The March Toward Totalitarianism: Hannah Arendt In The 21st Century

There is perhaps no philosopher in recent history that understood Totalitarianism than Hannah Arendt. Born in Germany in 1906 of Jewish parents, Hannah studied under Martin Heidegger at the University of Heidelberg. Heidegger is important because he converted to National Socialism and provided the Nazis with much of their philosophical underpinnings. Arendt did her doctoral dissertation on St. Augustine at Freiburg, I believe.

When the Nazis came to power, she moved first to Switzerland and then to Paris. She was arrested in France and placed in a concentration camp but escaped to America via Portugal before her execution. She had contemplated staying in Germany like many other Jews, but decided to go. We tend to view the Nazis ascent to power as if it happened overnight, as an almost isolated phenomenon. During the Weimar Republic, Germany was viewed by many as a nation of philosophers- it was a very liberal culture in many ways. Almost no one thought that the Nazis meant the things they proposed, there was an attitude of; "It couldn't happen here."

Philosophically, Arendt is kind of unique. She didn't consider herself a philosopher at all, but a political theorist. She is unpopular with the "right" because she took Marx seriously, not as a solution, but in that he recognized that capitalism was fraught with many inherent problems. She was equally unpopular with the "left" because she vociferously criticized the USSR and China as well as Nazi Germany. Although a prolific writer (and lecturer), her two preeminent works are The Origins of Totalitarianism and The Banality of Evil. The latter she wrote as an analysis of the trial of Adolph Eichmann.

Briefly, Arendt believed that we live in three spheres of existence. Social: that we live together as a confluence of differences. Political: how we deal with these differences in an organized manner. Private: how we select those with whom we wish to associate.

Totalitarianism, to Arendt transcends the left/right paradigm (another thing that made her unpopular with both sides) but occurs as a result of several factors. The first is the masses attempting to create a utopian political system (forward-looking) or a paleogenesis (backward-looking). A good example of the first is the USSR or China with their appeal for a new order based on the rise of the proletariat. Nazi Germany is an example of the second, with their appeal to the Teutonic myth system and the Aryan race. Either way, the result is the same. Here's how a culture falls to Totalitarianism.

First the masses are won over by the use of propaganda and/or psy ops involving terror. One way or the other, the population must be terrorized. The masses then become a mob. The mob becomes driven to action generally by the same methods. The result is inevitably evil. Arendt speaks of two forms of evil, radical and banal. She draws on Augustine to explain radical evil (it's not what you might think). In his Confessions, Augustine tells a story of having stolen a pear as a child. He then analyzes his motivation: he wasn't poor, he wasn't even hungry. His conclusion was that there was no real reason except that it was something in his nature that made him do it. In other words, there is something in our nature that gives us the capacity to do wrong for no good reason.

The banal form of evil is a little more complex. Writing about Eichmann, Arendt called him thoughtless, but not stupid. He sent millions to their deaths for no other reason than it was his job. Remember, Hitler never actually killed anyone- he ordered it, but only indirectly. It took a massive "machine" to exterminate millions of people. Those involved in transporting, recording, operating the camps, rounding up victims, etc., were merely cogs in a machine. There's a line from a movie that said something like: "What gave Hitler power were the clerks." Nazism was built primarily on a bureaucracy. Her observations about Eichmann were taken by much of the Jewish community as an excuse for his behavior, making her unpopular with them as well.

Within Totalitarianism the two evils coexist simultaneously. Whether utopian or paleogenic, Totalitarian regimes wind up being swallowed by themselves making their original purpose meaningless. According to Arendt, they make it impossible to be any longer human. People, like Eichmann and the Nazis become cogs in a wheel. Truth is no longer possible and neither is political engagement. In America today we are descending into Totalitarianism. The Deep State and political oligarchs have made democracy an illusion. After the elections ill-informed mobs took to the streets. Meaningful political discourse has all but disappeared. The MSM have become the purveyors of terrorist propaganda. It would be interesting to get Hanna Arendt's take on where we will wind up.