So this is the beginning of a fake class, seminar, 'colloquy' of some important books about authoritarianism, liberal democracy, and the condition of our future. It will not be delivered as live lectures, just texts. Nevertheless I'd like you to imagine that we're in a classroom setting where you can interpolate your own discussions. All throughout, I'm going to interrupt the text for classroom-type questions for you to ponder at your leisure.
I'm mostly going to present this as commentaries on important quotes from the books, not summations of the books and their theses. The point of these 'talks' is not the books themselves but how they relate to the situations of our present and future: what insights we gain, how they may let us understand our current zeitgeist and future predicaments. In just one month we have been thrown into a new era, the likes of which most countries on earth have experienced many times, but the United States has experienced not even once.
Thus, most of these books will be centered on the 20th century experience, the nearest experience of crisis to our own, and thus require the relative least amount of empathy to imagine ourselves in the place of those before us. As the preponderance of these books were written about the situation of Western countries, the majority of these books will concentrate on the situations of the West over the global East or South. Nevertheless, we will apply many of the insights of these books to the situation of other regions, which play an enormous, perhaps unprecedented role in modern global affairs.
As there are a lot of points to get through, the prose will be largely unedited, conversational and free-flowing with an intent to convey information rather than readability. The teacher will do his best to keep his own biases to a minimum. He believes in 'value free scholarship,' that scholarship for its own sake has value in itself and is a more reliable route to the proper course of action than the deliberate advancement of a point of view. Nevertheless, as with any analysis, conclusions must be drawn, and all conclusions necessarily betray a certain bias. Even so a good teacher can try to present the full issue in all its sides, particularly because ideology is the subject of this class: understanding why people come to believe what they believe. Inevitably, there will be people who would read these talks and find many conclusions uncharitable, such sentiments can't be helped, and if this teacher is successful in his endeavor, it will say more about the reader than writer.
Lastly, we will adopt a format for every talk I'm going to pretentiously call 'dualities' to help orient the reader/student about the subject being spoken. The reason I call them 'dualities' is because I believe that more than anything else, it's the divided self, the tensions between our ideals and our realities, that break ground for insight. Perhaps these thoughts are no better than the thoughts before, perhaps they inadvertently create their own dualities, or perhaps these dualities lead us right back to where we were. And sometimes there are not two sides to every issue, but three or four, necessitating trialities or quadralities, and sometimes there is only one side to an issue because any argument against it come up with so far is nonsense, and so far as we know yet those are monalities. Nevertheless, I believe dualities is the best way to frame these discussions.
There is no accurate way to read history. There is no 'monality' that explains how it all works, and one must always beware the ideologue who believes in any explanation that covers all with deep suspicion. Nevertheless, within our limited understanding, there are possibilities, percentages, causes and effects that are more likely than others, and those possible percentages are what we aim to entertain.
The Origins of Totalitarianism is not a book about any one thesis. It's at once a work that purports to explain how totalitarianism works, the social history that led to its formation, the intellectual underpinnings of the totalitarian philosophy - such as they are, and the conditions which lead people to be particularly susceptible to it. It is both a difficult book and not particularly difficult. Hannah Arendt is a clear and quotable writer, but she is nevertheless long-winded and full of references to historical figures that it can take twenty years of immersion in history to know her references. The insights of this book coruscate from the page, but like many of the best books, it is very difficult to take one over-arching insight from the whole thing.
So that is why we must present the book in small, digestible parts, and relate them to our current realities.
And therefore, we must start with a very bleak one from early in the book.
Oppression vs. Use
'Neither oppression nor exploitation is ever the main cause for resentment; wealth without visible function is much more intolerable because nobody can understand why it should be tolerated. ... Antisemitism reached its climax when Jews had similarly lost their public functions and their influence, and were left with nothing but wealth.'
In other words: Hitler stoked antisemitism by stripping Jews of their societal use, and the more he stripped them of means to prove their societal use, the more hated Jews became to Germany. In the midst of economic hardship, Germans saw that Jews were left with nothing but unaccountable wealth, and that provided more resentment than actual oppression ever could.
Arendt again:
"What makes men obey and tolerate real power and, on the other hand, hate people who have wealth without power, is the rational instinct that power has a certain function and is of some general use. Even exploitation and oppression still make society work and establish some kind of order. Only wealth without power or aloofness without a policy are felt to be parasitical, useless, revolting, because such conditions cut all the threads which tie men together. Wealth which does not exploit lacks the relationship which exists between exploiter and exploited;..."
In your experience, in your perception, does this seem true? Does envy spur you to more immediate anger than suffering?
I don't need to tell you what this points to in our current predicament. Everyone can see the writing on the wall and the ensuing hatred of liberals that will only increase as time goes on. Not just demographic minorities: all liberals, all 'blue staters.' Even if the employment sectors of economic hubs are gutted, America's majority blue states still live in 71% of the American economy and can live on their savings long after the majority red states live in privation and hardship. The stripping of governmental experience and authority can easily ruin the American economy and therefore the world's, but even through that, it is easily possible that the new regime's oppression will be lapped up, even respected, because people seem innately programmed to trust their surroundings until the threat against them is immediately present.
This does not mean that liberals will be sent to concentration camps, or any minority, but it does mean that the current polarization is likely to be a weak brew next to what's coming and the tensions of our society will only ratchet up further. One needs to be mindful of the dangers.
Contrary to our current perceptions, societies have undergone tensions far worse than ours and come out the other side still standing: insurrection, riots, targeted violence for years and years. We're often told to think of the 1950s America as the ultimate time of peace and prosperity: yet it was a time that easily could have dissolved in a pool of nuclear ash.
Still more in favor of liberals and left, the Trump administration has only begun. The time for them to receive blame them for coming disasters is ample. For better or worse, this is most likely to come about if a large number of journalists abandon the search for objective reporting in proportions similar to how the right wing journalists have in favor of a nakedly ideological spin on all events: carrying the intersectional ideology prevalent in universities fully and unapologetically into politics, irregardless of objective truth. The consequences for the next era could only be speculated about, but the future abandonment of objective truth by all political actors is a likely reality in our near-future, with the inevitable end result that objective truth in human events will be increasingly impossible to ascertain.
I can't help but air an Arendt quote from much later in the book:
'In an ever changing and incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point when they would, at the same time, believe everyhting and nothing, think that everything was possible and nothing is true.'
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