Hannah Arendt knew 2024 was coming!

Revel in her wisdoms - they help put All The Things in some sane perspective

In 2016, in direct response to Donald Trump becoming President of the United States for the first time, Hannah Arendt’s 1951 polemic The Origins of Totalitarianism became a belated bestseller, with sales increasing – overnight – by 1000 per cent. Online pop culture magazine Jezebel described the book as, “extremely metal”.

The German-Jewish philosopher, journalist, and political theorist’s ideas and phraseologies suddenly resurfaced and it became incredibly apparent that they were not just timeless but prescient.

On this week’s Wild podcast, I chat with Arendt biographer Lyndsey Stonebridge, a Professor of Humanities and Human Rights at the University of Birmingham. She was prompted to write her latest book We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience post-Trump 1.0. It came out in time for his second coming.

Arendt’s ideas at the time of publication were ridiculed and misinterpreted, including by the fashionable existentialists of the time. She called out difficult ideas that challenged not just the status quo, but our own character as banal bystanders to human atrocity and power plays. She also challenged binary thinking. She vigilantly contained and displayed multitudes. She swam in the nuances and didn’t feel it appropriate to have to surface them as neat, digestible and palatable theses, per the established academic tradition. After the fact, decades down the track, she was declared really rather right, or to have operated in brutal truth.

In our chat Lyndsey and I discuss how Arendt foresaw the rise of Trump, AI and our current culture’s complicity in self-destructive habits. In my re-reading of Arendt’s work for the interview, I dug up a bunch of her quotes (that go beyond her most famous and misinterpreted quote, “the banality of evil”) that speak to our current moment, warning of how totalitarianism arrives and dictates while we…play along.

The US election result has left so many of us dismayed and feeling alienated from each other. I’ve argued previously that one of the most effective salves for tough times is to “soul nerd”, to study the work of others who’ve experienced similar pain. Those who go deep into human pain are generally artists or writers, and so we get to enjoy their wisdoms decades, or centuries, later. Arendt definitely went “there” in similarly dark times. Her ideas are helping me frame what we’re facing as something humans do, almost instinctually, in a survivalist way. Check out the fourth quote - it…checks out! Also, follow the train of quotes to the end, to we land at what is essentially Arendt’s antidote.

“Fantastic statements” made by despotic leaders that are later exposed as lies are not met with outrage but are seen by the masses as “tactical cleverness”:

“In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, …under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”

On the way, truth is eroded by bullshit (something I cover in this chapter of my Book Serialisation):

“If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer.”

And:

“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced communist, but the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction no longer holds.”

I get Lyndsey to read out this line, below, twice in our conversation. I keep coming back to it:

“The masses’ escape from reality, is a verdict against the world in which they are forced to live and in which they cannot exist.”

Read that thrice! A verdict against the (unjust, off-track, exploitative) world…

In her other well-known book The Human Condition, she writes that:

People who are disconnected with the human condition are obsessed with outer space and want to, “escape man’s imprisonment to the earth.” Such people are “directed towards making life artificial”.

Hmmm….

Ted Gioia

writes about Arendt’s ability to portend Elon Musk and AI here. He notes that on page three she claims that they will eventually want to create,

“Artificial machines to do our thinking and speaking….we would become the helpless slaves…at the mercy of every gadget which is technically possible, no matter how murderous it is…

“The question therefore is not so much whether we are the masters or the slaves of our machines, but whether machines still serve the world and its things, or if, on the contrary, they and the automatic motion of their processes have begun to rule and even destroy the world and things.”

This “modern world alienation” sees us inhabit:

“An ‘artificial’ world of things distinctly different from all natural surroundings”—so that their tech innovations will lead to an inevitable degradation of the environment, and a detachment from the real world.

This is a theme that I’ll be exploring in an upcoming chapter of the Book Serialisation - that we must protect the artists in the apocalypse:

“This does not mean that modern man has lost his capacities….although these faculties are more and more restricted to the abilities of the artist.”

And for anyone following the Collapse journey here on Substack, this might sound familiar:

“The phenomenon of conformism is characteristic of the last stage of this modern development.”

And:

“It is quite con­ceivable that the modern age—which began with such an unprece­dented and promising outburst of human activity—may end in the deadliest, most sterile passivity history has ever known.”

And to finish on one of my favourite Arendt contributions:

 “There are no dangerous thoughts. Thinking itself is dangerous.” It is what makes people “free to change the world”.

To be sure, a lot of disenfranchised lonely humans are “positively keen for deceit” in a last “lunatic lunge for belonging”, as Arendt puts it. But she argued that the antidote was to think. She claimed that our very sense of reality, our “common sense”, depends on our curiosity, our discerning reflection and…the adventurous joy of testing out these ideas with other people. I’ll run the line that Lyndsey closes her book with here:

“Now pay attention and get on with the work of resisting the sorry reality you find yourselves in…and for goodness sake have some fun!”

Thoughts?

Sarah xx