NOTE to Environmental Ethicists: central to Arendt's philosophy and to an environmentally-sustainable future is her emphasis on "natality" and the ever-promising renewal of life with every birth and every new generation. "There is a tomorrow."
LISTEN. WATCH. The most interesting philosopher in today's CoPhi lineup, for my money, and by far the one with the most timely and relevant message for this moment when the future of democracy feels so precarious, is Hannah Arendt. She warned us to beware the "terribly and terrifyingly normal" average fellow citizens we'd never suspect of harboring a capacity for sadism and violence. She said:
- “The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.”
- “As citizens, we must prevent wrongdoing because the world in which we all live, wrong-doer, wrong sufferer and spectator, is at stake.”
- “Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.”
- “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.” Origins of Totalitarianism
In other words, Fantasyland is ripe for the picking. There may never in history have been such a concentration of banal, unthinking, uninformed, lonely (isolated, disconnected, paranoid/conspiratorial) people as we find here now... (continues)
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