Maria Popova - Hannah Arendt on Loneliness as the Common Ground for Terror and How Tyrannical Regimes Use Isolation as a Weapon of Oppression
“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.”
“Loneliness is
personal, and it is also political,” Olivia Laing wrote in The
Lonely City, one of the finest books
of the year. Half a century earlier, Hannah Arendt (October 14,
1906–December 4, 1975) examined those peculiar parallel dimensions of
loneliness as a profoundly personal anguish and an indispensable currency of
our political life in her intellectual debut, the incisive and astonishingly
timely 1951 classic The Origins of Totalitarianism (public library).
Arendt paints
loneliness as “the common ground for terror” and explores its function as both
the chief weapon and the chief damage of oppressive political regimes. Exactly
twenty years before her piercing treatise on lying
in politics, she writes:
Just as terror, even in its pre-total, merely
tyrannical form ruins all relationships between men, so the self-compulsion of
ideological thinking ruins all relationships with reality. 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. The ideal subject of totalitarian rule
is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the
distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the
distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer
exist.
What perpetuates such
tyrannical regimes, Arendt argues, is manipulation by isolation — something
most effectively accomplished by the divisiveness of “us
vs. them” narratives. She writes:
Terror can rule absolutely only over men who
are isolated against each other… Therefore, one of the primary concerns of all
tyrannical government is to bring this isolation about. Isolation may be the
beginning of terror; it certainly is its most fertile ground; it always is its
result. This isolation is, as it were, pretotalitarian; its hallmark is
impotence insofar as power always comes from men acting together…; isolated men
are powerless by definition.
Although isolation is not necessarily the same
as loneliness, Arendt notes that loneliness can become both the seedbed and the
perilous consequence of the isolation effected by tyrannical regimes:
In isolation, man remains in contact with the
world as the human artifice; only when the most elementary form of human
creativity, which is the capacity to add something of one’s own to the common
world, is destroyed, isolation becomes altogether unbearable… Isolation then
becomes loneliness. […]
While isolation concerns
only the political realm of life, loneliness concerns human life as a whole.
Totalitarian government, like all tyrannies, certainly could not exist without
destroying the public realm of life, that is, without destroying, by isolating
men, their political capacities. But totalitarian domination as a form of
government is new in that it is not content with this isolation and destroys
private life as well. It bases itself on loneliness, on the experience of not
belonging to the world at all, which is among the most radical and desperate
experiences of man.
This is why our
insistence on belonging, community, and human connection is one of the greatest
acts of courage and resistance in the face of oppression — for, in the words of
the beloved Irish poet and philosopher John O’Donohue, “the
ancient and eternal values of human life — truth, unity, goodness, justice,
beauty, and love — are all statements of true belonging.”
The Origins of Totalitarianism is a
remarkable read in its totality. Complement it with Arendt on the
life of the mind, how
we humanize each other, the
difference between how art and science illuminate human life, and her beautiful
love letters.
Pariah: can Hannah Arendt help us rethink our global refugee crisis? by Jeremy Adelman
Jon Nixon - Hannah Arendt: thinking versus evil
Jon Nixon - Hannah Arendt: thinking versus evil
