Presumably.

What convinces masses are not facts, and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably part.

Hannah Arendt, from The Origins of Totalitarianism

Examine.

Evil comes from a failure to think. It defies thought, for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil and examine the premises and principles from which it originates, it is frustrated because it finds nothing there. That is the banality of evil.

Hannah Arendt, from Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil

Deprived.

Hannah Arendt, from an interview in The New York Review of Books on October 26, 1978 ...

If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie—a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days—but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.

Open.

Steve has Gurri on free speech and ...

...[T]he resumption of the great American debate, of speech that is unencumbered and unafraid, of a Jeffersonian open society.

Hannah Arendt on soundbite discourse ...

To be sure, the judges were right when they finally told the accused that all he had said was "empty talk" -- except that they thought the emptiness was feigned, and that the accused wished to cover up other thoughts which, though hideous, were not empty. This supposition seems refuted by the striking consistency with which Eichmann, despite his rather bad memory, repeated word for word the same stock phrases and self-invented clichés each time he referred to an incident or event of importance to him. Whether writing his memoirs in Argentina or in Jerusalem, whether speaking to the police examiner or to the court, what he said was always the same, expressed in the same words. The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else. No communication was possible with him, not because he lied but because he was surrounded by the most reliable of all safeguards against the words and the presence of others, and hence against reality as such.

Later ...

The lesson of such stories is simple and within everybody’s grasp. Politically speaking, it is that under conditions of terror most people will comply but some people will not, just as the lesson of the countries to which the Final Solution was proposed is that “it could happen” in most places but it did not happen everywhere. Humanly speaking, no more is required, and no more can reasonably be asked, for this planet to remain a place fit for human habitation.

Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil

Rosa Luxemburg: Those who do not move, do not notice their chains.

Simone Weil: Never react to an evil in such a way as to augment it.

Bertolt Brecht, from “O Germany, Pale Mother!”

O Germany— 

Hearing the speeches that ring from your house 

    one laughs. 

But whoever sees you, reaches for his knife.

Cleverness.

The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie—a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days—but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.

 

The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world—and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end—is being destroyed.

 

Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, 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.

Hannah Arendt, from The Origins of Totalitarianism

Live.

Hannah Arendt on personal responsibility ...

Politically, the weakness of the argument has always been that those who choose the lesser evil forget very quickly that they chose evil ...

The precondition for this kind of judging is not a highly developed intelligence or sophistication in moral matters, but rather the disposition to live together explicitly with oneself, to have intercourse with oneself, that is, to be engaged in that silent dialogue between me and myself which, since Socrates and Plato, we usually call thinking. This kind of thinking, though at the root of all philosophical thought, is not technical and does not concern theoretical problems. The dividing line between those who want to think and therefore have to judge by themselves, and those who do not, strikes across all social and cultural or educational differences. In this respect, the total moral collapse of respectable society during the Hitler regime may teach us that under such circumstances those who cherish values and hold fast to moral norms and standards are not reliable: we now know that moral norms and standards can be changed overnight, and that all that then will be left is the mere habit of holding fast to something. Much more reliable will be the doubters and skeptics, not because skepticism is good or doubting wholesome, but because they are used to examine things and to make up their own minds. Best of all will be those who know only one thing for certain: that whatever else happens, as long as we live we shall have to live together with ourselves.

On preserving strength in desperation ...

But how is it with the reproach of irresponsibility leveled against these few who washed their hands of what was going on all around them? I think we shall have to admit that there exist extreme situations in which responsibility for the world, which is primarily political, cannot be assumed because political responsibility always presupposes at least a minimum of political power. Impotence or complete powerlessnes is, I think, a valid excuse. Its validity is all the stronger as it seems to require a certain moral quality even to recognize powerlessness, the good will and good faith to face realities and not to live in illusions. Moreover, it is precisely in this admission of one’s own impotence that a last remnant of strength and even power can still be preserved even under desperate conditions.

Happy Birthday, Arendt

The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.

Hannah Arendt, born on this day in 1906, from The Origins of Totalitarianism

Performance.

Each society demands of its members a certain amount of acting, the ability to present, represent, and act what one actually is. When society disintegrates into cliques such demands are no longer made of the individual but of members of cliques. Behavior then is controlled by silent demands and not by individual capacities, exactly as an actor’s performance must fit into the ensemble of all other roles in the play.

Hannah Arendt, from The Origins of Totalitarianism

Misused.

The most striking difference between the ancient and modern sophists is that the ancients were satisfied with a passing victory of the argument at the expense of truth, whereas the moderns want a more lasting victory at the expense of reality. In other words, one destroyed the dignity of human thought whereas the others destroy the dignity of human action. The old manipulators of logic were the concern of the philosopher, whereas the modern manipulators of facts stand in the way of the historian. For history itself is destroyed, and its comprehensibility—based upon the fact that it is enacted by men and therefore can be understood by men—is in danger, whenever facts are no longer held to be part and parcel of the past and present world, and are misused to prove this or that opinion.

Hannah Arendt, from The Origins of Totalitarianism

Cleverness.

The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, 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.

Hannah Arendt, from The Origins of Totalitarianism

Consistency.

What convinces masses are not facts, and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably part.

Hannah Arendt, from The Origins of Totalitarianism

Researches.

Kurt recently pointed to a timely quote from Hannah Arendt's nearly 50 year-old book, The Origins of Totalitarianism ...

Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.

Nothing's changed ...

Media degradation can take the form of a decline in any of these dimensions. In contemporary America, that decline has taken the form of a degradation in the capacities of professional journalism and a degradation of standards in online media, particularly the insular media ecosystem that has emerged on the far right. Social media, rather than encouraging productive debate, have amplified sensationalism, conspiracy theories, and polarization. In a degraded media environment, many people don’t know what to believe, a condition ripe for political exploitation. In early 2018, Steve Bannon, publisher of Breitbart News and Donald Trump’s former strategist, gave a concise explanation of how to exploit confusion and distrust: the way to deal with the media, he said, is “to flood the zone with shit.” That not only sums up the logic of Trump’s use of lies and distraction; it also describes the logic of disinformation efforts aimed at sowing doubts about science and democracy, as in industry-driven controversies over global warming and in Russian uses of social media to influence elections in western Europe as well as the United States. “Flooding” the media with government propaganda to distract from unfavorable information is also one of the primary techniques the Chinese regime currently uses to manage discontent.

CONNECT

From the Online Etymology Dictionary ...

skeptic (n.)

also sceptic, 1580s, "member of an ancient Greek school that doubted the possibility of real knowledge," from French sceptique and directly from Latin scepticus "the sect of the Skeptics," from Greek skeptikos (plural Skeptikoi "the Skeptics, followers of Pyrrho"), noun use of adjective meaning "inquiring, reflective" (the name taken by the disciples of the Greek philosopher Pyrrho, who lived c. 360-c. 270 B.C.E.), related to skeptesthai "to reflect, look, view" (from PIE root *spek- "to observe").

Skeptic does not mean him who doubts, but him who investigates or researches as opposed to him who asserts and thinks that he has found. [Miguel de Unamuno, "Essays and Soliloquies," 1924]

There is one word of caution, however, to be given to those who renounce inquiry; it is that they cannot retain the right to condemn inquirers. [Benjamin Jowett, "On the Interpretation of Scripture," in "Essays and Reviews," 1860]

We've gotten lazy and our leaders ... no, our elected officials, have noticed and taken advantage of our complacency. As Mencken said, "Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard."

Both sides are guilty. Be your own hero. Be a skeptic.