience. What convinces masses are not facts, and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably part.
For those of us on the other side of Donald Trump, let us try to rediscover the validity of truth that transcends wish-fulfillment and value as entertainment. Let us remember that words have meanings, and that the millennia of discovery of basic and irrefutable truth have come to Humanity at great expense and that might have to be relearned at great expense should people abandon them for something convenient but catastrophically false.
America has a hard lesson in basic civics awaiting it. So did Russia in 1917 and Germany in 1933.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.