Thread by @Helenreflects

@travisthewriter @mehdirhasan Ah that's a pity! I think Arendt works very well for intro phil course. She sought to understand how ordinary, decent people could enable something like the Nazis. I mean, people who voted for Nazis were people w families etc. not psychopaths, law-abiding citizens. So why?

@travisthewriter @mehdirhasan Arendt also focused on stalinism. To her, Nazism and stalinism (in her Origins of Totalitarianism) were similar in that respect that they are totalitarian regimes enabled by a mass of people 2/

@travisthewriter @mehdirhasan A key term for her is a "mass", a mass is when people are fractured, isolated, the social fabric is destroyed to such an extent they can't organize themselves according to common or public interest 3/

@travisthewriter @mehdirhasan Arendt argues that totalitarian regimes succeed because isolated, atomized individuals get a “sense of having a place in the world” - so you have these atomized people, who lost a sense of belonging and community and they say: We can be great again! Our wonderful nation! etc 4/

@travisthewriter @mehdirhasan Now, the key is that totalitarian regimes don't really deliver on that sense of belonging. They don't really make the country great again, or usher in the dawn of communism. Instead, they peddle in lies, they sell a kind of fake identity 5/

@travisthewriter @mehdirhasan Totalitarian regimes create “fictitious worlds”, a web of lies and bullshit in which no one believes, but which guide our behavior. (I mean bullshit in the technical philosophical term that Harry Frankfurt coined it, i.e., things you say to make someone do something). 6/

@travisthewriter @mehdirhasan Her Eichmann in Jerusalem focuses on the trial of a Nazi, the official Adolf Eichmann. She argued that his death sentence was a just punishment for his horrific crimes, but that the trial missed something important, something crucial ... 7/

@travisthewriter @mehdirhasan Namely, Eichmann for all his crimes and the horror of it, was a bureaucrat who merely obeyed orders, never questioned the morality of what he was doing, he was thoughtless.--this shutting down of one's own conscious is a crucial enabler of totalitarianism 8/

@travisthewriter @mehdirhasan This links to the fraught issue of banality of evil (lots of discussion on this and I'm not an Arendt specialist!) So evil not as monstrousness, but as shallowness, thoughtlessness. 9/
aeon.co/ideas/what-did…

@travisthewriter @mehdirhasan I love this quote by her from Eichmann in Jerusalem
"Good can be radical; evil can never be radical, it can only be extreme, for it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension." -- just a few more tweets to tease this out 10/

@travisthewriter @mehdirhasan The idea that only the good can be profound, and that evil is just inherently a lack, an absence is very old in philosophy. You see it in e.g., Augustine and Aquinas. I find something really appealing about this idea. Only the good can really move us 11/

@travisthewriter @mehdirhasan Sure, evil is horrific and can destroy people, communities, relationships, etc. but evil can never move us as profoundly as good does, and there is always something inherently flat and boring and lacking about it. I think that's a key insight. 12/

@travisthewriter @mehdirhasan Anyway, I'm not an Arendt specialist so nuance (also it's just a bunch of tweets) is lacking. I hope it was somewhat helpful in contextualizing her importance as a thinker @travisthewriter! /end