Excellent article on loneliness and totalitarianism: -https://aeon.co/essays/for-hannah-arendt-totalitarianism-is-rooted-in-loneliness …
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"Totalitarianism found a way to crystallise occasional loneliness into a permanent state of being"
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"Through the use of isolation and terror, totalitarian regimes created the conditions for loneliness, and then appealed to people’s loneliness with ideological propaganda."
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"Loneliness, she argued, is ‘among the most radical and desperate experiences of man’, because in loneliness we are unable to realise our full capacity for action as human beings"
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"^^**When we experience loneliness, we lose the ability to experience anything else; and, in loneliness, we are unable to make new beginnings.**^^"
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"**Totalitarianism uses isolation to deprive people of human companionship, making action in the world impossible, while destroying the space of solitude.**"
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"And this means that one can no longer trust the reality of one’s own lived experiences in the world. Instead, one is taught to distrust oneself and others, and to always rely upon the ideology of the movement, which must be right."
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"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:"
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"Organised loneliness, bred from ideology, leads to tyrannical thought, and destroys a person’s ability to distinguish between fact and fiction – to make judgments."
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"In loneliness, one is unable to carry on a conversation with oneself, because one’s ability to think is compromised."
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"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"
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(Trump is probably a very lonely guy. Would explain why threat of ostracization via "I will not think good thoughts towards you in my mind" doesn't affect him.)
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"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."
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"**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."
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"people who subscribe to ideology have thoughts, but they are incapable of thinking for themselves. And it is this inability to think, to keep one’s self company, to make meaning from one’s experiences in the world, that makes them lonely."
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**This is one of the paradoxes of loneliness. Solitude requires being alone whereas loneliness is felt most sharply in the company of others.** "‘What makes loneliness so unbearable,’ she said ‘is the loss of one’s own self which can be realised in solitude …’"
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"Never is a man more active than when he does nothing, never is he less alone than when he is by himself.’ This is what ideological thinking and tyrannical thinking destroy – our ability to think with and for ourselves. This is the root of organised loneliness."
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