Hannah Arendt: Some Thoughts on Loneliness and Its Usefulness to Dictators

I hope this isn't too wonky for folks.

Samantha Rose Hill, the assistant director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities, wrote a fascinating essay on how Stalin and Hitler used loneliness to help build their totalitarian regimes. Although both regimes are gone, human loneliness remains a very useful tool that demagogues and dictators can still exploit to serve their immoral and evil ends. Loneliness can be fomented by propaganda or dark free speech. It tends to make people more susceptible to authoritarians and authoritarianism. The essay is posted online by aeon here. 

Hill writes:

“Writing on loneliness often falls into one of two camps: the overindulgent memoir, or the rational medicalisation that treats loneliness as something to be cured. Both approaches leave the reader a bit cold. One wallows in loneliness, while the other tries to do away with it altogether. .... Everybody experiences loneliness, but they experience it differently.

In the 19th century, amid modernity, loneliness lost its connection with religion and began to be associated with secular feelings of alienation. The use of the term began to increase sharply after 1800 with the arrival of the Industrial Revolution, and continued to climb until the 1990s until it levelled off, rising again during the first decades of the 21st century.

But in the middle of the 20th century, Arendt approached loneliness differently. For her, it was both something that could be done and something that was experienced. In the 1950s, as she was trying to write a book about Karl Marx at the height of McCarthyism, she came to think about loneliness in relationship to ideology and terror. Arendt thought the experience of loneliness itself had changed under conditions of totalitarianism: 

What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience of the ever-growing masses of our century. 

Totalitarianism in power found a way to crystallize the occasional experience of loneliness into a permanent state of being. Through the use of isolation and terror, totalitarian regimes created the conditions for loneliness, and then appealed to people’s loneliness with ideological propaganda.

Before Arendt left to teach at Berkeley, she’d published an essay on ‘Ideology and Terror’ (1953) dealing with isolation, loneliness and solitude in a Festschrift for Jaspers’s 70th birthday. This essay, alongside her book The Origins of Totalitarianism, became the foundation for her oversubscribed course at Berkeley, ‘Totalitarianism’. The class was divided into four parts: the decay of political institutions, the growth of the masses, imperialism, and the emergence of political parties as interest-group ideologies. In her opening lecture, she framed the course by reflecting on how the relationship between political theory and politics has become doubtful in the modern age. She argued that there was an increasing, general willingness to do away with theory in favor of mere opinions and ideologies. ‘Many,’ she said, ‘think they can dispense with theory altogether, which of course only means that they want their own theory, underlying their own statements, to be accepted as gospel truth.’

The initial conclusion, published in 1951, reflected on the fact that, even if totalitarian regimes disappeared from the world, the elements of totalitarianism would remain. ‘Totalitarian solutions,’ she wrote, ‘may well survive the fall of totalitarian regimes in the form of strong temptations which will come up whenever it seems impossible to alleviate political, social, or economic misery in a manner worthy of man.’ When Arendt added ‘Ideology and Terror’ to Origins in 1958, the tenor of the work changed. The elements of totalitarianism were numerous, but in loneliness she found the essence of totalitarian government, and the common ground of terror.

Why loneliness is not obvious. 

Arendt’s answer was: because loneliness radically cuts people off from human connection. She defined loneliness as a kind of wilderness where a person feels deserted by all worldliness and human companionship, even when surrounded by others. The word she used in her mother tongue for loneliness was Verlassenheit – a state of being abandoned, or abandon-ness. Loneliness, she argued, is ‘among the most radical and desperate experiences of man’, because in loneliness we are unable to realize our full capacity for action as human beings. When we experience loneliness, we lose the ability to experience anything else; and, in loneliness, we are unable to make new beginnings. 
But in order to make individuals susceptible to ideology, you must first ruin their relationship to themselves and others by making them sceptical and cynical, so that they can no longer rely upon their own judgment: 

Just as terror, even in its pre-total, merely tyrannical form ruins all relationships between men, so the self-compulsion of ideological thinking ruins all relationship with reality. The preparation has succeeded when people have lost contact with their fellow men as well as the reality around them; for together with these contacts, men lose the capacity of both experience and thought. The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (ie, the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (ie, the standards of thought) no longer exist.  

Organised loneliness, bred from ideology, leads to tyrannical thought, and destroys a person’s ability to distinguish between fact and fiction – to make judgments. In loneliness, one is unable to carry on a conversation with oneself, because one’s ability to think is compromised. ....” (emphasis added)

Regarding ideology

Hill describes how Arendt believed that political, economic or religious ideology can create and then play on loneliness: 

“Arendt spends the first part of ‘Ideology and Terror’ breaking down the ‘recipes of ideologies’ into their basic ingredients to show how this is done:

• ideologies are divorced from the world of lived experience, and foreclose the possibility of new experience;
• ideologies are concerned with controlling and predicting the tide of history;
• ideologies do not explain what is, they explain what becomes;
• ideologies rely on logical procedures in thinking that are divorced from reality;
• ideological thinking insists upon a ‘truer reality’, that is concealed behind the world of perceptible things.”

Her assessment of ideology and ideological motivated reasoning being divorced from experience and sound reasoning seem to be spot on. Her assessment that ideologies are concerned with controlling and predicting the tide of history is partly true. It omits the fact that ideologies also tend to rewrite history in ways that favor the ideological fake reality vision. Ideological and authoritarian detachment from reality and sound reason covers the past, present and future.

Regarding pragmatic rationalism

Her point about ideologies not explaining what is, but instead explaining what will happen strikes me as very important but complicated. She goes into this idea in detail in her Origins book. This concept is one to the points I have been turning over in my head for several years. Can it somehow be used to evoke a reasonably realistic future that is sufficiently appealing to constitute a glue that can hold people of differing, even opposing, ideologies together? That is of personal interest because my own ideology, pragmatic rationalism, lacks a glue or secular spiritual component that might keep conservatives, centrists and liberals on the same page at least in terms of core political moral values.[1] Simply laying claim to trying to be more evidence-based and rational about politics and less ideological is probably weak glue at best, and at worst no glue at all or even an anti-glue.

Footnote: 

1. For wonks, it may be interesting to note that pragmatic rationalism, unlike authoritarian ideologies, does try to explain the present based on modern science, unspun history and moral philosophy. By definition, pragmatic rationalism is designed to be at least these three things: (i) anti-biasing (pro-reality and reason), (ii) anti-ideological (not liberal, conservative, capitalist, socialist, fascist, Christian, etc.) and (iii) anti-authoritarian and rule of the tyrant-demagogue, and pro-democracy and rule of law.