Ep. 269: Arendt on Totalitarianism (Part One)

0:07 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 269 is something like, what is totalitarianism and how is it different from tyranny? We read Hannah Arendt's essay on the nature of totalitarianism from 1953 and chapter 13 of her book on the origins of totalitarianism. That book was published in 1949 with a later addition, possibly as late as 1955. For more information, please visit partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer, not just a product of history, but a vehicle for its enactment.

0:43 Seth: In Madison, Wisconsin, this is Seth Paskin erasing the distinction between foreign and domestic through global domination.

0:51 Wes: In Austin, Texas, this is Wes Alwan wandering the desert of tranquility. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, this is Dylan Casey

1:00 Dylan: sitting squarely in the discrepancy between public and personal life.

1:03 Mark: In Madison, Wisconsin, Laura Arendt. You're the man who suggested this. Seth, start us off. What is this we're reading?

1:10 Seth: Hannah Arendt had obviously, totalitarianism and its effects on global civilization were important topics to her. We had previously read for one of our. I think, when we were at the University of Pittsburgh, right. We'd read the Life of the Mind.

1:25 Dylan: Nature of human understanding.

1:26 Seth: Isn't that nature of human understanding?

1:28 Mark: It was on the human.

1:29 Dylan: It was human was in the human was in the title.

1:32 Seth: Okay. That was where we at least first encountered her concept of public versus private life and her concern about maintaining the integrity of private life. I think I read Eichmann in Jerusalem for the first time when I was maybe 19 and have read it at least twice since. I'm a big fan of Arendt, and this was a text that's been kind of on my mind. And I think also there's with recent political changes in the world, something that I felt like was at least worth visiting to see if it had anything to say about the current political climate, which it may or may not, but I've been wanting to read it, and so I'm glad we are.

2:13 Mark: Yeah. Those other two books are both later, so human conditions.

2:16 Wes: 58.

2:17 Mark: Eichmann in Jerusalem is 63. This is again, 53 or so I thought we were going to read on the Origins of Totalitarianism. That's her most famous book, but apparently it's just a sprawling mass of historical research. And then reading this secondary essay about it, she kind of changed her mind. It's really a bunch of things cobbled together. So it's a bunch of essays that were talking about the rise of Nazism. And then she decided really toward the end, really, when the project was basically done, that she also wanted to put Stalinism in there as well.

And it really changed her whole view. And so it's that latter stuff that we're looking at, this last chapter 13, that was added to the book, which is very redundant of this standalone essay from 53 on the Nature of totalitarianism. I was kind of glad that we did both. They emphasized a few different points, but about 80% of it seems like it's the same content.

3:10 Wes: I mean, it does elaborate on a few things that actually that I'm glad got elaborated on. Like, they're things that in the standalone essay she kind of addresses in passing. And so that gets more treatment in that second essay. So I thought they did. Despite the overlap, they did complement each other nicely, I thought.

3:26 Mark: Dylan, what's your. Do you have an opening take here?

3:29 Dylan: I had never thought about a distinction between totalitarianism and tyranny, and I admit to having unthoughtfully glossed those two things. And I was particularly taken with the idea of her claim that it's effectively a new form of government that we had for thousands of years of political theory going at least back to Plato. Your basic forms of government, monarchy, aristocracy, oligarchy, democracy, you know, all those different versions and the corruptions of them and so forth. But that this form of government, totalitarianism, which has some things definitely in common with tyranny, but is decidedly distinct from it in her analysis, and something particularly modern, enabled by the circumstances of the 19th and 20th centuries. That was very interesting, and I had never thought about that before.

4:28 Mark: Yeah, I think by default we just think of totalitarianism is a really bad tyranny, a tyranny that really just gets in your face, that some tyrannies are just, I'm the ruler, do what I say. But most of the time I'm not going to actually say anything about you. So you can probably just go about your business as long as you don't, you know, raise your voice against me. Then I'll send my secret police out and kill you. But it's totalitarianism, the way she sees it really is like we were reading about in 1984 that really captures that.

4:55 Wes: She.

4:55 Mark: In fact, she even thinks that the Nazi government didn't persist long enough to become totalitarianism. It was on its way, but it was still a cult of personality of Hitler had a sort of ideology that works well for totalitarianism, but it was really only with Stalinism that you get its pure form out in the world.

5:14 Dylan: But one of the pieces that was interesting to me, and maybe I could stomach trying to read some of this in a future episode, is the notion that you would actually argue for this form of government in a positive way, as it being actually the way you ought to have government. And even if you argue that totalitarianism itself is sort of maybe uniformly understood as bad, which I don't think that she would agree that it's uniformly understood as bad. She argues that it's bad, but the notion that you would have partisans of it was also very intriguing to me.

And that probably just reveals my own indoctrination into liberal democracy, which I'm. Fine to be indoctrinated into liberal democracy, and I'm happy to defend it. I have thought in the past of aristocracy and monarchy, for instance, as completely undesirable forms of government, but sort of legitimate forms of government. And I would have said that fascism or totalitarianism are not only undesirable, but somehow fundamentally corrupt forms of government. And I don't know that she's claiming that. I think that she's claiming it's bad, but that is another form of government that has buy in, just like any other kind of government that has characteristics fundamental to certain human agency and could be a way in which government operates.

And that's very intriguing.

6:36 Wes: So in a way, that's the question that she starts out with. So one of the questions is, is totalitarianism just like tyranny? And another larger question, is it a form of government that we can explain in the same way that we explain other basic forms of government, like republics, monarchies, and not just tyrannies, but the republics and monarchies? And can we explain them in the way Montesquieu explains them by virtue of some principle of motion or some principle of action that animates the form of government? There are two aspects to this. One of them is structural. Right. The government has a certain structure, a monarchy, it's one person, but you have a constitution as well. Democracy, it's the people. But for Montesquieu, the really interesting thing is the principle of action that guides both rulers and ruled. And in the case of a monarchy, it's honor, which is to say a

7:31 Mark: passion, according to Montesquieu.

7:32 Wes: Yeah, yeah. A passion for distinction. In the case of democracy, it's virtue, which is the same thing as love of equality. And in tyranny the motivation will be fear. So the way she starts this essay is with an analysis of what Montesquieu does here and these different principles of action. And then the question is going to be, is there one for totalitarianism? And of course, it will turn out that there is not. What replaces, instead of fear, which is the principle of action and tyranny, you'll get ideology instead of it shares with tyranny, lawlessness, but it'll be lawful in some higher sense.

In some sense that a totalitarian regime sees itself as enacting the laws of what she calls nature and history. Right. The way I read it, totalitarianism will be radically unlike any. It can't be explained in the same way as these other governments. In some ways, like a Montesquieuian analysis fails because it's so radical.

8:35 Dylan: So I'll confess that I'm going to end up asking a lot of questions because I just found myself not completely understanding. And one of the things that I guess I was struggling with from the beginning was exactly what the features of a totalitarian regime were. That just wasn't a bad form of tyranny, like kind of an expletive form of tyranny. Super tyranny is totalitarianism kind of thing. I mean, the end result is that analysis about ideology and that kind of thing. But I was trying to think of, like, if I were to do the this one is not like the other game with governments, and I would have different boxes. Sometimes it's hard to put them in a box between, you know, is it an aristocracy or is it an oligarchy? You know, is it a democracy or is it a monarchy, because they have a constitution? You know, when do I put something in the box of totalitarianism versus tyranny?

9:29 Wes: I think one of the things straight out of the box, right, is that a tyranny is ruled by the whim of the tyrant. And it's the kind of personal interest of the tyrant that drives things. And then the fearfulness of the populace and the tyrant, which it produces a desire to dominate in the general population as well, which we could get into some of that. But the other difference here is just that she'll say that a tyranny doesn't destroy private life in it produces isolation of a sort, not to the same degree as totalitarianism. So that fear can actually still be a principle of action in a tyranny, where people might still have some fearful contact with each other, or one might even still be an artist in a tyranny.

There can be some space for private life. There can be some space for creative pursuits, even if public life and even if political life is completely corrupted and shut off to you. But in totalitarianism, private life is subject to complete control as well.

10:30 Dylan: Yeah, it's obliterated.

10:31 Mark: But, Dylan, I think you're right that it's not like she says, we all know what totalitarianism is. It's easy to say what a monarchy is. There is a king. But what is the thing that then she goes on to explain? Because her explanation could just be a description that there's no traditional distinction between. There's this unknown. Let's define it. So, for instance, certainly it's been characteristic of the Nazi regime and the Stalinist regime that the use of actual murder, even to the point she points out that guilt and innocence become beside the point.

You would think that a totalitarian regime is all about finding out who is an enemy of the regime and killing off those people. You know, in other words, just like a tyranny, it's just, again, a more aggressive tyranny. But she says that totalitarianism requires, in order to produce the effect that it needs to on its people, which is to freeze them in place, to keep them from forming social bonds, to keep them from thinking at all. It needs to have this constant. Even if you were a loyal subject, you could be at any point picked out and just murdered.

And talks about how the Nazis, like, in figuring out who was going to be the SS officers and who was going to be in the camps, somebody in particular just went through, like, a list of pictures that it became not a matter of controlling your belief. We want everybody to believe the same thing, which seems to be like, what's going on in 1984, but actually just, we are going to divide the world according to this racial schema in the case of the Nazis, or a class schema in the case of the Bolsheviks. That's really the word she uses to distinguish from these other things, right?

12:08 Dylan: Stalinist.

12:09 Mark: Yeah. I mean, it is under Stalin. That's what she's getting at. But is that really a characteristic of all totalitarian states that they kill indiscriminately just to solidify their power? Or is that just a particular excess of a particular kind of totalitarianism? I would think you would.

12:25 Seth: How many examples do you have to pick from?

12:27 Wes: Right.

12:28 Mark: Well, I guess that's the question. Like, she's identifying something that she thinks is going to be a serious danger in the future, something that there is a hunger for in modern Consciousness that there wasn't there before. This is one of the reasons why this has never happened before in history, is because industrialization, bureaucracy, all these modern things have produced the capacity for a loneliness that was not there before, and the capacity for domination, you know, technologies for domination. There's a lot of reasons why human beings could be more subject to this.

And she thinks that it's independent. It's not just a matter of like whoever thought of racism, that thing, you know, ultimately led to Tatar inheritance or Marx. She seems to think that any ideology, in other words, a philosophy that proposes to explain everything by a simple movement of history, could be corrupted in this way. So it's not a matter of a right or left wing thing. This is an ever present danger. Is it something that grows clearly to the excess of murdering even those loyal to the cause? Is this something that inevitably might flow out of human nature?

That's what she's claiming.

13:31 Seth: I feel like that characterization of the question is not exactly accurate.

13:37 Wes: And we're starting with the standalone essay.

13:39 Seth: Right, starting with the standalone essay. This is page 333. I'm not going to read an exact quote because I have in my notes here. But basically, totalitarianism, she says, claims to solve two different problems that pose themselves to the traditional forms of government that we say. One is the distinction between the individual and the citizen, which is to say private life and public life. And the other is the difference between lawfulness, which is to say the domestic national state, the laws that define public life and circumscribed private life, and then the relation between sovereign nations.

Right, because in the realm of legal theory and political philosophy, understanding, like how to adjudicate what's the just basis for a system of laws and a system of government, and what is, how do you treat between two sovereign states? And her claim is that totalitarianism solves this problem first by aspiring to global domination and rule. So to erase the notion of state versus state by aspiring to global domination, where there would be no states or a state, however you prefer to see it, and then the second is through the total domination of human beings, in other words, obviating the ability to have a private life.

The way she talks about legal theory and laws, her claim, Mark to the point you were just making, is that to obliterate the possibility of private life, you have to obliterate the notion of a system of laws that govern public life and circumscribe private life. And the way you do that is through, as she calls it, lawlessness, which is to say totally arbitrary. There's nothing that tells you what the right way or the wrong way to be a public participant or a citizen of the state is, and then gives you the freedom to go explore your individual. It's totally arbitrary.

The system requires simply that you either be a perpetrator or a victim. And it's completely arbitrary on any given day, even to which role you are assigned. So in other words, there's this breakdown of the very structure that makes it possible to define something like a civic life and a private life. These are her claims.

16:05 Dylan: Why does an ideology act as that unifying factor of the distinction between being in and out? And so that. That would be the adjudicator. Maybe the answer is that in totalitarianism there's no truth specifically regarding you being a proper partisan of the ideology. You still might get sacrificed regardless.

16:27 Seth: Yes, it doesn't matter whether you believe

16:29 Mark: so this is defining it as an extreme tribalism. You're either with us or against us. Whereas it's of course very normal, and I'm sure she was very much aware of this, that as soon as you establish an ideology, then you have Lenin going one way and Trotsky going the other way, or whatever the distinction was Trotsky versus Stalin. It's like you create a creed and you're going to have heretics immediately. So that seems to be the natural thing that ideology leads to is ideology does not, you know, in its natural state, as soon as people start taking it seriously, then their interpretations of it difference and you get splintering.

It almost destroys itself. So totalitarianism is ideology plus this defense mechanism of extreme tribalism. And I guess you're Seth, you're affirming with her that introducing an arbitrary, whimsical nature, which I would associate more with a tyranny like, oh, I just don't like you today. Off with your head. You know, that doesn't seem to be what ideology does.

17:25 Seth: Agreed. It's not. The key differentiator here, Mark, is that the whimsy that you just described requires agency. So you have this tyrant who one day loves you and one day doesn't. The way that she characterizes ideologically driven totalitarianism is the state is driven by the principle, the law that validates normal systems of law. So this is where the law of nature or the law of history. The law of nature says that we must all stem from this particular stock or have this particular. The law of history says we can't have capital and capitalists.

18:04 Wes: Let's expand on That a little bit. Right. The law of nature is that it takes off from Darwinism to say that the fittest shall survive and some species of animals are not fit, and so they become extinct. And you translate that to racial categories with human beings. And the idea is that some human beings are unfit and destined to be out competed and destined to die. The ultimate end is the kind of perfection, a racial perfection, towards which history is moving. In the case of socialism, the idea is that certain classes are parasitic, right? So Marx's theory was a theory of history and how history would inevitably unfold in certain ways because of the relations of production and the way that class struggle is predicated on that, so that inevitably we would reach a classless society, that the bourgeoisie essentially would be eliminated.

And so this is what she means by the laws of nature and history. They're laws of development, essentially. They're not the same thing as natural law. Right. She contrasts this to natural law, where you have certain fundamental truths about human beings, human nature, that are morally grounding, like, you know, and tell us, okay, thou shalt not kill. That's kind of grounded in human nature. And we make laws predicated on that. In this case, it's not those sorts of laws. It's these laws of development. And their application is not to individuals, but to the species as a whole or to society as a whole.

I think that's important because in saying what ideology is, we should be careful because it's something very specific. And incidentally, it's not what Marx. Right. Marx is the one who made the word ideology famous. And it's not what Marx means by ideology. So for Marx, ideology is the. It's the stuff that the ruling class puts out. Ideology for Marx is the bourgeoisie saying, hey, the classes are natural, they're not contingent. You're born into a certain class, and that's just the way it is. And things can't change. So ideology with Marx is associated with a defense of the status quo.

Here it's something for Arendt. She's completely redefining it in a very specific way.

20:11 Dylan: But it has the commonality with the Marxist version that you just described as being something that you don't control as a human being is a characteristic of history or a characteristic of the status of the universe and our place in it. And you're in it where you're in it.

20:30 Mark: I'm not sure because she also, just like Wes was saying, makes this contrast between discovering these objective laws and there's a very strong antisocial constructionist thing in Arendt, that part of the way, it's beyond your capabilities as an individual. You can't just as dictator, decide this is what ideology is, this is what the truth is. But there is sort of a group think that determines it's trying to follow this objective rule of the process of history, but because it is unrooted from any real attempt to determine objective truth. It's more like truth is whatever we say it is. So it becomes the party, as we got in 1984, creates truth.

21:17 Wes: Yeah. And so instead of waiting for the bourgeoisie to disappear according to natural historical development. Right. You just kill them. You accelerate the whole process. And so you don't wait around to find out if the theory actually works. You make it come true as soon as possible.

21:33 Dylan: Yeah. And I also can't help but point out, you know, on the case with Darwinism, you know, the way you characterized how a totalitarian would view it and utilize Darwinism as survival of the fittest, such that there's this process of honing down to result in the species that's the best is completely anti Darwinian. And the principle of natural selection is not one of honing to the best. It's kind of a gross misinterpretation of it.

22:06 Seth: So I was not trying to faithfully and accurately characterize those two things. I want to get back to that point of agency. And Dylan, it's like don't get caught up in the mechanisms of whether it's Darwinian or not. Ideology functioning here is not, as you said, something that's produced by the ruling class. It's instead something that is to be more interpreted along the lines of a force of history, where instead of an arbitrary decision by an individual or by a group of individuals about who is or isn't in at any given time, it's that she thinks there is this movement, right, because she's concerned about this motive principle.

What is it that motivates action? And the action says, as Wes said, this group is a disease, they need to be exterminated. Now, does that mean that the people who are doing the exterminating are exempt from that same treatment themselves? No. In fact, it could very well be that after those people do the extermination, they become the targets for extermination. It's all about getting to this end state of whatever the ideology is driving at.

23:15 Mark: It's funny that she says that even though it might state that it wants to get to this end state as fast as possible, that totalitarianism will pursue terror for its own sake that it enters a cycle and it always needs to find new folks to call the enemy. It would be the end of history if it were to actually achieve its goals. I don't know how she would support this because we've just never had a totalitarian state last long enough to see if this is actually how it would act, if it would. Would finally say, oh, we've achieved it. Or I guess part of its goal is it sets impossible goals for itself.

Right. It sets a world domination in the first place, and it sets complete obliteration of individuals. And she, she wants to stress every time a new person is born, there's a potential wrench in the system. And so as long as there are new people, they're going to be new folks to oppress. Now that still makes it sound like not everybody's going to toe the company line as opposed to, it doesn't matter if you toe the company line. We're still going to just arbitrarily pick a group of you and kill you off.

24:12 Dylan: It's always going to be the case for any of these forms of government that there's a little bit of degree in it and there's going to be ways that they fall apart. And totalitarianism isn't going to be any different than that, despite its totalitarian objectives. As you pointed out, Mark, she says, you know, every time someone's born, that's the potential to save us from totalitarianism

24:31 Mark: or a thing that totalitarianism feels itself the need to grab hold of. So it could be fuel for totalitarianism.

24:38 Dylan: I do think it's. It might be worth us stepping back a couple steps more because as Wes pointed out at the beginning, she starts with Montesquieu's political theory account and the distinction between action and. What was the other thing?

24:52 Wes: Well, there's the structure of governments and then there's the principle of action or the principle of motion.

24:57 Dylan: The principle of action. That's what I was thinking of, the principle of action and the structure. So the structure being the rule of the one, the rule of the many, the rule of the few, and then the principle of action behind them. And we summarized it. But it seems like we ought to turn back to that a little bit because this idea of there being of the characteristic distinction of totalitarianism with regards to principle of action or lack of thereof, is important.

25:22 Wes: Yeah, I think it is. And it'll also help us explain what loneliness means, for instance, what isolation really means. And one of the things she's doing in the Beginning is she wants to understand whether totalitarianism is rooted in the human condition and certain fundamental experiences in the way that the other governments seem to be, or at least the lawful governments. So, for instance, in the case of monarchy and democracy, they are reflective of two fundamental intuitions we can have as human beings in the world about the nature of status.

One is that it's just a matter of birth. It's kind of in a monarchy, you come to believe that status is by nature, let's say. And the other is, you know, in a democracy, you think, well, that's just a contingent. It's not by nature. And actually we are all equally valuable. And we are also inherently equal in another sense, which is that the concerted action of a group is where real power lies, and the power is with the concert of action action of a group of people, not with any one individual. And our individual power is in a way mutually limiting.

So these are both principles that can be a foundation for lawful governments. Right? A monarchy and a democracy can both be constitutional governments with laws that regulate cooperative public life, but also carve out space for a place that the law can basically doesn't touch your private life, where your individual destiny unfolds without government interference. There's a place for spontaneity, there's a place for freedom. Both of those intuitions can ground the kind of government that does that, and they also ground the kind of society in which there can be genuine connection between human beings.

Because for her, those social connections are built on our capacity for cooperative, concerted behavior. I mean, what it means ultimately to be lonely, and this will be important later on for totalitarianism, is to be shut off from that, that life in which concerted action with other people is possible. So tyranny is our first hint of what all that means. Because in tyranny you get, you know. For her, fear will amount to a kind of anxiety of loneliness. It's fearful because to be lonely is more than just the bad feeling, like, oh, I feel lonely.

It's powerlessness. Like, your intuition is that if I'm lonely, if I am cut off from other people, I am actually impotent. And the reflexive desire that comes out of that is the desire to dominate amidst the tyrannical desire is produced by that feeling.

28:02 Mark: I thought she made a distinction between inability to actually enact change through group association, which a tyranny is going to smack you down if you do that, and an inability to even converse totalitarianism. Like, if we think about 1984, it really does not want you to have personal relationships of any sort. And because we are social beings that actually, if you can get rid of personal relationships, then you get rid of thinking altogether. Like you don't think on your own.

28:33 Wes: Yeah, I was describing tyranny, not totalitarianism. Yeah. So totalitarianism will go. Yeah, transcend that. Because it's not just about the desire to dominate. And that's the interesting thing. It's not fear and the desire to dominate in totalitarianism. That's a counterintuitive conclusion we're going to get to.

28:49 Mark: I guess I was just wondering whether just tyranny, not totalitarianism, is actually to the point of lonely. Because again, the tyrant is just like, don't come after me. If you're not saying coming after me and you're giving me your fealty and your taxes, then there's still room for a private life.

29:06 Wes: In that she uses the words, the phrase anxiety of loneliness and radical isolation for a tyranny. But she does, you know, qualify that later on to say there could still be fearful. She calls it fearful contact between people in a tyranny. And in the other essay, sorry, in the other chapter of the book, I mean, I think it's a little fuzzy on this because it does seem like there's plenty of room in a tyranny for a private life and to be an artist, to be, you know, Homo Faber. Right. The kinds of things that totalitarianism eliminates, there's room for those things. Even though loneliness is a factor now and fear is a factor.

29:45 Dylan: Well, and those two things are related. Right. I mean, the reason for the loneliness is the prevalence of fear is the mechanism for controlling the society. And even though there are those connections, in spite of fear amongst people and a tyranny, it's that in spite of that is telling. It's sort of the activity of the natural activity of human beings that is going to overcoming the instruments of tyranny. But that fear is what's driving it. I mean, that's why it feels, you know, it sort of instinctually feels like it's on the spectrum of totalitarianism is the way in which fear is the instrument.

And it becomes this kind of question of when this qualitative change is happening in totalitarianism, where there's no longer this room that somehow fear and the obliteration, the strangulation of the private life into something close to obliteration ends up transforming a tyranny into totalitarian regime, but something that has importantly different effects and modes of operation.

30:49 Mark: It's a matter of who you're afraid of. Are you afraid of everyone because your own kids are going to rat you out to the state, to the secret police?

30:56 Wes: She does make the weird argument, right, with totalitarianism, that fear is not the operative principle. Even though there's lots of fear.

31:03 Dylan: It's not the operative principle.

31:04 Wes: It's not the operative principle. Because you can behaving in a certain way doesn't mean you're not going to be the next victim.

31:10 Dylan: Your fear doesn't matter. It's not that they can't hear you the scream, it's that they don't care if you scream.

31:15 Wes: The operative principle will turn out to be ideology. Right? What replaces law in a tyranny and totalitarianism is terror. Terror is what replaces law and fear to a tyranny is as ideology is to totalitarianism. Which is not to say it's a principle of action. Right? She says it's going to be an unusual thing because ideology, I don't think is a. Is to be conceived of as a motivation. Well, actually, now that's something to discuss. Is that an individual motivation?

31:45 Seth: I wanted to go back to this concept of isolation. I don't know if I'm going back or if I'm out of touch with where things are, but isolation versus loneliness. I want to get to this, just this section of the text, which I think was really poignant, where she delineates the difference between the two and I think clarifies what she means about how totalitarianism differs from tyranny. So can I read a little bit?

32:10 Dylan: What page?

32:11 Seth: 474, bottom of 474. In the full book, the ideology and terror chapter. What we call isolation in the political sphere is called loneliness in the sphere of social intercourse. Isolation and loneliness are not the same. I can be isolated, that is, in a situation in which I cannot act because there is nobody who will act with me without being lonely. And I can be lonely, that is, in a situation in which I as a person feel myself deserted by all human companionship without being isolated. Isolation is that impasse into which men are driven when the political sphere of their lives, where they act together in the pursuit of a common concern, is destroyed.

Yet isolation through destructive power and the capacity for action not only leaves intact, but is required for all so called productive activities of man. Man, insofar as he is homo faber, tends to isolate himself with his work, that is to temporarily leave the realm of politics, fabrication, the making of things as distinguished from action. Praxis on one hand, and the sheer labor on the other is always performed in a certain isolation from common concerns, no matter whether the result is a piece of craftsmanship or art. And then she goes on to say that what differs about totalitarian and government is that it 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. In other words, what differentiates totalitarianism is the desire to destroy or completely suppress the human capacity for poesis. So many, many states can destroy the public sphere. But totalitarian is distinguished in that it also tries to destroy the private sphere.

34:04 Mark: So that distinction between isolation and loneliness on the one hand is what I was thinking was tyranny brings about isolation. You're not allowed to work with other people, at least not to overthrow the government.

34:16 Wes: You're not a citizen. You don't act in cooperative efforts as a citizen. Yeah, there's no public life.

34:22 Mark: Right, Exactly. Exactly. Because we're basically lawless. It's only the whim of the monarch on any one time. And so I'm just following this through. So if the monarch says, we're all going to build a pyramid today and gets you all down, well, that's not your, like, authentic. You're doing something with other people but you don't want to. You know, even if you kind of decide you're into it, there's something that's not authentic action. According to Arendt, you're not really making something. You're not exerting your capacity to work.

34:50 Wes: There's no freedom and spontaneity to it.

34:52 Seth: Yes.

34:53 Mark: So you're isolated even though you're working with other people. Loneliness, though, impinged on the mental.

35:00 Wes: Yeah, no, I think you're right.

35:01 Mark: But then solitude is the third thing. And it's kind of confusing the way she discusses them, because first she's contrasting loneliness, isolation, but then solitude comes in. Solitude is actually the good thing because it requires isolation. That's what you actually need to have any authentic thoughts at all. But solitude only makes sense in a social context. In other words, you can go back to have a conversation with somebody that things only really make sense. There's no such thing as a truly solitary philosopher. You have to be talking with other people at some point or else you'll go freaking nuts if you think that you are just purely reading off of nature and producing your philosophy.

That is exactly the kind of thing that she's going to warn against. That isolation pushing you to loneliness. If you try to think in that situation, you don't end up getting other points of view that would cause you to think twice, that would cause you to rethink your initial conclusions, and so you can become a total fanatic.

36:00 Seth: I'm glad you brought this up, Mark. There's a really poignant passage on page 476 about solitude that I think really captures what you're driving at. In solitude, in other words, I am by myself, together with myself, and therefore two in one, whereas in loneliness I am actually one, deserted by all others. Loneliness in her mind is a certain kind of loss of self. You can be in solitude and lose your relationship with others in the public sphere or the civil sphere. But what's required is this ability to be in relation with yourself. Reflective self, reflection, solitude. And if that's removed ahead of you is madness. Right? Loneliness is literally being divorced from yourself in the sense that it's rendering your capacity for self reflection moot. And that's intolerable.

36:51 Wes: There's this kind of dynamic between being in solitude and two in one. Being able to talk to yourself, being able to be reflective, but always being able to come back from that, as Mark said, and. And to be able to talk to someone. And if you can't do that, then you can't even be a. An individual in a sense. The way she puts it is you're. You become whole again. You know, you go off by yourself to think and you become two in one. And then you are restored to the company of others and it restores your identity. You become whole again in the company of others.

So there's this interesting dynamic. But what she'll say is that loneliness is the essence of totalitarianism. And she is going to connect that to what she calls uprootedness, which she sees as, you know, that's the curse since the Industrial revolution. And she connects it to the breakdown of political institutions and social traditions. She doesn't go into a lot of, or to any detail, I think, about what. What all that means. But we can see how she's giving us a theory here of why totalitarianism would have come about in the 20th century. You know, what were the conditions for it?

And I think we can say fundamentally there's certain social conditions were created in which loneliness is a more predominant factor in societies than it ever had been.

38:12 Seth: Yeah, what she says specifically there, Wes, is about uprootedness means to have no place. But she connects it to superfluousness, which is to be of no use.

38:22 Mark: I want to make a parallel between what I was just saying about whether it's the party or the tyrant says we're all going to go build a pyramid together, like that seems like you're acting together with the Party saying, let's all think together. In other words, let's think according to the ideology, that there's something about those experiences, even though you're technically with other people, doing things or thinking things, saying things with other people, you're having conversations with other people, but yet you are exactly like the person who is isolated and goes nuts.

Because this is the nature of ideology, is that. I just want to really get this out before we are done with the first half here is that ideology, again, is a total explanation for things, whether it's everything is explained by race and the superiority of some races over others, or everything is explained by class struggle. We can even think of some other potential totalizing ideologies. Normally, people use religion for something like that, but she doesn't focus on that in any of these. You know, at least those haven't been the dangerous ones.

Religious fanatic. Those words tend to go together. And in fact, these ideologies make these secular things into something like a religion, you know, a very harmfully held, dogmatic, terrible religion.

39:37 Wes: Yeah. So the way she puts it is that id, you know, ideologies are these grand theories, right? They have found the key to the explanation for all the mysteries of life in the world, past and future. And. And basically you don't need experience. It's independent. And she calls it the arrogant emancipation from experience and from the need for inquiry and curiosity. And I think if we, if we want to say why that's appealing to people who are isolated or in an atomized society, as she puts it, it's because ideology suggests that you are also emancipated from the need for genuine contact with other people. There's the kind of these two things

40:13 Seth: go together and genuine reflection, right?

40:16 Wes: But basically contact with other people, it requires cooperative behavior within a moral framework. It requires tolerating difference and disagreement. She doesn't go into this, but this is my interpretation of it. And there's something satisfying in ideology about achieving a fantasy of that just through ideological conformity. So that it is a kind of oneness, right. She talks about it kind of terror, binding everyone together tightly as if you were just one person. But it's, you know, it's not real togetherness, obviously.

40:51 Dylan: It's the clarity of having no crack in your vision of the world based upon your experience or recognizing other individual experiences. There's a supreme unity to it and

41:04 Mark: clearly there is a social motivation within to get you to conform. That once you realize that the bourgeoisie are destined to die off, then if you flinch from actually murdering them yourself, you're a coward. Right? That's the way she puts it. And the same goes with the Nazis, that there is supposed to be the tyranny of logic. Which of course doesn't mean like I've considered all the relevant facts out there and I'm computing, you know, it's not that kind of logic. It's the kind of logic where you have one premise and because it's a totalizing premise, everything is supposed to follow from that.

And if you flinch from that. So this is exactly what I don't want to get too political. Right. You know, maybe this can be something we talk about in the second half, but it made me think back to our Ayn Rand episode where she basically A equals A, which is supposed to be sort of a symbol for there are certain things you know to be true, like you will your own self interest. And so because you will that end, you also implicitly will all the means to that. And if you don't recognize that, if you don't live in a self consciously selfish way, then your being irrational and now the truth is that I do want to, you know, thrive.

But then these other people are also seem to have legitimate claims, you know, but according to the the Objectivist, all that is just you being weak willed and other people are trying to impinge on you with their selfishness and you're letting them that if you really are consistent, if you're logical, then you will pay attention to that initial self evident premise of just being an individual, that you have a self interest that is your desire to further and you will just go with that sort of. You have to live in a society, of course, but it all becomes a matter of calculation on how to maximize that interest based on the situation you're in.

42:58 Dylan: So part of this is articulating why a group of people or society would be susceptible to to ideology and being convinced to participate or enable totalitarianism. Because there's a kind of funny thing about it, which is that at some level people have to buy into it. And I guess the account of that is the account of loneliness, right? That pervasive loneliness sets the stage for the working of totalitarianism, that people buy into it. Then that engine continues to drive loneliness and the human typical human being has the reaction to gravitate towards the solace and unity provided by totalitarianism in order to assuage their loneliness.

43:42 Seth: I think that's part of the ground. So she definitely thinks that there's something in the modern industrial world that there's more uprootedness, people being moved from much more relocation, moving from the country to the city where there's no sense of place or home. And then I think there's also an aspect of, you know, modern capitalism where you're a laborer but you can be replaced in this sense of utility. But I think also there's an aspect here of techne in that there are means of modern communication and industrialization, of warfare and surveillance and a variety of other things that contribute. So I think the conditions were ripe for all of that to take place.

44:34 Dylan: The way you were just describing it makes me think about several different things. Podcasts I listened to about World War I and the experience of being a soldier in World War I and the way in which being a soldier was kind of transformed so that the experience all the way up and down for both sides was of this sort of throwing flesh into the maw of a machine in which it just didn't matter. There was no more possibility for military virtue or anything like that. It just, I'm saying, a truism. But that experience culturally has got to have informed some of this. And it seems like she would say that it was a symptom of an enabler of totalitarianism.

45:22 Seth: I think that's a brilliant analogy. Especially you talk about the concept of virtue in battle. That's a perfect example of a motive force from a traditional or bygone era and how it's completely transformed in the 20th century to where the individual matters. It simply becomes an instrument. I think that was great.

45:45 Mark: Just to clarify, I was not saying objectivists or fascists or totalitarian. That was not my point. The point was to say something about logic and so called scientific thought. But we'll let's expand on that in part two, along with some of these other things. There are so many good quotes in this, so supporters can get that as the next thing in your feed. Go check it out.