The
news is all so terrible now that I can't stand to look at it. Ditto,
Facebook. I enjoy YouTube, like most people, and there was a time
when I might watch the new “Trump fans say the damnedest things”
video. Through it all, the common thread is the constant stream of
bald-faced lies from Trump, and the constant chorus of “hell,
yeah!” from his fans and enablers. It has grown tiresome, at least
for me it has. There are mysterious aspects to this phenomenon.
I
don't know the people in the YouTube videos, so it's easy to dismiss
them as uneducated Rubes and borderline cretins. They believe
everything that Trump or Fox News tells them, even if they have seen
the truth with their own eyes (things that are contrary to statements
that Trump has made that were rebroadcast on TV thousands of times).
They believe lies that are chronologically impossible (President
Obama was in office and totally responsible for 9/11). They appear to
be in some kind of fugue state, where all of the lines of reality
have lost their power to bind. These people appear to be stupid.
It's
harder to accept that they are being stupid when you see it on
Facebook and it's people that you have known for many decades. You know that these people are not stupid, not at all, not even close. Not crazy,
either. It's people that went through some kind of education and on
to successful family lives. Many of them are very prosperous, as a
result of either some kind of business ownership or a cleverly
managed career in a lucrative field. And yet they, like the actual
Rubes and ignoramuses, blithely repeat impossible lies or repost
horrible calumnies against Democratic politicians, or anyone else that their echo chamber has focused their hatred on. They praise Trump to the high heaven and talk
about the imaginary great job that he has done on the economy,
diplomacy, jobs, the military, and immigration, among many other
things. Why they do this is a mystery, or it was until the miracle of
reading books provided a partial/ possible answer this week.
I
read, no, it's too much to say that I “read” the New York Times
every day. I do subscribe, and I do scan the entire portal every
morning, but I only read half a dozen or eight of the articles on
average. You can get some good information from that. I also scan
things like the Raw Story; the Daily Beast; Slate; Salon; Truthdig;
and Think Progress. I also subscribe to the Atlantic Magazine and
Harper's Magazine. I don't read every word of those, either, but I
read a lot. My experience of life, however, has taught me that to
become really informed one must take up actual books and read them.
This point was driven home in the last week or so.
I've
been reading references to Hannah Arendt in serious articles for
decades now, and she is a remarkably lucid and quotable woman. Was,
if you consider that she died many years ago. I finally took the
plunge and put a famous book of hers on my Kindle. A piece of one,
actually. I was afraid that the entirety of “Origins of Totalitarianism” would
be too much for me, so I ordered a copy of “Totalitarianism,” which
is the last of the three parts of that larger work. The fact that the three sections of the book are available individually reassures me that I am not the only lazy
person around here. I've been filing up a notebook with quotes, but
my purpose today is simple and straightforward. The book provides a
valuable clue as to why otherwise intelligent and moral people would
believe such impossible lies and support such unacceptable behavior. I'm here to share it.
Ms.
Arendt talks at length about the mob, and mass man (people being
handled in bulk, having lost their individuality), and the conditions
under which totalitarian ideologies thrive. The key seems to be
periods of rapid change, changes in people's social status and
financial security, changes in society, in societal mores and norms,
changes in borders and identities and politics, changes of all kinds
that are so fast and furious that people look for relief. They can't
take the uncertainty of it all. This could explain why so many of our
family and friends have jumped on the crazy train, since America and
the world have been adding new technologies, new people, and new
ideas at a previously unheard of rate. The combination of chaos,
uncertainty, and loss of status has made them look for solutions to
their psychological and emotional suffering. An ideology, or a demagogue, appears with
a way out. It is, of course, a house of cards built of lies, but
people are in such a dismal condition that they prefer the certainty
of the lies to the uncertainty of the facts around them. The lies are
consistent, which is comforting, as opposed to the facts, which are
chaotic. This dynamic was played out in the episodes of Nazism in
Germany, and Soviet Communism in Russia. Communism in China too, I
suppose. If one were prone to worry, one might suspect that it is
playing out in the United States today.
It
is more likely, however, that we will experience only some kind of
dictatorship, rather than the full-blown totalitarian experience. My
guess is a dictatorship not of one individual, but rather of a small
class of people, or families. An oligarchy, with the extremely
wealthy installed as the decision makers behind some kind of Potemkin
Village of optical-illusion democracy.
Is
it time to start worrying about that result? No, not at all. It's way
past time. That's what we have already.
No comments:
Post a Comment