Why no clique? One reason is that the goal of totalitarianism is not the welfare of the state. It is not economic prosperity or social advancement. The reason why the ingenious devices of totalitarian rule, with their absolute and unsurpassed concentration of power in the hands of a single man, were never tried before is that no ordinary tyrant was ever mad enough to discard all limited and local interests — economic, national, human, military — in favor of a purely fictitious reality in some indefinite distant future.
Since independent thinkers are a threat, they are among the first to be purged. Bureaucratic functions are duplicated and layered, with people being shifted all the time. This regular violent turnover of the whole gigantic administrative machine, while it prevents the development of competence, has many advantages: it assures the relative youth of officials and prevents a stabilization of conditions which, at least in time of peace, are fraught with danger for totalitarian rule….
Any chances of discontent and questioning of the status quo are eliminated by this perpetual rising of the newly indoctrinated. Totalitarianism in power is about keeping itself in power.
By preemptively removing large groups of people, the system neutralizes all those who might question it. Possibly the one ray of hope in these systems is that because they pay no attention to actually governing, they are not likely to be sustainable in the long run. The incredibility of the horrors is closely bound up with their economic uselessness.
The Nazis carried this uselessness to the point of open anti-utility when in the midst of the war, despite the shortage of building material and rolling stock, they set up enormous, costly extermination factories and transported millions of people back and forth.
In the eyes of a strictly utilitarian world the obvious contradiction between these acts and military expediency gave the whole enterprise an air of mad unreality. But in the meantime, what these regimes create is so devastating to humanity that it would be naive to assume that humanity will always bounce back. Here the night has fallen on the future. When no witnesses are left, there can be no testimony. The carnage they create tears apart all social fabric.
And we must not assume that they exist only in the past. Read Next. When we experience loneliness, we lose the ability to experience anything else; and, in loneliness, we are unable to make new beginnings. 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. Even the mere reading of a book, she says requires some degree of isolation. One must intentionally turn away from the world to make space for the experience of solitude but, once alone, one is always able to turn back:. Totalitarianism uses isolation to deprive people of human companionship, making action in the world impossible, while destroying the space of solitude.
The world becomes a wilderness, where neither experience nor thinking are possible. Totalitarian movements use ideology to isolate individuals. The way we think about the world affects the relationships we have with others and ourselves. 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. Instead, one is taught to distrust oneself and others, and to always rely upon the ideology of the movement, which must be right.
But in order to make individuals susceptible to ideology, you must first ruin their relationship to themselves and others by making them sceptical and cynical, so that they can no longer rely upon their own judgment:.
Ideological thinking turns us away from the world of lived experience, starves the imagination, denies plurality, and destroys the space between men that allows them to relate to one another in meaningful ways. And once ideological thinking has taken root, experience and reality no longer bear upon thinking.
Instead, experience conforms to ideology in thinking. Which is why when Arendt talks about loneliness, she is not just talking about the affective experience of loneliness: she is talking about a way of thinking.
Loneliness arises when thought is divorced from reality, when the common world has been replaced by the tyranny of coercive logical demands. We think from experience, and when we no longer have new experiences in the world to think from, we lose the standards of thought that guide us in thinking about the world.
Free movement in thinking is replaced by the propulsive, singular current of ideological thought. She follows the question with the statement that the point is to resist being swept up in the tide at all. What allows men to be carried away? Arendt argues that the underlying fear that attracts one to ideology is the fear of self-contradiction. 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.
Thinking can unsettle our faith, our beliefs, our sense of self-knowledge. 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. But life is messy.
Amid the chaos and uncertainty of human existence, we need a sense of place and meaning. We need roots. But those who succumb to the siren song of ideological thinking, must turn away from the world of lived experience. Put very simply: people who subscribe to ideology have thoughts, but they are incapable of thinking for themselves. She was unable to find the private, self-reflective space necessary for thinking. You will be susceptible to organised loneliness. The constant exposure to a public audience made it impossible for her to keep company with herself.
She was unable to people her solitude. This is one of the paradoxes of loneliness. Controlling the most advanced technology of the time could have solidified Nazi power and changed the course of history. When we think of existential risks, events like nuclear war or asteroid impacts often come to mind. But is it likely? Researchers and philosophers are beginning to ponder how it might come about — and, more importantly, what we can do to avoid it. Existential risks x-risks are disastrous because they lock humanity into a single fate, like the permanent collapse of civilisation or the extinction of our species.
These catastrophes can have natural causes, like an asteroid impact or a supervolcano, or be human-made from sources like nuclear war or climate change. Hitler inspects advanced German engineering of the time - what if it had given the Nazis an unbeatable advantage?
Credit: Getty Images. Toby Ord, a senior research fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute FHI at Oxford University, believes that the odds of an existential catastrophe happening this century from natural causes are less than one in 2, , because humans have survived for 2, centuries without one.
However, when he adds the probability of human-made disasters, Ord believes the chances increase to a startling one in six. Researchers at the Center on Long-Term Risk, a non-profit research institute in London, have expanded upon x-risks with the even-more-chilling prospect of suffering risks.
In short: a future with negative value is worse than one with no value at all. If a malevolent group or government suddenly gained world-dominating power through technology, and there was nothing to stand in its way, it could lead to an extended period of abject suffering and subjugation. Though global totalitarianism is still a niche topic of study, researchers in the field of existential risk are increasingly turning their attention to its most likely cause: artificial intelligence.
Once in charge, it would control advances in technology that prevent internal challenges, like surveillance or autonomous weapons, and, with this monopoly, remain perpetually stable. A nuclear missile on display in China Credit: Getty Images. If the singleton is totalitarian, life would be bleak.
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