Thread by @Helenreflects

A wee thread in this festive season on Hannah Arendt and Brexit. 1/
If you think of the Leavers, are they people genuinely united by a common passion? A desire for blue passports? A patriotism for a golden UK that never existed? Or are they more of an amorphous mass?

Hannah Arendt distinguished between classes, mobs and masses (see link for a good overview) Masses are easily swayed and have no clear common identity 2/
literaturesalon.wordpress.com/2013/11/14/han…

As she writes, "The term masses applies only when we deal with people who either because of their sheer numbers, or indifference, or a combination of both, cannot be integrated into any organization based on common interest" 3/

Masses are moved by superficial and empty rhetoric, they are not truly mobilized (as genuine grassroots movements are). They are divided. The bonds of family, love, civic participation have been destroyed. They are adrift. 4/

if the structures that hold people together in society collapse, the inhabitants are turned into a mass of isolated individuals, a bit like a house that collapses and leaves people isolated in the separate apartments (Arendt's metaphor) 5/

Isolated, apathetic individuals are vulnerable to state ideology. They thus become loyal to the "will of the people" (Brexit) regardless of what it brings or doesn't bring, regardless of what it looks like 6/

Regardless of all the hollow cheering of @DailyMailUK et al about blue passport, there is no joy, no shared identity, nothing grassrootsy about Brexit. Instead it sows division, atomism, apathy, a society ripe for falling prey to totalitarianism 6/

This explains also in a sense why our MPs have lost their compass and why it seemed like an extraordinary act of bravery of 11 conservative MPs to vote to uphold Parliamentary sovereignty for the withdrawal bill 7/

This explains also why those who voted for Brexit don't change their minds. Not because they all of a sudden have a deep desire for blue passports, but because they are apathetic and in the thralls of an effective propaganda machine 8/

How do we counter the indifference of the masses?
The first thing to do is not to let this Brexit thing isolate and divide us further. Seek out to speak to your Leave voting friends and family. 9/

Try to repair the decline of civic participation and community. Organize in local communities. Follow back #FBPE twitter feeds. Get together locally 10/

Arendt argues that totalitarian regimes succeed because isolated, atomized individuals get a "sense of having a place in the world". Brexit gives that false, short-lived sense of identity, hence all the cheering about blue passports. 11/

Totalitarian regimes create "fictitious worlds", filled with lies. In this case, about funding the NHS, about gentle ethnic cleansing to make the UK British again, about getting the empire back. We need to create a sense of community again to counter this 12/

Thus, to fix Brexit, to fix the UK's potential vulnerability to other extreme ideologies, we need to fix British fractured society. This is the only long-term fix. No small order, but we can start small by reaching out locally. /ends