Hannah Arendt on arresting our ‘flight from reality’
quillette.com
quillette.com
When people adopt conspiracy theories, they are unsatisfied with some aspect of their place in the world and they may feel no one is caring for them properly. Or they feel that the world is behaving improperly and they want it to return to the state they are used to. It is very easy to blame one group. It is very hard to realize that every human is an individual actor with their own emotions and motivations and moral history.
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The world is really crazy - it takes a lot to engage with it on it's own terms.
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I have some sympathy for individuals who adopt conspiracy theories. I have no sympathy for people who use conspiracy theories to enrich or empower themselves.
In some sense is this treating them as children? sheep without any intellectual volition? I do not have much sympathy for individuals who adopt conspiracy theories. If they're adults they're able to think critically and they've decided not to. Sure, despots who use conspiracy theories to manipulate the masses are more culpable, but those of the masses who adopt them uncritically also deserve some blame.
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To put this another way - Michael Shermer writes and talks about weird things that people believe and shows why they are not true. This is good. But sometimes it seems like he has a sense of superiority about it. It's like atheists telling people there are no gods and that it is silly to believe in god. Do you need a sense of superiority to believe these things yourself? Do you need the other person to feel bad about the wrong thing they believed? At times it may be expressed as intellectual bullying.
I don't think it's infantilizing to recognize that we make assumptions when we are young that we hold throughout our lives. We learn how to process sensations and emotions when we are young. Of course the way we do that processing matures with age, but not all at the same rate; and some things may not mature. People can act very childish when they are denied something they feel they are entitled to, for instance.
Either that or something else entirely. I personally know a few people I would firmly place in the conspiracy corner. What I noticed are very different motivations for conspiracy theories (the absurd ones). Some use it for fun, some for boredom, some to get/have an explanation, some to have a sense or a mix of them and there are certainly more aspects to it.
> It is very hard to realize that every human is an individual actor with their own emotions and motivations and moral history.
But you would not deny that conspiracies do exist, right? The term is so widely misused, that I want to make clear that conspiracy theories in their actual meaning doesn't tell you if they are absurd or not. We saw with Iraq war and NSA mass surveillance how this can actually happen and stay clandestine for quite some time.
Most conspiracy theories are motivation theories - I believe that this group has a reason to collude for these reasons. If that motivation is real, it's entirely likely that something LIKE that conspiracy is happening or has happened. False Flag operations do exist, but not everything is a False Flag.
The problem with conspiracy theories is that when you start believing them, you start defending them, and that's when families get angry at each other and split and people get cut off from their usual support groups.
Yeah, I actually expected you to mean the absurd, but I wanted to make clear that conspiracy theories are not the same as absurd as this gets too often conflated.
> Most conspiracy theories are motivation theories - I believe that this group has a reason to collude for these reasons. If that motivation is real, it's entirely likely that something LIKE that conspiracy is happening or has happened. False Flag operations do exist, but not everything is a False Flag.
From my intuition I'd say False Flag happens very rarely, yeah (but it erodes trust). And I would go a bit further and say that only because something is plausible doesn't mean it's likely, but the lower bound of my statement would be to not outright deny the possibility.
We are mostly in agreement here to be clear.
> The problem with conspiracy theories is that when you start believing them, you start defending them, and that's when families get angry at each other and split and people get cut off from their usual support groups.
That's not exclusive to conspiracy theories. Everything slightly political can easily make people angry including myself (tho not resentful). One needs to gauge with whom you can talk about political topics even if disagreeing. I personally do this less/not online tho, except for people I know for longer.
When the conspiracy fantasy is personal ("they" are out to get me, and screwed me at the DMZ), "paranoid conspiracy fantasy" is traditional.
Not that this solves anything. People discussing ECHELON in the 80s were called fantasists. And many react to descriptions of room 641A the same way despite the pictures. Arendt's concept of reconciliation is a helpful tool for making my own sense of other people's sense-making.
It is quite amazing to watch:
Interviewer asks a thoughtful question. Then there is silence and thinking. And then there’s an eloquent, thoughtful response. Just imagine how different the world would look if people today conversed like that!
If you know of any contemporary interviews in that style, please let me know.
> The promise of modern science addresses an ever-present-but-only-now-realizable drive to make life and man artificial; to cut, as Arendt put it, “the last tie through which even man belongs among the children of nature.” We will soon “produce superior human beings.”
I take issue with the ideas this article is trying to present. Humans are not children of nature; they are nature. Humanity evolved of this earth and everything humanity has achieved is a consequence of that. I don't think that "technological advancement" severs any ties with the nature that birthed us, it is just the further progression of the same processes that created us and continue to shape us.
For as long as humans have existed, we have been creating technology to deal with the environments we find ourselves in. Fire for warmth and cooking, clothing, tools, agriculture, etc. Is not the human ability to take an active and concerted role in shaping ourselves and our environments a part of what defines "humanity"? Modification of the human body itself is not even anything new; for thousands of years humans have been piercing themselves and binding themselves and even deforming skulls, before that fell out of fashion in the last century.
To me, the lines being drawn here, that we must not modify ourselves or evolve beyond where we are at now, are arbitrary. I think there are good arguments over specifics when it comes to things like gene editing or AI, but to issue such a blanket statement that we must simply "man up" and "accept reality" seems overly broad, and itself ignores the actual reality that humans have been shaping ourselves and our world for as long as we have existed.
I do think mortality is often used as an allegory in order to humble and show how arrogance leads to fallibility, and to that end I 100% agree. But it’s important to separate the story telling device and the meaning behind it in my opinion.
I was struck by how closely this passages describes the ever-growing infection of post-modernism in contemporary US institutions.
You make it sound like truth wasn't a game until now, all of a sudden, or that people weren't championing the goals they value until now, all of a sudden. Politics didn't start yesterday, you were simply more comfortable with previous regimes. 'Post-modernism' is one of the most over-used keywords to describe the current landscape, particularly if you think only a certain party can be accused of it.
My intention was to make it sound like objective reality was always at least part of the game until now. There has never been a period of time where the explicit rejection of objective reality in lieu of ideology has been a significant part of the United States "establishment".
>'Post-modernism' is one of the most over-used keywords to describe the current landscape, particularly if you think only a certain party can be accused of it.
Unfortunately rampant partisanship combined with a lack of education and critical thinking skills has left people unable to have any understanding of society outside of the false, contrived Republican vs Democratic binary narrative.
As an example of the delusional brain-rot that has infected our institutions, I point you to a recent article from The Atlantic, which has been widely regarded as the voice of the DC Establishment for decades.
> And though sex differences in sports show advantages for men, researchers today still don’t know how much of this to attribute to biological difference versus the lack of support provided to women athletes to reach their highest potential.
https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2022/09/sports-g...
The whole point is that objective reality ends very quickly past mathematical theorems. Slaves were not people according to the establishment, and it was common sense and objective fact that whites were superior. Until it wasn't. According to the mainstream homosexual people were objectively, factually mentally ill and evil, and then they weren't.
Back when those ideas were mainstream, there were always people who rejected those "objective realities", but most people had a harder time spreading ideas which went against the mainstream then we do today. In other words, minority voices are louder now then any other time in history, and our sense of an objective reality relies on having a stable narrative grounded in the majority voice.
In fact that's completely false. If a rock is flying through the air towards your head, and you don't move, that rock will hit you in the head. That is objective reality. Various people can come up with all sorts of narratives and beliefs about what that rock is, who threw it, whether or not the rock is sentient or represents something else entirely. But objective reality is the rock hitting you in the head. Reasonable people can argue about the meaning of the rock, why it was thrown, who threw it, or how it was otherwise ejected through the sky towards your head, but they all agree that the rock is there, flying through the sky towards your head. That is objective reality.
But there's no zone in the brain that directly distinguishes facts from opinions or narratives. The brain has to recognize that other people exist, and those other people have beliefs. All of our culture is built on top of that, including our understanding of facts.
If you were utterly alone, you would develop narratives about the world, but without external challenge there's no reason to believe that you would develop a conception of falsehood. The story of Adam and Eve in the Garden is kind of an echo of this.
We are all individuals participating in culture.
This is part of the mindset I'm referring too. For example, 2+2 = 4. This mathematical statement has been self-evident and uncontroversial for thousands of years, across an almost infinite array of societies. The idea that this simple, self-evident mathematical statement is disputed by anyone, let alone "serious" academics in some of our most prestigious universities (the ones churning out our next generation of "leaders") is a new phenomenon, and one that should be very concerning.
To go on further and to find justification in Nietzsche is absurd. I could just as easily drag Jonas Čeika into the conversation and point to evidence that Marx and Nietzsche complement each other. Given that the author doesn't even attempt to rebut such a connection, I can't help but think they are vastly under-read in this area and as such simply wrote whatever drivel they wanted without actually engaging in the topic.
At the end of the day he's engaging in a classic trope of reality construction by invoking common sense and truth. His brand of reality has its own unsaid boundaries - simply identify ideas that he would claim as heresy and the worldview he holds will be outlined as the very ideological reality he claims to dispute.