Hannah Arendt's ultracrepidarian prohairesis

In ancient Greece, a humble cobbler once told the great painter, Apelles, that he had made a mistake in his depiction of a sandal. Apelles corrected the painting because cobbler are experts on sandals. However, he rejected the cobbler’s subsequent criticism of other aspects of the painting because the cobbler had no expertise on those matters. This gave rise to the saying ‘supra crepidam sutor iudicaret," meaning "let the shoemaker not judge beyond the sandal." Ultracrepidarianism arises where judgments are made outside one’s field of expertise.

Sadly, there is one academic field whose ‘prohairesis’- volitional predilection, or ‘choice made in advance’- is to always and only engage in ultracrepidarianism. Instead of cultivating the Stoic virtue of strengthening one’s will and independence to synthesize sense-impressions, or other information, in a manner that seeks for truth, justice, or utility, Philosophy- more particularly of a political or ‘public’ type’- has doubled down on puerile or paranoid availability cascades of a wholly ignorant or actively mischievous type.

Hannah Arendt, unlike Grete Hermann- who actually contributed to Social Democracy in Germany- studied stupid shite at Uni. She was 26 years old when she left Germany for Paris because the Nazis had came to power. She was 35 years old when she arrived in the USA in 1941. Had she studied something useful- like Dentistry- she might have remained in Germany and ended up in a death camp. For her, studying philosophy was the opposite of ‘practicing death’. It was a pathway to the more ample life to be found in Capitalist countries where the bourgeoisie pretend to respect a wholly foolish type of Paideia and thus a pedagogue with a foreign accent can make a decent enough living.

What is puzzling about Arendt was that she belonged to the first cohort of women to be enfranchised and to be given, at least in theory, an equal opportunity to hold political office and exercise authority in proprio persona. Arendt’s generation was aware of the theory that it was Livia, in ancient Rome, more than anyone else who ensured that the Republic could not be revived. She was the power behind the throne and her bloodline constituted the first Imperial dynasty. Tiberius was her son. Claudius her grandson, Caligula her great-grandson and Nero her great great-grandson. Yet, in formal terms, she held no authority. Tiberius vetoed her divine honours. It was Claudius who made her a God.
It must be said, there had been regnant Queens or Queen Regents in Europe but this was the exception not the rule. Male primogeniture remained the practice wherever feasible. The question was whether female enfranchisement too was exceptional or bound to be ephemeral. In Hitler’s Thousand Year Reich, women would be domestic animals birthing and breast-feeding swarms of blonde super-beasts.
In some countries, like England, female suffrage was considered a reward for the great role women played in the Great War. They had entered the munition factories in unprecedented numbers and showed their courage and patriotism by performing nursing duties under artillery fire. We may say that total war required a total mobilization of resources- including women as a factor of production- and that it was the experience of total war which permitted the development of totalitarian polities- where even the home and family life offered no refuge from the public realm. Your child might inform on you. A wife or a husband was obliged to report any disloyal utterance on the part of a spouse. What was true of the hearth was also true of the altar. The Church could be persecuted or rendered subservient. Neither those who managed industries nor those who worked in them were permitted to exercise any countervailing power over the state. Scientists and Artists, too, were required to dedicate themselves to the common purpose. Failure to do so received draconian punishment.
Arguably, Twentieth Century totalitarianism differed from anything imposed by a King or Emperor or Warlord in that women were notionally equal and, in practice, just as subservient to the power of the State. Previously, a woman was considered to be under the control of her father or husband. Now, she, like her brother, was equally subject to the Dictator whose personality cult required absolute, personal, loyalty regardless of ties of blood, affection, marriage, friendship, religion, or the pursuit of scientific or artistic excellence.

Arendt’s first book was on the origin of Totalitarianism by which is meant a centralized, dictatorial state which requires complete subservience from its subjects. Though, all states involved in ‘total war’ display this, in liberal democracies the pretence may be maintained that everybody is free and actually there is plenty of dissent- albeit of a cantankerous or eccentric kind. Oddly, this boosts morale. The radio broadcasts of the British BBC and the ‘War films’ produced during the Second World War are evidence of this. Consider the film the ‘life and death of Colonel Blimp’. In February 1942, when things were going very badly for England, a Labour Member of Parliament made an impassioned speech attacking ‘Blimpery’. Some ten years previously, David Low, a cartoonist for the Daily Mail, had created the character of an elderly, aristocratic, soldier who is completely out of touch with the modern world. Some thought Churchill, who had attained the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel during the Great War, just such a Colonel Blimp. He was an elderly aristocrat who believed India could be ruled as it had been in the days of, his father, Randolph Churchill. Churchill was bitterly opposed to the production of the film. But the film served a good purpose. It boosted morale. That’s all that mattered. Britain was fighting for its life. Thus, the film was a great success when it came out in 1943. Why? Deborah Kerr plays three roles in the film. First she is the intelligent and educated Victorian governess of Blimp as a little boy. Then she is his love interest. Finally, she is a career woman who has volunteered for military service and is his chauffeur. Hitler hadn’t mobilized the women of Germany. English women had mobilized themselves so effectively as to alter the balance of power by greatly raising British industrial productivity. These women had affection for avuncular Blimps and the cherubic Churchill adorably playing the part of the British bull-dog. But the only thing that mattered was total victory in a total war. It was this totalized Society which Socialised its Economic arrangements under Clement Atlee. Churchill returned to office to preserve what Labour had created- the National Health Service is British politics’ one sacred cow- while lifting rationing and ameliorating the more onerous or doctrinaire aspects of Labour’s policies.

It must be said, total war can actually make things better in a totalitarian country because the Dictator has to stop doing quite as much stupid evil shit as is his habit, because otherwise the enemy will annihilate his army. More generally, coercion is costly. Evil psychopaths have to dial down the sadism if they want more and more nice palaces and super-yachts.

One final point. Countries tend to be ruled as they were previously ruled. Under exigent circumstances there may be ‘functional convergence’- in other words, what is done is the same- but how it is done is different. Consider the Colonel Blimp film. Churchill tells his Minister of Information to put a stop to it. But the ‘English Goebbels’ is Brendan Bracken (whom Orwell satirized as ‘Big Brother’ presiding over the ‘Ministry for Truth’)- a Catholic Fenian by birth who pretended to be an Australian- whom Baldwin described as ‘Churchill’s chela’ (chela is the Hindu word for disciple). Bracken saw that the Blimp film helped England and thus helped Churchill. It was a big hit in the UK but, quite correctly, an export ban prevented it being screened in the US. It gave a wholly misleading picture of the leadership of the British Army. Churchill would find, Field Marshall turned Viceroy, Wavell the biggest thorn in his Imperial backside. Thus, England’s triumph also meant the triumph of freedom for its Indian subjects. Bracken deplored this outcome and, though ennobled as a Viscount, died prematurely in a political wilderness of his own creation.

I am tempted to speculate that people like Leo Strauss and Hannah Arendt, gaining refuge in America, were aware that German Jewish intellectuals- like Hugo Preuss, who wrote the Weimar Constitution- had dug the grave of their own people and the culture they had so adored and advanced. That was not a mistake Jews could afford to repeat.

Strauss and Arendt had to write books and give lectures to earn dollars. But those books and lectures were arid, ambiguous and obviously erroneous on all points of history or hermeneutics. Their misology, it may be, was a precaution against their being taken seriously. If American Youth must be corrupted, let it be by their own comic books and jungle jazz. The German Jew had been moths to a false enlightenment. Let such political theory as they professed, in their new places of refuge, be so woeful and witless a wilderness that no Sodom Settlement, no Gomorrah Governance, was possible there.

According to the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, Arendt believed what ‘made totalitarianism possible was collapsed political structures and masses of uprooted people who had lost their orientation and sense of reality in a world marked by socio-economic transformation, revolution and war.’

Arnedt’s readers knew Japan had experienced none of these things. Yet the Japanese, albeit more briefly, had embraced totalitarianism to a higher degree than Italy or Germany. The Japanese soldier wouldn’t stop fighting till the Emperor surrendered. By contrast, Ireland had had an uprising and a Civil War. It wasn’t totalitarian at all. Indeed, very few countries went down that road unless some external force- e.g. the Red Army- constrained them. The other possibility was that, as in Mao’s China, a party with a totalitarian ideology waded through a sea of blood to take absolute power. But, in China, peak totalitarianism still lay in the future. Poverty is a constraint for even the most evil polity.

Arendt had no personal experience of living in a totalitarian society and did not understand the incentive matrix which arises under those conditions. Perhaps, there was a Cold War angle to the success of her book. Japan and West Germany were allies. Nazism could be explained as an aberration brought on by Anti-Semitism. The Rooskis and the Chinks were obviously the descendants of Genghis Khan. Thankfully, it was the Soviets who built a great wall to prevent their subjects escaping. The West could focus on attaining yet higher affluence.Arendt’s second book- ‘the Human condition’- came out in 1958. At that time, there was some notion that a ‘Social Gospel’ or ‘Humanistic Marxism’ could provide a via media for the Turd World and the backward Catholics and Buddhists and so forth. Arendt’s ‘critical conception of the modern age’ features a ‘tripartite division of the vita activa in labor, work and action’. Sadly, labour is work which is action and so there is no fucking division. The Stanford Encyclopaedia claims that ‘By distinguishing action (praxis) from fabrication (poiesis), by linking it to freedom and plurality, and by showing its connection to speech and remembrance, Arendt is able to articulate a conception of politics in which questions of meaning and identity can be addressed in a fresh and original manner.’ Sadly, poiesis is merely a type of praxis. Freedom obtains even where there is no praxis or poiesis. It doesn’t where it is slave-traders who are doing the praxis and poiesis and theoria and methexis. They may promote ‘Pluralism’ by ensuring that slaves of different ethnicities and languages are mixed together. It will take a generation for a pidgin to develop and another generation for a creole tongue to evolve. But, speech and remembrance are like farts and forgetting. They have no magical properties.

Consider the following-

Labor is judged by its ability to sustain human life,

Hunting, fishing and gathering fruits and nuts etc. are not described as labour. The agricultural revolution did create something we recognize as labour. But it was judged by reproductive success and the degree to which it permitted higher population density and increased division of labour. More productive techniques and those who used them demographically replaced less productive agricultural labour. The rate of growth of population was what mattered, not sustenance or subsistence.

to cater to our biological needs of consumption and reproduction, work is judged by its ability to build and maintain a world fit for human use,

No. Work is judged by its remuneration which in turn depends on supply and demand. Shit produced by Arendt is not fit for even donkey use. But it was work for she was well paid because there was a demand for worthless shite.

and action is judged by its ability to disclose the identity of the agent, to affirm the reality of the world, and to actualize our capacity for freedom.

Actions are judged by their utility in some broad sense. A guy who a stranger’s life is considered to have performed a good action even if he never disclosed his name or failed to affirm that the world is real rather than a hologram. As for ‘actualizing your capacity for freedom’, it is like aligning your chakras so you can use the 98 percent of the brain’s neurons which lie dormant because we have been fooled into eating junk food rather than our own shit.

Why is Arendt not considered a moron? The answer is she that bounced out of a bad period in her country’s history and, with commendable hucksterism, marketed her ‘Everything that ever happened is actually about me’ brand of infantile narcissism in a country which had very rapidly expanded its Higher Education Sector.

Thus ‘by viewing action as a mode of human togetherness, Arendt is able to develop a conception of participatory democracy which stands in direct contrast to the bureaucratized and elitist forms of politics so characteristic of the modern epoch.’ What this means is that true political action causes the Cabinet to order a State of Emergency such that everybody can participate in trying to find my TV remote while listening to me gas on about how despite my coming out of the closet as a Disabled Transgender Lesbian who was anally probed by Neo-Liberalism, nevertheless, Beyonce did not come to my birthday party. Well, it wasn’t a birthday party per se. It was more like a sleep-over and I only invited her to make Rihanna jelly.

It may be argued that Arendt wasn’t a systematic thinker. She was a fine phrase-maker whose feeble intellect burned with a hard gem-like flame to inscribe her oeuvre in the annals of Humanity’s Promethean struggle to say ‘it’s nice to be nice. That’s what Plato was really getting at.’ while eagles tore out its liver and Zeus shat himself laughing. Since Arendt did her part, as a pensioner of the bien pensant, by shitting on the new state of Israel and pretending ‘Operation Paperclip’-type scientific Eichmanns were ‘banal’ not evil, I suppose she deserved such emoluments and royalties as came her way. She was a refugee who worked hard to earn a livelihood in her new country. But, that country has changed. Arendt worship isn’t obligatory. Indeed, it is mischievous. Where Arendt continues to be taught, you are going to get ‘Virulent Wokeness’ of the Jason Stanley type. One may say, what’s wrong if Marci Shore, Timothy Snyder and Jason Stanley escape Trump’s Gestapo and gain refuge in Canada? The obvious answer is that this will trigger the invasion of Canada. Stanley and Shore and her husband may think they are safe hiding in a garret. But they aren’t really. Look at what happened to Anne Frank.

In Macro-Economics, Expectations can create Reality. In Political Theory- if not practical politics- Perception is Reality. It is foolish to encourage impressionable young people to accept Arendt as an authority on how Totalitarianism originates. The result is that they will seek to battle Nazis where no Nazis are. As I have persuasively argued in previous volumes, the real threat is the Spanish Inquisition. They are very sneaky. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance. There is smoke rising from your neighbour’s back-yard. He says he is having a barbeque. Don’t believe him. It’s a fucking auto da fe mate! They will burn you as a heretic. Mark my words, the new Pope isn’t a nice corn-fed lad from Illinois. He’s Torque-fucking-mada!

In ancient Greece, a humble cobbler once told the great painter, Apelles, that he had made a mistake in his depiction of a sandal. Apelles corrected the painting because cobbler are experts on sandals. However, he rejected the cobbler’s subsequent criticism of other aspects of the painting because the cobbler had no expertise on those matters. This gave rise to the saying ‘supra crepidam sutor iudicaret," meaning "let the shoemaker not judge beyond the sandal." Ultracrepidarianism arises where judgments are made outside one’s field of expertise.

Sadly, there is one academic field whose ‘prohairesis’- volitional predilection, or ‘choice made in advance’- is to always and only engage in ultracrepidarianism. Instead of cultivating the Stoic virtue of strengthening one’s will and independence to synthesize sense-impressions, or other information, in a manner that seeks for truth, justice, or utility, Philosophy- more particularly of a political or ‘public’ type’- has doubled down on puerile or paranoid availability cascades of a wholly ignorant or actively mischievous type.

Hannah Arendt, unlike Grete Hermann- who actually contributed to Social Democracy in Germany- studied stupid shite at Uni. She was 26 years old when she left Germany for Paris because the Nazis had came to power. She was 35 years old when she arrived in the USA in 1941. Had she studied something useful- like Dentistry- she might have remained in Germany and ended up in a death camp. For her, studying philosophy was the opposite of ‘practicing death’. It was a pathway to the more ample life to be found in Capitalist countries where the bourgeoisie pretend to respect a wholly foolish type of Paideia and thus a pedagogue with a foreign accent can make a decent enough living.
What is puzzling about Arendt was that she belonged to the first cohort of women to be enfranchised and to be given, at least in theory, an equal opportunity to hold political office and exercise authority in proprio persona. Arendt’s generation was aware of the theory that it was Livia, in ancient Rome, more than anyone else who ensured that the Republic could not be revived. She was the power behind the throne and her bloodline constituted the first Imperial dynasty. Tiberius was her son. Claudius her grandson, Caligula her great-grandson and Nero her great great-grandson. Yet, in formal terms, she held no authority. Tiberius vetoed her divine honours. It was Claudius who made her a God.
It must be said, there had been regnant Queens or Queen Regents in Europe but this was the exception not the rule. Male primogeniture remained the practice wherever feasible. The question was whether female enfranchisement too was exceptional or bound to be ephemeral. In Hitler’s Thousand Year Reich, women would be domestic animals birthing and breast-feeding swarms of blonde super-beasts.
In some countries, like England, female suffrage was considered a reward for the great role women played in the Great War. They had entered the munition factories in unprecedented numbers and showed their courage and patriotism by performing nursing duties under artillery fire. We may say that total war required a total mobilization of resources- including women as a factor of production- and that it was the experience of total war which permitted the development of totalitarian polities- where even the home and family life offered no refuge from the public realm. Your child might inform on you. A wife or a husband was obliged to report any disloyal utterance on the part of a spouse. What was true of the hearth was also true of the altar. The Church could be persecuted or rendered subservient. Neither those who managed industries nor those who worked in them were permitted to exercise any countervailing power over the state. Scientists and Artists, too, were required to dedicate themselves to the common purpose. Failure to do so received draconian punishment.
Arguably, Twentieth Century totalitarianism differed from anything imposed by a King or Emperor or Warlord in that women were notionally equal and, in practice, just as subservient to the power of the State. Previously, a woman was considered to be under the control of her father or husband. Now, she, like her brother, was equally subject to the Dictator whose personality cult required absolute, personal, loyalty regardless of ties of blood, affection, marriage, friendship, religion, or the pursuit of scientific or artistic excellence.

Arendt’s first book was on the origin of Totalitarianism by which is meant a centralized, dictatorial state which requires complete subservience from its subjects. Though, all states involved in ‘total war’ display this, in liberal democracies the pretence may be maintained that everybody is free and actually there is plenty of dissent- albeit of a cantankerous or eccentric kind. Oddly, this boosts morale. The radio broadcasts of the British BBC and the ‘War films’ produced during the Second World War are evidence of this. Consider the film the ‘life and death of Colonel Blimp’. In February 1942, when things were going very badly for England, a Labour Member of Parliament made an impassioned speech attacking ‘Blimpery’. Some ten years previously, David Low, a cartoonist for the Daily Mail, had created the character of an elderly, aristocratic, soldier who is completely out of touch with the modern world. Some thought Churchill, who had attained the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel during the Great War, just such a Colonel Blimp. He was an elderly aristocrat who believed India could be ruled as it had been in the days of, his father, Randolph Churchill. Churchill was bitterly opposed to the production of the film. But the film served a good purpose. It boosted morale. That’s all that mattered. Britain was fighting for its life. Thus, the film was a great success when it came out in 1943. Why? Deborah Kerr plays three roles in the film. First she is the intelligent and educated Victorian governess of Blimp as a little boy. Then she is his love interest. Finally, she is a career woman who has volunteered for military service and is his chauffeur. Hitler hadn’t mobilized the women of Germany. English women had mobilized themselves so effectively as to alter the balance of power by greatly raising British industrial productivity. These women had affection for avuncular Blimps and the cherubic Churchill adorably playing the part of the British bull-dog. But the only thing that mattered was total victory in a total war. It was this totalized Society which Socialised its Economic arrangements under Clement Atlee. Churchill returned to office to preserve what Labour had created- the National Health Service is British politics’ one sacred cow- while lifting rationing and ameliorating the more onerous or doctrinaire aspects of Labour’s policies.

It must be said, total war can actually make things better in a totalitarian country because the Dictator has to stop doing quite as much stupid evil shit as is his habit, because otherwise the enemy will annihilate his army. More generally, coercion is costly. Evil psychopaths have to dial down the sadism if they want more and more nice palaces and super-yachts.

One final point. Countries tend to be ruled as they were previously ruled. Under exigent circumstances there may be ‘functional convergence’- in other words, what is done is the same- but how it is done is different. Consider the Colonel Blimp film. Churchill tells his Minister of Information to put a stop to it. But the ‘English Goebbels’ is Brendan Bracken (whom Orwell satirized as ‘Big Brother’ presiding over the ‘Ministry for Truth’)- a Catholic Fenian by birth who pretended to be an Australian- whom Baldwin described as ‘Churchill’s chela’ (chela is the Hindu word for disciple). Bracken saw that the Blimp film helped England and thus helped Churchill. It was a big hit in the UK but, quite correctly, an export ban prevented it being screened in the US. It gave a wholly misleading picture of the leadership of the British Army. Churchill would find, Field Marshall turned Viceroy, Wavell the biggest thorn in his Imperial backside. Thus, England’s triumph also meant the triumph of freedom for its Indian subjects. Bracken deplored this outcome and, though ennobled as a Viscount, died prematurely in a political wilderness of his own creation.

I am tempted to speculate that people like Leo Strauss and Hannah Arendt, gaining refuge in America, were aware that German Jewish intellectuals- like Hugo Preuss, who wrote the Weimar Constitution- had dug the grave of their own people and the culture they had so adored and advanced. That was not a mistake Jews could afford to repeat.

Strauss and Arendt had to write books and give lectures to earn dollars. But those books and lectures were arid, ambiguous and obviously erroneous on all points of history or hermeneutics. Their misology, it may be, was a precaution against their being taken seriously. If American Youth must be corrupted, let it be by their own comic books and jungle jazz. The German Jew had been moths to a false enlightenment. Let such political theory as they professed, in their new places of refuge, be so woeful and witless a wilderness that no Sodom Settlement, no Gomorrah Governance, was possible there.

According to the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, Arendt believed what ‘made totalitarianism possible was collapsed political structures and masses of uprooted people who had lost their orientation and sense of reality in a world marked by socio-economic transformation, revolution and war.’

Arnedt’s readers knew Japan had experienced none of these things. Yet the Japanese, albeit more briefly, had embraced totalitarianism to a higher degree than Italy or Germany. The Japanese soldier wouldn’t stop fighting till the Emperor surrendered. By contrast, Ireland had had an uprising and a Civil War. It wasn’t totalitarian at all. Indeed, very few countries went down that road unless some external force- e.g. the Red Army- constrained them. The other possibility was that, as in Mao’s China, a party with a totalitarian ideology waded through a sea of blood to take absolute power. But, in China, peak totalitarianism still lay in the future. Poverty is a constraint for even the most evil polity.

Arendt had no personal experience of living in a totalitarian society and did not understand the incentive matrix which arises under those conditions. Perhaps, there was a Cold War angle to the success of her book. Japan and West Germany were allies. Nazism could be explained as an aberration brought on by Anti-Semitism. The Rooskis and the Chinks were obviously the descendants of Genghis Khan. Thankfully, it was the Soviets who built a great wall to prevent their subjects escaping. The West could focus on attaining yet higher affluence.Arendt’s second book- ‘the Human condition’- came out in 1958. At that time, there was some notion that a ‘Social Gospel’ or ‘Humanistic Marxism’ could provide a via media for the Turd World and the backward Catholics and Buddhists and so forth. Arendt’s ‘critical conception of the modern age’ features a ‘tripartite division of the vita activa in labor, work and action’. Sadly, labour is work which is action and so there is no fucking division. The Stanford Encyclopaedia claims that ‘By distinguishing action (praxis) from fabrication (poiesis), by linking it to freedom and plurality, and by showing its connection to speech and remembrance, Arendt is able to articulate a conception of politics in which questions of meaning and identity can be addressed in a fresh and original manner.’ Sadly, poiesis is merely a type of praxis. Freedom obtains even where there is no praxis or poiesis. It doesn’t where it is slave-traders who are doing the praxis and poiesis and theoria and methexis. They may promote ‘Pluralism’ by ensuring that slaves of different ethnicities and languages are mixed together. It will take a generation for a pidgin to develop and another generation for a creole tongue to evolve. But, speech and remembrance are like farts and forgetting. They have no magical properties.

Consider the following-

Labor is judged by its ability to sustain human life,

Hunting, fishing and gathering fruits and nuts etc. are not described as labour. The agricultural revolution did create something we recognize as labour. But it was judged by reproductive success and the degree to which it permitted higher population density and increased division of labour. More productive techniques and those who used them demographically replaced less productive agricultural labour. The rate of growth of population was what mattered, not sustenance or subsistence.

to cater to our biological needs of consumption and reproduction, work is judged by its ability to build and maintain a world fit for human use,

No. Work is judged by its remuneration which in turn depends on supply and demand. Shit produced by Arendt is not fit for even donkey use. But it was work for she was well paid because there was a demand for worthless shite.

and action is judged by its ability to disclose the identity of the agent, to affirm the reality of the world, and to actualize our capacity for freedom.

Actions are judged by their utility in some broad sense. A guy who a stranger’s life is considered to have performed a good action even if he never disclosed his name or failed to affirm that the world is real rather than a hologram. As for ‘actualizing your capacity for freedom’, it is like aligning your chakras so you can use the 98 percent of the brain’s neurons which lie dormant because we have been fooled into eating junk food rather than our own shit.

Why is Arendt not considered a moron? The answer is she that bounced out of a bad period in her country’s history and, with commendable hucksterism, marketed her ‘Everything that ever happened is actually about me’ brand of infantile narcissism in a country which had very rapidly expanded its Higher Education Sector.

Thus ‘by viewing action as a mode of human togetherness, Arendt is able to develop a conception of participatory democracy which stands in direct contrast to the bureaucratized and elitist forms of politics so characteristic of the modern epoch.’ What this means is that true political action causes the Cabinet to order a State of Emergency such that everybody can participate in trying to find my TV remote while listening to me gas on about how despite my coming out of the closet as a Disabled Transgender Lesbian who was anally probed by Neo-Liberalism, nevertheless, Beyonce did not come to my birthday party. Well, it wasn’t a birthday party per se. It was more like a sleep-over and I only invited her to make Rihanna jelly.

It may be argued that Arendt wasn’t a systematic thinker. She was a fine phrase-maker whose feeble intellect burned with a hard gem-like flame to inscribe her oeuvre in the annals of Humanity’s Promethean struggle to say ‘it’s nice to be nice. That’s what Plato was really getting at.’ while eagles tore out its liver and Zeus shat himself laughing. Since Arendt did her part, as a pensioner of the bien pensant, by shitting on the new state of Israel and pretending ‘Operation Paperclip’-type scientific Eichmanns were ‘banal’ not evil, I suppose she deserved such emoluments and royalties as came her way. She was a refugee who worked hard to earn a livelihood in her new country. But, that country has changed. Arendt worship isn’t obligatory. Indeed, it is mischievous. Where Arendt continues to be taught, you are going to get ‘Virulent Wokeness’ of the Jason Stanley type. One may say, what’s wrong if Marci Shore, Timothy Snyder and Jason Stanley escape Trump’s Gestapo and gain refuge in Canada? The obvious answer is that this will trigger the invasion of Canada. Stanley and Shore and her husband may think they are safe hiding in a garret. But they aren’t really. Look at what happened to Anne Frank.

In Macro-Economics, Expectations can create Reality. In Political Theory- if not practical politics- Perception is Reality. It is foolish to encourage impressionable young people to accept Arendt as an authority on how Totalitarianism originates. The result is that they will seek to battle Nazis where no Nazis are. As I have persuasively argued in previous volumes, the real threat is the Spanish Inquisition. They are very sneaky. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance. There is smoke rising from your neighbour’s back-yard. He says he is having a barbeque. Don’t believe him. It’s a fucking auto da fe mate! They will burn you as a heretic. Mark my words, the new Pope isn’t a nice corn-fed lad from Illinois. He’s Torque-fucking-mada!

In ancient Greece, a humble cobbler once told the great painter, Apelles, that he had made a mistake in his depiction of a sandal. Apelles corrected the painting because cobbler are experts on sandals. However, he rejected the cobbler’s subsequent criticism of other aspects of the painting because the cobbler had no expertise on those matters. This gave rise to the saying ‘supra crepidam sutor iudicaret," meaning "let the shoemaker not judge beyond the sandal." Ultracrepidarianism arises where judgments are made outside one’s field of expertise.

Sadly, there is one academic field whose ‘prohairesis’- volitional predilection, or ‘choice made in advance’- is to always and only engage in ultracrepidarianism. Instead of cultivating the Stoic virtue of strengthening one’s will and independence to synthesize sense-impressions, or other information, in a manner that seeks for truth, justice, or utility, Philosophy- more particularly of a political or ‘public’ type’- has doubled down on puerile or paranoid availability cascades of a wholly ignorant or actively mischievous type.

Hannah Arendt, unlike Grete Hermann- who actually contributed to Social Democracy in Germany- studied stupid shite at Uni. She was 26 years old when she left Germany for Paris because the Nazis had came to power. She was 35 years old when she arrived in the USA in 1941. Had she studied something useful- like Dentistry- she might have remained in Germany and ended up in a death camp. For her, studying philosophy was the opposite of ‘practicing death’. It was a pathway to the more ample life to be found in Capitalist countries where the bourgeoisie pretend to respect a wholly foolish type of Paideia and thus a pedagogue with a foreign accent can make a decent enough living.
What is puzzling about Arendt was that she belonged to the first cohort of women to be enfranchised and to be given, at least in theory, an equal opportunity to hold political office and exercise authority in proprio persona. Arendt’s generation was aware of the theory that it was Livia, in ancient Rome, more than anyone else who ensured that the Republic could not be revived. She was the power behind the throne and her bloodline constituted the first Imperial dynasty. Tiberius was her son. Claudius her grandson, Caligula her great-grandson and Nero her great great-grandson. Yet, in formal terms, she held no authority. Tiberius vetoed her divine honours. It was Claudius who made her a God.
It must be said, there had been regnant Queens or Queen Regents in Europe but this was the exception not the rule. Male primogeniture remained the practice wherever feasible. The question was whether female enfranchisement too was exceptional or bound to be ephemeral. In Hitler’s Thousand Year Reich, women would be domestic animals birthing and breast-feeding swarms of blonde super-beasts.
In some countries, like England, female suffrage was considered a reward for the great role women played in the Great War. They had entered the munition factories in unprecedented numbers and showed their courage and patriotism by performing nursing duties under artillery fire. We may say that total war required a total mobilization of resources- including women as a factor of production- and that it was the experience of total war which permitted the development of totalitarian polities- where even the home and family life offered no refuge from the public realm. Your child might inform on you. A wife or a husband was obliged to report any disloyal utterance on the part of a spouse. What was true of the hearth was also true of the altar. The Church could be persecuted or rendered subservient. Neither those who managed industries nor those who worked in them were permitted to exercise any countervailing power over the state. Scientists and Artists, too, were required to dedicate themselves to the common purpose. Failure to do so received draconian punishment.
Arguably, Twentieth Century totalitarianism differed from anything imposed by a King or Emperor or Warlord in that women were notionally equal and, in practice, just as subservient to the power of the State. Previously, a woman was considered to be under the control of her father or husband. Now, she, like her brother, was equally subject to the Dictator whose personality cult required absolute, personal, loyalty regardless of ties of blood, affection, marriage, friendship, religion, or the pursuit of scientific or artistic excellence.

Arendt’s first book was on the origin of Totalitarianism by which is meant a centralized, dictatorial state which requires complete subservience from its subjects. Though, all states involved in ‘total war’ display this, in liberal democracies the pretence may be maintained that everybody is free and actually there is plenty of dissent- albeit of a cantankerous or eccentric kind. Oddly, this boosts morale. The radio broadcasts of the British BBC and the ‘War films’ produced during the Second World War are evidence of this. Consider the film the ‘life and death of Colonel Blimp’. In February 1942, when things were going very badly for England, a Labour Member of Parliament made an impassioned speech attacking ‘Blimpery’. Some ten years previously, David Low, a cartoonist for the Daily Mail, had created the character of an elderly, aristocratic, soldier who is completely out of touch with the modern world. Some thought Churchill, who had attained the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel during the Great War, just such a Colonel Blimp. He was an elderly aristocrat who believed India could be ruled as it had been in the days of, his father, Randolph Churchill. Churchill was bitterly opposed to the production of the film. But the film served a good purpose. It boosted morale. That’s all that mattered. Britain was fighting for its life. Thus, the film was a great success when it came out in 1943. Why? Deborah Kerr plays three roles in the film. First she is the intelligent and educated Victorian governess of Blimp as a little boy. Then she is his love interest. Finally, she is a career woman who has volunteered for military service and is his chauffeur. Hitler hadn’t mobilized the women of Germany. English women had mobilized themselves so effectively as to alter the balance of power by greatly raising British industrial productivity. These women had affection for avuncular Blimps and the cherubic Churchill adorably playing the part of the British bull-dog. But the only thing that mattered was total victory in a total war. It was this totalized Society which Socialised its Economic arrangements under Clement Atlee. Churchill returned to office to preserve what Labour had created- the National Health Service is British politics’ one sacred cow- while lifting rationing and ameliorating the more onerous or doctrinaire aspects of Labour’s policies.

It must be said, total war can actually make things better in a totalitarian country because the Dictator has to stop doing quite as much stupid evil shit as is his habit, because otherwise the enemy will annihilate his army. More generally, coercion is costly. Evil psychopaths have to dial down the sadism if they want more and more nice palaces and super-yachts.

One final point. Countries tend to be ruled as they were previously ruled. Under exigent circumstances there may be ‘functional convergence’- in other words, what is done is the same- but how it is done is different. Consider the Colonel Blimp film. Churchill tells his Minister of Information to put a stop to it. But the ‘English Goebbels’ is Brendan Bracken (whom Orwell satirized as ‘Big Brother’ presiding over the ‘Ministry for Truth’)- a Catholic Fenian by birth who pretended to be an Australian- whom Baldwin described as ‘Churchill’s chela’ (chela is the Hindu word for disciple). Bracken saw that the Blimp film helped England and thus helped Churchill. It was a big hit in the UK but, quite correctly, an export ban prevented it being screened in the US. It gave a wholly misleading picture of the leadership of the British Army. Churchill would find, Field Marshall turned Viceroy, Wavell the biggest thorn in his Imperial backside. Thus, England’s triumph also meant the triumph of freedom for its Indian subjects. Bracken deplored this outcome and, though ennobled as a Viscount, died prematurely in a political wilderness of his own creation.

I am tempted to speculate that people like Leo Strauss and Hannah Arendt, gaining refuge in America, were aware that German Jewish intellectuals- like Hugo Preuss, who wrote the Weimar Constitution- had dug the grave of their own people and the culture they had so adored and advanced. That was not a mistake Jews could afford to repeat.

Strauss and Arendt had to write books and give lectures to earn dollars. But those books and lectures were arid, ambiguous and obviously erroneous on all points of history or hermeneutics. Their misology, it may be, was a precaution against their being taken seriously. If American Youth must be corrupted, let it be by their own comic books and jungle jazz. The German Jew had been moths to a false enlightenment. Let such political theory as they professed, in their new places of refuge, be so woeful and witless a wilderness that no Sodom Settlement, no Gomorrah Governance, was possible there.

According to the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, Arendt believed what ‘made totalitarianism possible was collapsed political structures and masses of uprooted people who had lost their orientation and sense of reality in a world marked by socio-economic transformation, revolution and war.’

Arnedt’s readers knew Japan had experienced none of these things. Yet the Japanese, albeit more briefly, had embraced totalitarianism to a higher degree than Italy or Germany. The Japanese soldier wouldn’t stop fighting till the Emperor surrendered. By contrast, Ireland had had an uprising and a Civil War. It wasn’t totalitarian at all. Indeed, very few countries went down that road unless some external force- e.g. the Red Army- constrained them. The other possibility was that, as in Mao’s China, a party with a totalitarian ideology waded through a sea of blood to take absolute power. But, in China, peak totalitarianism still lay in the future. Poverty is a constraint for even the most evil polity.

Arendt had no personal experience of living in a totalitarian society and did not understand the incentive matrix which arises under those conditions. Perhaps, there was a Cold War angle to the success of her book. Japan and West Germany were allies. Nazism could be explained as an aberration brought on by Anti-Semitism. The Rooskis and the Chinks were obviously the descendants of Genghis Khan. Thankfully, it was the Soviets who built a great wall to prevent their subjects escaping. The West could focus on attaining yet higher affluence.Arendt’s second book- ‘the Human condition’- came out in 1958. At that time, there was some notion that a ‘Social Gospel’ or ‘Humanistic Marxism’ could provide a via media for the Turd World and the backward Catholics and Buddhists and so forth. Arendt’s ‘critical conception of the modern age’ features a ‘tripartite division of the vita activa in labor, work and action’. Sadly, labour is work which is action and so there is no fucking division. The Stanford Encyclopaedia claims that ‘By distinguishing action (praxis) from fabrication (poiesis), by linking it to freedom and plurality, and by showing its connection to speech and remembrance, Arendt is able to articulate a conception of politics in which questions of meaning and identity can be addressed in a fresh and original manner.’ Sadly, poiesis is merely a type of praxis. Freedom obtains even where there is no praxis or poiesis. It doesn’t where it is slave-traders who are doing the praxis and poiesis and theoria and methexis. They may promote ‘Pluralism’ by ensuring that slaves of different ethnicities and languages are mixed together. It will take a generation for a pidgin to develop and another generation for a creole tongue to evolve. But, speech and remembrance are like farts and forgetting. They have no magical properties.

Consider the following-

Labor is judged by its ability to sustain human life,

Hunting, fishing and gathering fruits and nuts etc. are not described as labour. The agricultural revolution did create something we recognize as labour. But it was judged by reproductive success and the degree to which it permitted higher population density and increased division of labour. More productive techniques and those who used them demographically replaced less productive agricultural labour. The rate of growth of population was what mattered, not sustenance or subsistence.

to cater to our biological needs of consumption and reproduction, work is judged by its ability to build and maintain a world fit for human use,

No. Work is judged by its remuneration which in turn depends on supply and demand. Shit produced by Arendt is not fit for even donkey use. But it was work for she was well paid because there was a demand for worthless shite.

and action is judged by its ability to disclose the identity of the agent, to affirm the reality of the world, and to actualize our capacity for freedom.

Actions are judged by their utility in some broad sense. A guy who a stranger’s life is considered to have performed a good action even if he never disclosed his name or failed to affirm that the world is real rather than a hologram. As for ‘actualizing your capacity for freedom’, it is like aligning your chakras so you can use the 98 percent of the brain’s neurons which lie dormant because we have been fooled into eating junk food rather than our own shit.

Why is Arendt not considered a moron? The answer is she that bounced out of a bad period in her country’s history and, with commendable hucksterism, marketed her ‘Everything that ever happened is actually about me’ brand of infantile narcissism in a country which had very rapidly expanded its Higher Education Sector.

Thus ‘by viewing action as a mode of human togetherness, Arendt is able to develop a conception of participatory democracy which stands in direct contrast to the bureaucratized and elitist forms of politics so characteristic of the modern epoch.’ What this means is that true political action causes the Cabinet to order a State of Emergency such that everybody can participate in trying to find my TV remote while listening to me gas on about how despite my coming out of the closet as a Disabled Transgender Lesbian who was anally probed by Neo-Liberalism, nevertheless, Beyonce did not come to my birthday party. Well, it wasn’t a birthday party per se. It was more like a sleep-over and I only invited her to make Rihanna jelly.

It may be argued that Arendt wasn’t a systematic thinker. She was a fine phrase-maker whose feeble intellect burned with a hard gem-like flame to inscribe her oeuvre in the annals of Humanity’s Promethean struggle to say ‘it’s nice to be nice. That’s what Plato was really getting at.’ while eagles tore out its liver and Zeus shat himself laughing. Since Arendt did her part, as a pensioner of the bien pensant, by shitting on the new state of Israel and pretending ‘Operation Paperclip’-type scientific Eichmanns were ‘banal’ not evil, I suppose she deserved such emoluments and royalties as came her way. She was a refugee who worked hard to earn a livelihood in her new country. But, that country has changed. Arendt worship isn’t obligatory. Indeed, it is mischievous. Where Arendt continues to be taught, you are going to get ‘Virulent Wokeness’ of the Jason Stanley type. One may say, what’s wrong if Marci Shore, Timothy Snyder and Jason Stanley escape Trump’s Gestapo and gain refuge in Canada? The obvious answer is that this will trigger the invasion of Canada. Stanley and Shore and her husband may think they are safe hiding in a garret. But they aren’t really. Look at what happened to Anne Frank.

In Macro-Economics, Expectations can create Reality. In Political Theory- if not practical politics- Perception is Reality. It is foolish to encourage impressionable young people to accept Arendt as an authority on how Totalitarianism originates. The result is that they will seek to battle Nazis where no Nazis are. As I have persuasively argued in previous volumes, the real threat is the Spanish Inquisition. They are very sneaky. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance. There is smoke rising from your neighbour’s back-yard. He says he is having a barbeque. Don’t believe him. It’s a fucking auto da fe mate! They will burn you as a heretic. Mark my words, the new Pope isn’t a nice corn-fed lad from Illinois. He’s Torque-fucking-mada!

In ancient Greece, a humble cobbler once told the great painter, Apelles, that he had made a mistake in his depiction of a sandal. Apelles corrected the painting because cobbler are experts on sandals. However, he rejected the cobbler’s subsequent criticism of other aspects of the painting because the cobbler had no expertise on those matters. This gave rise to the saying ‘supra crepidam sutor iudicaret," meaning "let the shoemaker not judge beyond the sandal." Ultracrepidarianism arises where judgments are made outside one’s field of expertise.

Sadly, there is one academic field whose ‘prohairesis’- volitional predilection, or ‘choice made in advance’- is to always and only engage in ultracrepidarianism. Instead of cultivating the Stoic virtue of strengthening one’s will and independence to synthesize sense-impressions, or other information, in a manner that seeks for truth, justice, or utility, Philosophy- more particularly of a political or ‘public’ type’- has doubled down on puerile or paranoid availability cascades of a wholly ignorant or actively mischievous type.

Hannah Arendt, unlike Grete Hermann- who actually contributed to Social Democracy in Germany- studied stupid shite at Uni. She was 26 years old when she left Germany for Paris because the Nazis had came to power. She was 35 years old when she arrived in the USA in 1941. Had she studied something useful- like Dentistry- she might have remained in Germany and ended up in a death camp. For her, studying philosophy was the opposite of ‘practicing death’. It was a pathway to the more ample life to be found in Capitalist countries where the bourgeoisie pretend to respect a wholly foolish type of Paideia and thus a pedagogue with a foreign accent can make a decent enough living.
What is puzzling about Arendt was that she belonged to the first cohort of women to be enfranchised and to be given, at least in theory, an equal opportunity to hold political office and exercise authority in proprio persona. Arendt’s generation was aware of the theory that it was Livia, in ancient Rome, more than anyone else who ensured that the Republic could not be revived. She was the power behind the throne and her bloodline constituted the first Imperial dynasty. Tiberius was her son. Claudius her grandson, Caligula her great-grandson and Nero her great great-grandson. Yet, in formal terms, she held no authority. Tiberius vetoed her divine honours. It was Claudius who made her a God.
It must be said, there had been regnant Queens or Queen Regents in Europe but this was the exception not the rule. Male primogeniture remained the practice wherever feasible. The question was whether female enfranchisement too was exceptional or bound to be ephemeral. In Hitler’s Thousand Year Reich, women would be domestic animals birthing and breast-feeding swarms of blonde super-beasts.
In some countries, like England, female suffrage was considered a reward for the great role women played in the Great War. They had entered the munition factories in unprecedented numbers and showed their courage and patriotism by performing nursing duties under artillery fire. We may say that total war required a total mobilization of resources- including women as a factor of production- and that it was the experience of total war which permitted the development of totalitarian polities- where even the home and family life offered no refuge from the public realm. Your child might inform on you. A wife or a husband was obliged to report any disloyal utterance on the part of a spouse. What was true of the hearth was also true of the altar. The Church could be persecuted or rendered subservient. Neither those who managed industries nor those who worked in them were permitted to exercise any countervailing power over the state. Scientists and Artists, too, were required to dedicate themselves to the common purpose. Failure to do so received draconian punishment.
Arguably, Twentieth Century totalitarianism differed from anything imposed by a King or Emperor or Warlord in that women were notionally equal and, in practice, just as subservient to the power of the State. Previously, a woman was considered to be under the control of her father or husband. Now, she, like her brother, was equally subject to the Dictator whose personality cult required absolute, personal, loyalty regardless of ties of blood, affection, marriage, friendship, religion, or the pursuit of scientific or artistic excellence.

Arendt’s first book was on the origin of Totalitarianism by which is meant a centralized, dictatorial state which requires complete subservience from its subjects. Though, all states involved in ‘total war’ display this, in liberal democracies the pretence may be maintained that everybody is free and actually there is plenty of dissent- albeit of a cantankerous or eccentric kind. Oddly, this boosts morale. The radio broadcasts of the British BBC and the ‘War films’ produced during the Second World War are evidence of this. Consider the film the ‘life and death of Colonel Blimp’. In February 1942, when things were going very badly for England, a Labour Member of Parliament made an impassioned speech attacking ‘Blimpery’. Some ten years previously, David Low, a cartoonist for the Daily Mail, had created the character of an elderly, aristocratic, soldier who is completely out of touch with the modern world. Some thought Churchill, who had attained the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel during the Great War, just such a Colonel Blimp. He was an elderly aristocrat who believed India could be ruled as it had been in the days of, his father, Randolph Churchill. Churchill was bitterly opposed to the production of the film. But the film served a good purpose. It boosted morale. That’s all that mattered. Britain was fighting for its life. Thus, the film was a great success when it came out in 1943. Why? Deborah Kerr plays three roles in the film. First she is the intelligent and educated Victorian governess of Blimp as a little boy. Then she is his love interest. Finally, she is a career woman who has volunteered for military service and is his chauffeur. Hitler hadn’t mobilized the women of Germany. English women had mobilized themselves so effectively as to alter the balance of power by greatly raising British industrial productivity. These women had affection for avuncular Blimps and the cherubic Churchill adorably playing the part of the British bull-dog. But the only thing that mattered was total victory in a total war. It was this totalized Society which Socialised its Economic arrangements under Clement Atlee. Churchill returned to office to preserve what Labour had created- the National Health Service is British politics’ one sacred cow- while lifting rationing and ameliorating the more onerous or doctrinaire aspects of Labour’s policies.

It must be said, total war can actually make things better in a totalitarian country because the Dictator has to stop doing quite as much stupid evil shit as is his habit, because otherwise the enemy will annihilate his army. More generally, coercion is costly. Evil psychopaths have to dial down the sadism if they want more and more nice palaces and super-yachts.

One final point. Countries tend to be ruled as they were previously ruled. Under exigent circumstances there may be ‘functional convergence’- in other words, what is done is the same- but how it is done is different. Consider the Colonel Blimp film. Churchill tells his Minister of Information to put a stop to it. But the ‘English Goebbels’ is Brendan Bracken (whom Orwell satirized as ‘Big Brother’ presiding over the ‘Ministry for Truth’)- a Catholic Fenian by birth who pretended to be an Australian- whom Baldwin described as ‘Churchill’s chela’ (chela is the Hindu word for disciple). Bracken saw that the Blimp film helped England and thus helped Churchill. It was a big hit in the UK but, quite correctly, an export ban prevented it being screened in the US. It gave a wholly misleading picture of the leadership of the British Army. Churchill would find, Field Marshall turned Viceroy, Wavell the biggest thorn in his Imperial backside. Thus, England’s triumph also meant the triumph of freedom for its Indian subjects. Bracken deplored this outcome and, though ennobled as a Viscount, died prematurely in a political wilderness of his own creation.

I am tempted to speculate that people like Leo Strauss and Hannah Arendt, gaining refuge in America, were aware that German Jewish intellectuals- like Hugo Preuss, who wrote the Weimar Constitution- had dug the grave of their own people and the culture they had so adored and advanced. That was not a mistake Jews could afford to repeat.

Strauss and Arendt had to write books and give lectures to earn dollars. But those books and lectures were arid, ambiguous and obviously erroneous on all points of history or hermeneutics. Their misology, it may be, was a precaution against their being taken seriously. If American Youth must be corrupted, let it be by their own comic books and jungle jazz. The German Jew had been moths to a false enlightenment. Let such political theory as they professed, in their new places of refuge, be so woeful and witless a wilderness that no Sodom Settlement, no Gomorrah Governance, was possible there.

According to the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, Arendt believed what ‘made totalitarianism possible was collapsed political structures and masses of uprooted people who had lost their orientation and sense of reality in a world marked by socio-economic transformation, revolution and war.’

Arnedt’s readers knew Japan had experienced none of these things. Yet the Japanese, albeit more briefly, had embraced totalitarianism to a higher degree than Italy or Germany. The Japanese soldier wouldn’t stop fighting till the Emperor surrendered. By contrast, Ireland had had an uprising and a Civil War. It wasn’t totalitarian at all. Indeed, very few countries went down that road unless some external force- e.g. the Red Army- constrained them. The other possibility was that, as in Mao’s China, a party with a totalitarian ideology waded through a sea of blood to take absolute power. But, in China, peak totalitarianism still lay in the future. Poverty is a constraint for even the most evil polity.

Arendt had no personal experience of living in a totalitarian society and did not understand the incentive matrix which arises under those conditions. Perhaps, there was a Cold War angle to the success of her book. Japan and West Germany were allies. Nazism could be explained as an aberration brought on by Anti-Semitism. The Rooskis and the Chinks were obviously the descendants of Genghis Khan. Thankfully, it was the Soviets who built a great wall to prevent their subjects escaping. The West could focus on attaining yet higher affluence.Arendt’s second book- ‘the Human condition’- came out in 1958. At that time, there was some notion that a ‘Social Gospel’ or ‘Humanistic Marxism’ could provide a via media for the Turd World and the backward Catholics and Buddhists and so forth. Arendt’s ‘critical conception of the modern age’ features a ‘tripartite division of the vita activa in labor, work and action’. Sadly, labour is work which is action and so there is no fucking division. The Stanford Encyclopaedia claims that ‘By distinguishing action (praxis) from fabrication (poiesis), by linking it to freedom and plurality, and by showing its connection to speech and remembrance, Arendt is able to articulate a conception of politics in which questions of meaning and identity can be addressed in a fresh and original manner.’ Sadly, poiesis is merely a type of praxis. Freedom obtains even where there is no praxis or poiesis. It doesn’t where it is slave-traders who are doing the praxis and poiesis and theoria and methexis. They may promote ‘Pluralism’ by ensuring that slaves of different ethnicities and languages are mixed together. It will take a generation for a pidgin to develop and another generation for a creole tongue to evolve. But, speech and remembrance are like farts and forgetting. They have no magical properties.

Consider the following-

Labor is judged by its ability to sustain human life,

Hunting, fishing and gathering fruits and nuts etc. are not described as labour. The agricultural revolution did create something we recognize as labour. But it was judged by reproductive success and the degree to which it permitted higher population density and increased division of labour. More productive techniques and those who used them demographically replaced less productive agricultural labour. The rate of growth of population was what mattered, not sustenance or subsistence.

to cater to our biological needs of consumption and reproduction, work is judged by its ability to build and maintain a world fit for human use,

No. Work is judged by its remuneration which in turn depends on supply and demand. Shit produced by Arendt is not fit for even donkey use. But it was work for she was well paid because there was a demand for worthless shite.

and action is judged by its ability to disclose the identity of the agent, to affirm the reality of the world, and to actualize our capacity for freedom.

Actions are judged by their utility in some broad sense. A guy who a stranger’s life is considered to have performed a good action even if he never disclosed his name or failed to affirm that the world is real rather than a hologram. As for ‘actualizing your capacity for freedom’, it is like aligning your chakras so you can use the 98 percent of the brain’s neurons which lie dormant because we have been fooled into eating junk food rather than our own shit.

Why is Arendt not considered a moron? The answer is she that bounced out of a bad period in her country’s history and, with commendable hucksterism, marketed her ‘Everything that ever happened is actually about me’ brand of infantile narcissism in a country which had very rapidly expanded its Higher Education Sector.

Thus ‘by viewing action as a mode of human togetherness, Arendt is able to develop a conception of participatory democracy which stands in direct contrast to the bureaucratized and elitist forms of politics so characteristic of the modern epoch.’ What this means is that true political action causes the Cabinet to order a State of Emergency such that everybody can participate in trying to find my TV remote while listening to me gas on about how despite my coming out of the closet as a Disabled Transgender Lesbian who was anally probed by Neo-Liberalism, nevertheless, Beyonce did not come to my birthday party. Well, it wasn’t a birthday party per se. It was more like a sleep-over and I only invited her to make Rihanna jelly.

It may be argued that Arendt wasn’t a systematic thinker. She was a fine phrase-maker whose feeble intellect burned with a hard gem-like flame to inscribe her oeuvre in the annals of Humanity’s Promethean struggle to say ‘it’s nice to be nice. That’s what Plato was really getting at.’ while eagles tore out its liver and Zeus shat himself laughing. Since Arendt did her part, as a pensioner of the bien pensant, by shitting on the new state of Israel and pretending ‘Operation Paperclip’-type scientific Eichmanns were ‘banal’ not evil, I suppose she deserved such emoluments and royalties as came her way. She was a refugee who worked hard to earn a livelihood in her new country. But, that country has changed. Arendt worship isn’t obligatory. Indeed, it is mischievous. Where Arendt continues to be taught, you are going to get ‘Virulent Wokeness’ of the Jason Stanley type. One may say, what’s wrong if Marci Shore, Timothy Snyder and Jason Stanley escape Trump’s Gestapo and gain refuge in Canada? The obvious answer is that this will trigger the invasion of Canada. Stanley and Shore and her husband may think they are safe hiding in a garret. But they aren’t really. Look at what happened to Anne Frank.

In Macro-Economics, Expectations can create Reality. In Political Theory- if not practical politics- Perception is Reality. It is foolish to encourage impressionable young people to accept Arendt as an authority on how Totalitarianism originates. The result is that they will seek to battle Nazis where no Nazis are. As I have persuasively argued in previous volumes, the real threat is the Spanish Inquisition. They are very sneaky. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance. There is smoke rising from your neighbour’s back-yard. He says he is having a barbeque. Don’t believe him. It’s a fucking auto da fe mate! They will burn you as a heretic. Mark my words, the new Pope isn’t a nice corn-fed lad from Illinois. He’s Torque-fucking-mada!