Samantha Hill writes in Aeon about 'where loneliness can lead'. Apparently, if you are lonely you might become susceptible to totalitarianism. This is nonsense. If you are very lonely, you might become a catitarian- i.e. your cat takes over your life. On the other hand, a totalitarian regime- to reduce the cost of surveillance- might insist that life be lived as communally as possible and moreover, by reason of collective punishment, everyone will have a strong incentive to keep tabs on everybody else.
Hannah's Aunt, in her origins of totalitarianism, wrote
'What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world is
existential threats to the polity- e.g. danger of invasion, large scale famine, a terrible epidemic etc. To fight a 'total war', totalitarian methods may be necessary more particularly if Judicial and other institutions, or a portion of the citizenry is oblivious of the seriousness of the threat.
the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience
fuck off! In primitive pastoral societies, shepherds were as lonely as fuck as were the guys who had to sleep in the fields so as to be ready to drive off animals which might trample the crop. Women might have a baby or two to look after, but once they went to sleep, Mum was lonely. She didn't know how to read and, anyway, she couldn't afford a candle. Loneliness was worst where populations were low and scattered.
usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age,
most people, nowadays, expect to live at least ten or twenty years after retirement. If they have put by money, they can expect to have a better, not a worse, social life than they did when they were shackled to a desk.
has become an everyday experience …
Once a society achieves a degree of affluence, more and more people can live alone. Moreover, as technology improves, they can cook for themselves rather than dining with others. They can watch movies on a big screen TV at home rather than at the Cinema. They can listen to music on their Music system rather than go to the concert hall.
‘Please write regularly, or otherwise I am going to die out here.’ Hannah Arendt didn’t usually begin letters to her husband this way, but in the spring of 1955 she found herself alone in a ‘wilderness’.
Because she needed money and had taken a teaching gig.
After the publication of The Origins of Totalitarianism, she was invited to be a visiting lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley. She didn’t like the intellectual atmosphere.
California has something better than intellectual atmosphere. She should have taken up surfing.
Her colleagues lacked a sense of humour,
If she'd had a sense of humor she'd have laughed at Heidegger instead of fucking him.
and the cloud of McCarthyism hung over social life.
Why didn't she fuck off to East Germany? Oh. Proper German pedants thought her ignorant and stupid.
She was told there would be 30 students in her undergraduate classes: there were 120, in each.
She didn't like teaching worthless shite. Good for her.
She hated being on stage lecturing every day: ‘I simply can’t be exposed to the public five times a week – in other words, never get out of the public eye. I feel as if I have to go around looking for myself.’
She knew she was a charlatan. It wasn't as though she was helping her students to find the cure for cancer.
The one oasis she found was in a dockworker-turned-philosopher from San Francisco, Eric Hoffer – but she wasn’t sure about him either: she told her friend Karl Jaspers that Hoffer was ‘the best thing this country has to offer’; she told her husband Heinrich Blücher that Hoffer was ‘very charming, but not bright’.
Jaspers was a fucking cretin. He thought all democracies would insist on a common public education. None do.
Arendt was no stranger to bouts of loneliness.
No. What she experienced was periods when she felt she didn't have smart or stimulating enough interlocutors. We don't say that a guy who is disgruntled by the fact that he isn't porking lots of super-models is lonely. We say he is dissatisfied with his sex life. A person who is missing their soul mate may be lonely if they remain solitary. But if they are hardly ever alone, they aren't lonely. They are simply yearning for the company of a person who is inaccessible.
From an early age, she had a keen sense that she was different, an outsider, a pariah, and often preferred to be on her own.
In which case, if her theory were correct, she'd have gravitated to Stalinism rather than slyly fucked off to affluent America.
Her father died of syphilis when she was seven; she faked all manner of illnesses to avoid going to school as a child so she could stay at home;
later she'd fake being smart to earn money writing or teaching nonsense. Nothing wrong with that. Capitalism means there are markets even for the most egregious shite.
her first husband left her in Berlin after the burning of the Reichstag;
both had the sense to run away from Germany. They divorced amicably enough in France in 1937.
she was stateless for nearly 20 years.
13 years. But the last 9 of those years were spent in the US whose citizenship she finally took. I suppose her husband's Communist views might have posed a problem.
But, as Arendt knew, loneliness is a part of the human condition.
or the animal condition.
Everybody feels lonely from time to time.
More particularly when they are alone.
Writing on loneliness often falls into one of two camps: the overindulgent memoir, or the rational medicalisation that treats loneliness as something to be cured. Both approaches leave the reader a bit cold.
Whereas accounts of orgies tends to heat them up.
As a word, ‘loneliness’ is relatively new to the English language.
'elenge' was the older world. It conveys the wretchedness and tedium and irksomeness of a solitary existence.
One of the first uses was in William Shakespeare’s tragedy Hamlet, which was written around 1600. Polonius beseeches Ophelia: ‘Read on this book, that show of such an exercise may colour your loneliness.’ (He is counselling her to read from a prayer book, so no one will be suspicious of her being alone – here the connotation is of not being with others rather than any feeling of wishing that she was.)
She gains a reputation for piety and not being a social butterfly. People will think better of her and se will make an advantageous marriage.
Throughout the 16th century, loneliness was often evoked in sermons to frighten churchgoers from sin – people were asked to imagine themselves in lonely places such as hell or the grave.
Being alone meant being vulnerable to rapists and cut-throats not to mention gagaga ghosts!
But well into the 17th century, the word was still rarely used.
Solitary sounded posher. A solitarian was a hermit or recluse. Medieval England had rather a high proportion of eremites probably because one soon gets fed up
In 1674, the English naturalist John Ray included ‘loneliness’ in a list of infrequently used words, and defined it as a term to describe places and people ‘far from neighbours’. A century later, the word hadn’t changed much. In Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language (1755), he described the adjective ‘lonely’ solely in terms of the state of being alone (the ‘lonely fox’), or a deserted place (‘lonely rocks’) – much as Shakespeare used the term in the example from Hamlet above.
That's all the word means even now. True me may elide the phrase 'I'm feeling lonely' and just say 'I'm lonely.'
Until the 19th century, loneliness referred to an action
nonsense!
– crossing a threshold, or journeying to a place outside a city –
this simply isn't true
and had less to do with feeling.
Because people would say 'I feel lonely' rather than 'I'm lonely'.
Descriptions of loneliness and abandonment were used to rouse the terror of
being abandoned and left all on your lonesome not
nonexistence within men, to get them to imagine absolute isolation, cut off from the world and God’s love.
Alternatively, a demon would be shoving a pitchfork up your bum while your mother-in-law looked on laughing her fucking head off.
And in a certain way, this makes sense. The first negative word spoken by God about his creation in the Bible comes in Genesis after he made Adam: ‘And the Lord God said, “It is not good that man is alone; I shall make him a helpmate opposite him.”’
Previously, Gods were killed by their sons who then fucked their Mum's. This was not good at all- for God. Anyway, if you have a ram, it occurs to you that buying a ewe might be a good idea.
In the 19th century, amid modernity, loneliness lost its connection with religion and began to be associated with secular feelings of alienation.
Nonsense! Romanticism, which had a notion of a Noble Savage, not Modernism, valorized loneliness and associated solitude with sublimity. You should be as lonely as a cloud when alone amidst of grand mountains and dark forests. The notion of alienation does have Romantic roots as in Rousseau. At a later point there was the notion that mass man was lonely in a crowd. Society had been atomized. The solution, obviously, was to do stupid shite or study nonsense at Uni.
The use of the term began to increase sharply after 1800 with the arrival of the Industrial Revolution, and continued to climb until the 1990s until it levelled off, rising again during the first decades of the 21st century.
Why? The answer is obvious. People started spending more time on-line. Also 'Bowling alone' was a big seller in 2000. The irony here is that the internet cold take the place of 'social capital'. Then came the smartphone and everybody started hooking up like crazy.
Loneliness took up character and cause in Herman Melville’s ‘Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street’ (1853),
Poe's 'man in the crowd' came first. Hawthorne's Wakefeld came 5 years later. I suppose Americans were used to smaller towns and pictured life in London. Barteleby's problem isn't loneliness. It is futility. He reacts by 'preferring not to' do anything required to hold a job or, in prison, even avert starvation by eating his porridge.
the realist paintings of Edward Hopper,
which had glamour at a time when most of the people who bought fancy magazines lived in small towns.
and T S Eliot’s poem The Waste Land (1922).
Which is actually the diary of lonely teenage Valley girl whose parents divorced and she had to move to a cow town where the other kids think Taylor Swift is still cool.
But in the middle of the 20th century, Arendt approached loneliness differently.
Why did German peeps follow the Fuhrer. It's coz they were lonely. Hitler would get them together to listen to his speeches. They enjoyed that.
For her, it was both something that could be done
I suppose loneliness can be done the same way that cuteness can be done. But if you are a fat, elderly, Tamil man, rather than a winsome slip of a girl, don't fucking do it.
and something that was experienced.
if you are alone- sure.
In the 1950s, as she was trying to write a book about Karl Marx at the height of McCarthyism, she came to think about loneliness in relationship to ideology and terror.
An ideology is something you have so as to join a party- not the cool type of party but the boring sort. This may have something to do with loneliness. But terror is something which costs money to do on any substantial scale. Saying 'look behind you, There's a gagaga ghost!' only gets you so far.
Totalitarianism in power found a way to crystallise the occasional experience of loneliness into a permanent state of being.
No. In a totalitarian society, if you feel lonely chances are others will twig that you haven't gotten with the program and so your life is likely to be very fucking short.
Through the use of isolation and terror,
Nope. Collectivization, mutual surveillance, and cruel and unusual punishment is the way to go.
totalitarian regimes created the conditions for loneliness,
but Hannah's Aunt said loneliness created the conditions for totalitarianism. Oh. Right. The fact that I'm not currently pleasuring three super-models shows I'm lonely and that means.... Rishi Sunak is Hitler!
and then appealed to people’s loneliness with ideological propaganda.
England and France had even more ideological propaganda because they were richer. But they didn't become totalitarian. Still, everything comes back to Hitler. Are you feeling lonely coz your significant other had to work late? This is a sign of the second coming of Hitler! Did you stub your toe? That is terrorism- a sure sign that Hitlerism is on the rise.
Before Arendt left to teach at Berkeley, she’d published an essay on ‘Ideology and Terror’ (1953) dealing with isolation, loneliness and solitude in a Festschrift for Jaspers’s 70th birthday.
What he really wanted was a cake. If a stripper came bursting out of it, so much the better.
This essay, alongside her book The Origins of Totalitarianism, became the foundation for her oversubscribed course at Berkeley, ‘Totalitarianism’.
Her students were actually stupider than her.
The class was divided into four parts: the decay of political institutions,
which hadn't occurred anywhere for five decades.
the growth of the masses,
which had grown more in places without any fucking totalitarianism
imperialism,
which was over
and the emergence of political parties as interest-group ideologies.
which had occurred in the eighteenth century.
In her opening lecture, she framed the course by reflecting on how the relationship between political theory and politics has become doubtful in the modern age.
Because the former was and is stupid shit.
She argued that there was an increasing, general willingness to do away with theory in favour of mere opinions and ideologies.
Nobody ever gave a shit about theory though some Bolsheviks pretended this wasn't the case.
‘Many,’ she said, ‘think they can dispense with theory altogether, which of course only means that they want their own theory, underlying their own statements, to be accepted as gospel truth.’
No. Nobody gives a shit about whether people think they are lying. They just want people to do what they want them to do.
Arendt was referring to the way in which ‘ideology’ had been used as a desire to divorce thinking from action
which has never been the case
– ‘ideology’ comes from the French idéologie, and was first used during the French Revolution,
which featured 'Terror' which is how come the words ideology and terror go together. The notion is that doctrinaire shitheads are bound to start guillotining random dudes the moment they got a bit of power.
but didn’t become popularised until the publication of Marx and Friedrich Engels’s The German Ideology (written in 1846) and later Karl Mannheim’s Ideology and Utopia (1929), which she reviewed for Die Gesellschaft in 1930.
Napoleon was important. He used the word in a pejorative sense to attack his enemies. Marx and Engels were useless tossers, though the latter did make some money.
In 1958, a revised version of ‘Ideology and Terror’ was added as a new conclusion to the second edition of The Origins of Totalitarianism.
Hannah's Aunt was thrifty. She recycled her own shit.
Origins is a 600-page work divided into three sections on antisemitism, imperialism and totalitarianism.
In other words, it is totes random.
As Arendt worked on it, the text changed over time, to incorporate new information about Hitler and Stalin as it emerged from Europe. The initial conclusion, published in 1951, reflected on the fact that, even if totalitarian regimes disappeared from the world, the elements of totalitarianism would remain. ‘Totalitarian solutions,’ she wrote, ‘may well survive the fall of totalitarian regimes in the form of strong temptations which will come up whenever it seems impossible to alleviate political, social, or economic misery in a manner worthy of man.’
This was deeply silly. America had seen plenty of economic misery during the Depression. But it hadn't become totalitarian.
When Arendt added ‘Ideology and Terror’ to Origins in 1958, the tenor of the work changed. The elements of totalitarianism were numerous, but in loneliness she found the essence of totalitarian government, and the common ground of terror.
Because she was as daft as a brush. Affluent countries with advanced technology and very strong individualism and rule of law may have a lot of loneliness simply because people can afford to be more picky and the opportunity cost of shared pleasure is higher. Totalitarian government has an incentive to keep people in groups to reduce surveillance and punishment costs. But its 'essence' is that it is not 'limited' by the Rule of Law such that Hohfeldian immunities arise and a 'private sector' can exist independently.
Why loneliness is not obvious.
Arendt’s answer was: because loneliness radically cuts people off from human connection.
It doesn't. Solitary confinement may do so. Being stuck on a desert island may do so. But loneliness is something your Mummy can help you with by getting you to join a Church choir or bowling team or whatever.
She defined loneliness as a kind of wilderness where a person feels deserted by all worldliness and human companionship, even when surrounded by others.
because she is a very precious little snow-flake. Also hubby doesn't understand me and my PA is useless and all my so called friends are basic bitches- anyway, that's why I'm fucking the pool-boy.
The word she used in her mother tongue for loneliness was Verlassenheit – a state of being abandoned, or abandon-ness.
If Mummy doesn't bring me pancakes in bed I complain of abandonment and threaten to call Child Services.
Loneliness, she argued, is ‘among the most radical and desperate experiences of man’,
It is nothing compared to getting the trots. To be frank, ennui is worse than abandonment. It's just that you get more sympathy if you say you are lonely- nobody understands you- rather than that you are bored with the incessant chatter of others of your own class. Also, saying you are lonely coz your high pressure job takes up so much of your time may get invited to pool parties. Complaining of chronic diarrhoea, not so much.
because in loneliness we are unable to realise our full capacity for action as human beings.
Whereas chronic diarrhoea makes for high productivity and living your best life.
When we experience loneliness, we lose the ability to experience anything else;
No. That's why cutting off your own leg when you are lonely hurts like hell.
and, in loneliness, we are unable to make new beginnings.
We can make new beginnings on books like Finnegan's Wake or Infinite Jest. Then we give up and have a wank.
In order to illustrate why loneliness is the essence of totalitarianism and the common ground of terror, Arendt distinguished isolation from loneliness, and loneliness from solitude. Isolation, she argued, is sometimes necessary for creative activity.
Equally, it may hinder it.
Even the mere reading of a book, she says requires some degree of isolation.
For some, not others.
One must intentionally turn away from the world to make space for the experience of solitude
One must intentionally turn away from the world to make space for the experience of taking a big stinky shit. On the other hand, you may experience solitude because you fell asleep on the night bus and ended up having to walk home across Hampstead heath at four o'clock in the morning.
but, once alone, one is always able to turn back:
Not if you get marooned on a desert island.
'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
you can act on your own. Indeed you can even have sex with yourself.
– without being lonely;
because your wife is a sheep and your best friends are dolphins.
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.'
only in the sense that I can be lovely- that is in a situation in which I as a person feel myself desired by all- while remaining as ugly as shit.
Totalitarianism uses isolation to deprive people of human companionship,
No. Prisons in any type of regime might use solitary confinement to break a prisoner, but Totalitarianism can be a bit more direct in its methods.
making action in the world impossible, while destroying the space of solitude.
America has 80,000 people in solitary confinement. This proves it is totes totalitarian.
The iron-band of totalitarianism, as Arendt calls it, destroys man’s ability to move, to act, and to think,
No. Totalitarian states may be better able to mobilize resources for war or to provide the sinews of war. This is because people retain the ability to move and to act and to think no matter what the political regime.
while turning each individual in his lonely isolation against all others, and himself.
Very true. Biden has turned Mummy against me. Every time I threaten to call Child Services, she tells me to move out and get a fucking job you fat sack of shit.
Totalitarian movements use ideology to isolate individuals.
No. They beat people and put them in solitary confinement.
Isolate means ‘to cause a person to be or remain alone or apart from others’.
COVID isolation was totes Fascist- right? Biden had to isolate for that reason. This shows his regime is not just Totalitarian, it is also solitarily confining its own Fuhrer!
Arendt spends the first part of ‘Ideology and Terror’ breaking down the ‘recipes of ideologies’ into their basic ingredients to show how this is done:
The basic ingredients of ideologies are ideas.
ideologies are divorced from the world of lived experience,
They may be. An ideology may be wholly theological and concerned with the life to come.
and foreclose the possibility of new experience;
Nope. Plenty of politicians start off 'ideological' but become pragmatic on the basis of experience
ideologies are concerned with controlling and predicting the tide of history;
they may be historicist. But then again, they may not.
ideologies do not explain what is, they explain what becomes;
No. They may do neither or both or who gives a flying fuck.
ideologies rely on logical procedures in thinking that are divorced from reality;
Nope. That is logic. An ideology may be wholly anti-rational. 'Counter-culture' ideology could take the form of advocating putting LSD in the water supply.
ideological thinking insists upon a ‘truer reality’, that is concealed behind the world of perceptible things.
That is mysticism or neo-Platonism or some such shit.
The way we think about the world affects the relationships we have with others and ourselves.
Unless it doesn't at all.
By injecting a secret meaning into every event and experience, ideological movements are forced to change reality in accordance with their claims once they come to power.
Fuck that! Once you get power, you kick away the fucking ladder. What Stalin and Hitler and Mao figured out was that 'totalitarianism' means is 'gangsterism'. Being the cappo dei tutti i capi means periodically slaughtering not just your rivals but your lieutenants who might become rivals. As for ideology, what everybody should understand is any shite you say is fucking Gospel mate. Everybody else is a right deviationist or left adventurist or crypto-Jew.
And this means that one can no longer trust the reality of one’s own lived experiences in the world.
If you were foolish enough to quit America for some Commie or Caliphate Utopia- maybe. But otherwise, all we are speaking of is gangsterism. The Boss is handsome, virile, and his jokes are so fucking hilarious you literally shit yourself.
Instead, one is taught to distrust oneself and others, and to always rely upon the ideology of the movement, which must be right.
That a cult, dude. Totalitarianism is about exercising total power, not fleecing Dental Hygienists or people who might otherwise invested in an Applebee's franchise.
But in order to make individuals susceptible to ideology,
why bother? There's a sucker born every minute. Just recruit from existing fringe groups till you manage to land a whale- i.e. a really wealthy sucker.
you must first ruin their relationship to themselves and others by making them sceptical and cynical,
Fuck off! Skeptical and cynical people won't join your cult unless they get money up-front and an assured share of the profits. Why bother with them? Like I said, there's a sucker born every minute. True, you do need to tell kids that their Mum is totes Hitler coz otherwise they won't understand why they have to fuck a lot of ugly dudes so as to make money for the cause.
so that they can no longer rely upon their own judgment:
e.g. thinking it yucky to suck off ugly dudes.
'Just as terror, even in its pre-total, merely tyrannical form ruins all relationships between men,
unless they have teamed up to kill the tyrant and his minions
so the self-compulsion of ideological thinking ruins all relationship with reality.
Nope. The only self-compulsion has to do with really having money and power. The only self-compulsion which ruins our relationship with reality is the compulsion to continually take a lot of drugs or alcohol.
The preparation has succeeded when people have lost contact with their fellow men as well as the reality around them; for together with these contacts, men lose the capacity of both experience and thought.
Thus Hitler and Stalin and Mao were geniuses who first cut off their fellow men from reality by making them real lonely coz they were missing their teddy bear's imaginary friends, and then killed their rivals and gained total power.
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 (ie, the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (ie, the standards of thought) no longer exist.
No. Such people would be useless. You say to one such- 'get me a sandwich' and he comes back with a walrus which he thinks is a sandwich. Also if you ask 'What is your name?' they will think they are giving a truthful answer when they say 'last Saturday at three p.m.'
Organised loneliness, bred from ideology, leads to tyrannical thought, and destroys a person’s ability to distinguish between fact and fiction – to make judgments.
Which is why everybody in solitary confinement is bound to become prey to 'tyrannical thought'. Also they won't be able to distinguish between Harry Potter and a ham sandwich.
In loneliness, one is unable to carry on a conversation with oneself,
No. You can talk to yourself just fine. It is when you are teaching Econ 101 that you keep getting interrupted any time you start really getting into the issue of your poor masturbatory technique by questions about whether this will be on the test?
because one’s ability to think is compromised.
Arendt had no ability to think. Still, she made a bit of money by playing the 'I fled Hitler' card. Also she'd fucked Heidegger. For some reason, that was a big deal back then.
Ideological thinking turns us away from the world of lived experience,
Stupid thinking- like Arendt's- does that. There were plenty of economists of a highly ideological type who did empirical research of a pathbreaking type back in the Fifties. Indeed, even when I was young, studying under a Marxist econometrician was considered advantageous. Sadly, almost all econometrics is shit.
starves the imagination, denies plurality,
shits its pants while masturbating
and destroys the space between men
by pushing them against each other
that allows them to relate to one another in meaningful ways.
Very true. Humanity can't relate to itself meaningfully if all human beings are forced into the same pair of underpants.
And once ideological thinking has taken root, experience and reality no longer bear upon thinking.
Arendt's experience had taught her that if she didn't want to end up working for a Jewish Charity, she needed to write shitty books and pretend to be a philosopher of some sort. Americans were plenty stupid and vast hordes of them were being given sheepskins. There was no such thing as academic standards any more. To be fair, though prewar savants did know Greek and Latin, they were equally stupid.
Instead, experience conforms to ideology in thinking.
It can conform to anything at all- in stupidity.
Which is why when Arendt talks about loneliness, she is not just talking
nonsense
about the affective experience of loneliness: she is talking about a way of thinking.
a nonsensical way of thinking.
Loneliness arises when thought is divorced from reality,
In which case maybe you are surrounded by your pals from the Legion of Super Heroes.
when the common world has been replaced by the tyranny of coercive logical demands.
Shit would that dim bint know about what logic demands?
We think from experience, and when we no longer have new experiences in the world to think from, we
do what physicists do- i.e. build mathematical models which make different predictions which a crucial experiment will decide between.
lose the standards of thought that guide us in thinking about the world.
Arendt studied stupid shit probably because she was as stupid as shit. Grete Hermann was a few years older than Arendt. She studied under Emmy Noether rather than the shithead Heidegger. In 1935, she spotted the flaw in Von Neumann's 'no hidden variable' theorem. True, that sort of stuff would only be empirically verifiable many decades later, but it shows what genuine thought looks like. Incidentally Hermann was an excellent neo-Kantian philosopher and, after returning to Germany, contributed to the Socialist Party's Bad Godesberg program.
And when one submits to the self-compulsion of ideological thinking, one surrenders one’s inner freedom to think.
No. Gentzen was a dyed in the wool Nazi. Still a great logician. Sadly, the craziest nutters can think better than stupid peeps like me and Arendt.
It is this submission to the force of logical deduction that ‘prepares each individual in his lonely isolation against all others’ for tyranny.
That's why Bertrand Russell became a Nazi, or proto-Nazi- like Frege.
Free movement in thinking is replaced by the propulsive, singular current of ideological thought.
No. A smart guy may have an ideological or theological or occultic bee in his bonnet without ceasing to be smart. As for the rest of us, even if we are as stupid shit, so long as we- like Arendt- run the fuck away from places taken over by violent nutters, we are safe enough from totalitarianism.
In one of her thinking journals, Arendt asks: ‘Gibt es ein Denken das nicht Tyrannisches ist?’ (Is there a way of thinking that is not tyrannical?)
Yes. Don't be silly. Useful thinking is not tyrannical.
She follows the question with the statement that the point is to resist being swept up in the tide at all.
Run the fuck away from a place taken over by thugs or cut-throats.
What allows men to be carried away?
Not running away. Either run or you may end up being carried.
Arendt argues that the underlying fear that attracts one to ideology is the fear of self-contradiction.
Arendt wasn't afraid of self-contradiction. She would chase it and bite it and then force it to do really demeaning sexual things.
This fear of self-contradiction is why thinking itself is dangerous – because thinking has the power to uproot all of our beliefs and opinions about the world.
No it doesn't. Don't be silly.
Thinking can unsettle our faith, our beliefs, our sense of self-knowledge.
Nope. It can cause you to understand that maybe the Church doesn't have the keys to Heaven if it devotes itself so entirely to fucking little boys in the ass.
Thinking can strip away everything that we hold dear, rely upon, take for granted day-to-day. Thinking has the power to make us come undone.
No. Thinking isn't enough. You actually have to do stupid shit.
But life is messy.
So is sodomy.
Amid the chaos and uncertainty of human existence,
is stupidity- e.g. people who say
we need a sense of place and meaning. We need roots.
Which is cool if you are in a halfway house and have to listen to such sermons as a condition of your parole.
And ideologies, like the Sirens in Homer’s Odyssey, appeal to us.
No. The Sirens are far away. Ideologies are like junk food. They are near at hand.
But those who succumb to the siren song of ideological thinking,
This lady has succumbed to the sophomore temptation to mention 'siren songs'. What's next? Scylla & Charybides? Ossa & fucking Pelion?
must turn away from the world of lived experience.
Because that's easy to do. It often happens, when I head down to the fridge to get a cold one, that I get turned around and end up in the world of undead experience.
In doing so, they 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.
This is true of any sort of belief. You wife might be cheating on you. The cat may be a Ninja assassin. Talking about these possibilities might confirm your worst fears. The cat is a Ninja assassin and is porking your wife. Sadly your buddies at the bar try to change the subject of conversation any time you talk to them about this.
Put very simply: people who subscribe to ideology have thoughts, but they are incapable of thinking for themselves.
So, nobody has ever subscribed to an ideology. This is why the way people react to your telling them about the Ninja assassin that is porking your wife but who is actually a cat, they tend to, quite independently, think to themselves that you are drunk off your head.
And it is this inability to think, to keep one’s self company, to make meaning from one’s experiences in the world, that makes them lonely.
But, since they can't think for themselves, they can't think they are lonely. But if they don't think they are lonely then they aren't lonely. True, we can say to them 'you don't know you are lonely' but this is like saying 'you don't know you want to suck my dick but you really really do.'
Arendt’s argument about loneliness and totalitarianism is not an easy one to swallow,
because it is shit.
because it implies a kind of ordinariness about totalitarian tendencies that appeal to loneliness: if you are not satisfied with reality, if you forsake the good and always demand something better, if you are unwilling to come face-to-face with the world as it is, then you will be susceptible to ideological thought. You will be susceptible to organised loneliness.
If you aren't sucking my dick, you don't know how lonely you are and how you've been totes seduced by a Nazi ideology. Did you know the Nazi's killed cock suckers? If you weren't a fucking brainwashed Hitlerite you'd be on your knees gobbling away right now and thus safe from 'organized loneliness' & totalitarian ideology.
When Arendt wrote to her husband: ‘I simply can’t be exposed to the public five times a week – in other words, never get out of the public eye. I feel as if I have to go around looking for myself,’ she wasn’t vainly complaining about the limelight.
She was complaining about having to teach Americans- i.e. imbeciles.
The constant exposure to a public audience made it impossible for her to keep company with herself.
She couldn't even fist herself in class. Sad.
She was unable to find the private, self-reflective space necessary for thinking.
There was plenty of empty space between her ears
She was unable to people her solitude.
She had no kids. I believe her second marriage way 'polyamory'.
This is one of the paradoxes of loneliness.
Which is like the paradox that you aren't sucking my cock right now even though, deep down, that's what you really really want to do.
Solitude requires being alone whereas loneliness is felt most sharply in the company of others.
No. Loneliness is felt most sharply when everybody is very fucking far away. You may feel 'this party sucks. It's like nobody here understands that what they really want to do is not challenge me to beer pong but just suck my cock already.
Just as much as we rely upon the public world of appearances for recognition,
fuck recognition. Most people would settle for a beejay.
we need the private realm of solitude to be alone with ourselves and think.
No. We need a brain. That's all.
And this is what Arendt was stripped of when she lost the space to be alone with herself.
The Fascists at Berkely made her give five classes a week. The inhumanity! Why can't Americans just hand over lots of dollars and then fuck off so you can be alone with your beautiful thoughts.
‘What makes loneliness so unbearable,’
is that there's someone you love whom you really really want to be with. If you are away from your hubby, it is a good idea to suggest that you feel very lonely rather than that you are greatly chuffed thats every single one of your orifices is currently occupied by a throbbing dick.
she said ‘is the loss of one’s own self which can be realised in solitude …’
Or the recovery of one's own self or the fact that one's own self was borrowed by your cousin who has move to Atlanta.
In solitude, one is able to keep oneself company,
more particularly if you have lost your freakin' mind and are married to a log of wood whose name is Brenda and who went Bryn Mawr.
to engage in a conversation with oneself. In solitude, one doesn’t lose contact with the world, because the world of experience is ever-present in our thinking.
Unless you are smart enough to be working on proving the Reimann hypothesis
To quote Arendt, quoting Cicero: ‘Never is a man more active than when he does nothing, never is he less alone than when he is by himself.’
This was Stoicism for Dummies.
This is what ideological thinking and tyrannical thinking destroy – our ability to think with and for ourselves.
Sadly our ability to think depends on how smart we are. Smart peeps do STEM subjects. Stupid people pretend Hannah's Aunt was smart.
This is the root of organised loneliness
but only because it is the fruit of messy silliness which is itself the anal toot toot of syndicated sodomy.
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