[b]Hannah Arendt
Factuality itself depends for its continued existence upon the existence of the nontotalitarian world.[/b]
Our own nontotalitarian world of course not theirs.
Nothing perhaps illustrates the general disintegration of political life better than this vague, pervasive hatred of everybody and everything, without a focus for its passionate attention, with nobody to make responsible for the state of affairs—neither the government nor the bourgeoisie nor an outside power. It consequently turned in all directions, haphazardly and unpredictably, incapable of assuming an air of healthy indifference toward anything under the sun.
I think she means folks like me. On the other hand, it’s beyond my control.
The concentration camps, by making death itself anonymous (making it impossible to find out whether a prisoner is dead or alive), robbed death of its meaning as the end of a fulfilled life. In a sense they took away the individual’s own death, proving that henceforth nothing belonged to him and he belonged to no one. His death merely set a seal on the fact that he had never existed.
Right, like having your very own death makes you less dead. Though, sure, by all means, point taken.
What has come to light is neither nihilism nor cynicism, as one might have expected, but a quite extraordinary confusion over elementary questions of morality—as if an instinct in such matters were truly the last thing to be taken for granted in our time.
Right, instinctive morality.
War has become a luxury that only small nations can afford.
Let’s file this one under “mutually assured destruction”.
Today we ought to add to these terms the latest and perhaps most formidable form of such dominion, bureaucracy or the rule by an intricate system of bureaucrats in which no men, neither one nor the best, neither the few nor the many can be held responsible and which could be properly called the rule by Nobody.
Not only that but now Nobody is too big to fail.