Post by midcan5 on Jun 11, 2017 9:44:05 GMT -5
"Movements thrive on the destruction of reality. Because the real world confronts us with challenges and obstructions, reality is uncertain, messy, and unsettling. Movements work to create alternate realities that offer adherents a stable and empowering place in the world."
The OP below is an excellent piece on Trump's person. Trump followers beware you may gain some insight which is scary and extremely rare in the fearful follower's mind.
lithub.com/rebecca-solnit-the-loneliness-of-donald-trump/
"The reason fact-checking is ineffective today — at least in convincing those who are members of movements — is that the mobilized members of a movement are confounded by a world resistant to their wishes and prefer the promise of a consistent alternate world to reality. When Donald Trump says he’s going to build a wall to protect our borders, he is not making a factual statement that an actual wall will actually protect our borders; he is signaling a politically incorrect willingness to put America first. When he says that there was massive voter fraud or boasts about the size of his inauguration crowd, he is not speaking about actual facts, but is insisting that his election was legitimate. “What convinces masses are not facts, and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably part.”
"What Arendt shows in Origins is that movements are so dangerous and can be central elements of totalitarianism because they provide the psychological conditions for “total loyalty,” the kind of unquestioned loyalty Trump rightly understands himself to possess among his most faithful supporters. “Such loyalty,” she writes, “can be expected only from the completely isolated human being who, without any other social ties to family, friends, comrades, or even mere acquaintances, derives his sense of having a place in the world only from his belonging to a movement.”
lareviewofbooks.org/article/arendt-matters-revisiting-origins-totalitarianism/
"Simone Weil wrote that “to be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.” The modern condition of rootlessness is a foundational experience of totalitarianism; totalitarian movements succeed when they offer rootless people what they most crave: an ideologically consistent world aiming at grand narratives that give meaning to their lives. By consistently repeating a few key ideas, a manipulative leader provides a sense of rootedness grounded upon a coherent fiction that is “consistent, comprehensible, and predictable.” lareviewofbooks.org/article/arendt-matters-revisiting-origins-totalitarianism/
onbeing.org/programs/lyndsey-stonebridge-thinking-and-friendship-in-dark-times-hannah-arendt-for-now/
www.juancole.com/2017/06/watching-trump-voter.html
Reading: 'On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century' by Timothy Snyder
'The Trouble with Reality: A Rumination on Moral Panic in Our Time' by Brooke Gladstone
"The supreme mystery of despotism, its prop and stay, is to keep men in a state of deception, and with the specious title of religion to cloak the fear by which they must be held in check, so that they will fight for their servitude as if for salvation." Baruch Spinoza