🐈

"**Totalitarianism uses isolation to deprive people of human companionship, making action in the world impossible, while destroying the space of solitude.**"

"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."

"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:"

"Organised loneliness, bred from ideology, leads to tyrannical thought, and destroys a person’s ability to distinguish between fact and fiction – to make judgments."

"In loneliness, one is unable to carry on a conversation with oneself, because one’s ability to think is compromised."

"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"

(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.)

"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."