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. 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. 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. Exactly twenty years before her piercing treatise on lying in politics, she writes: 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).Īrendt 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.
“Loneliness is personal, and it is also political,” Olivia Laing wrote in The Lonely City, one of the finest books of the year.
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