“Under nondespotic forms of government, laws function to stabilize human relationships, lending the latter a degree of predictability, not to mention security. But under totalitarian regimes, the laws invoked are meant not to anchor interaction in something solid, but rather to throw it helter-skelter into the rapids of unceasing turbulence.”
"What had made ideology so attractive in the modern world, Arendt argued, was less any particular content than the fact that it had appeared in societies ravaged by “loneliness.” To people uprooted and superfluous for whom “the fundamental unreliability if man” and “the curious inconsistency of the human world” were too much to bear, ideology offered a home and cause , “a last support in a world where nobody is reliable and nothing can be relied upon.” The price of that support was incalculably high: a rupture with reality and the submission to that “‘ice-cold reasoning’ and the ‘mighty tentacle’ of dialectics which ‘seizes [the believer] in a vice’ “–both from Peter Baerhr’s introduction to The Portable Hannah Arendt: pg. XX to XXI….
First of all, I would point out that the former quote makes Orwell’s description of the totalitarian state seem a little dated and unlikely –that is even though it made points we need to pay attention to such as the staged event, especially given the very real control that corporate owned media has on our perception of reality. At the same time, it could very well have served as a distraction (or red herring (in terms of the very real totalitarian potential that was emerging in America under Reagan –that which was anticipated by Arendt’s radical and demonized observations concerning NAZI Germany.
Back in 1983, December, as we were approaching 1984, we jokingly held our breaths and jokingly sighed in relief when it didn’t happen. I was living in L.A. at the time. And we chuckled at Orwell’s prophecy failing to happen. However, at that same time, under the reactionary movement that was emerging under Reagan and Nancy’s “Just Say No” campaign (as well as Joe Biden’s campaign for a drug czar, the partiers were being driven from Glendora Mountain Road and the hookers were being chased off of Sunset Boulevard –both locations of which were major centers of the kind of energy that made California what it was and no longer is. And this, of course, was the result of America finding its self cowering in the economic shadow of Japan. America simply could not stand the idea of being number two and found its self willing to trade its soul, the old American spirit associated with freedom, for the new American spirit associated with economic and military prowess: the tyranny of the functional which defines freedom in terms of our roles as producer/consumers. I return again to the former point:
“Under nondespotic forms of government, laws function to stabilize human relationships, lending the latter a degree of predictability, not to mention security. But under totalitarian regimes, the laws invoked are meant not to anchor interaction in something solid, but rather to throw it helter-skelter into the rapids of unceasing turbulence.”
Let’s note here how Capitalism, as compared to Orwell’s vision of law as stability, has come closer to Arendt’s vision of a constant state of instability that we can only react to by taking on more debt in order to maintain the standard of living we’re use to. And I mean it: they are every bit as insidious as drug dealers. We experience it personally every day. When I first got on to Rhapsody, I was offered a subscription that allowed me to put streaming songs on my mp3 player: rhapsody to go they called it. Then the mp3 players you could do that with suddenly stopped being manufactured. This was because Rhapsody suddenly decided that the only way you should be able to stream those songs is by paying for a data phone service. In other words, not only am I required to pay Rhapsody their subscription fee, I am now required to pay for the data plan on my phone.
And, quite frankly, I’m waiting for some Republican to offer, as a practical solution to the debt that Capitalism (a debt based economy (forces on us, the solution that the individual submit themselves to slavery to pay it off. In that sense, the one thing the Capitalist form of totalitarianism offers us in common with Orwell’s vision is the staged event: much as corporate owned prisons are doing with black men: create the desperate environment that will drive them to the desperate measure of crime, then incarcerate them (sometimes under the watchful eye and whipping post of COPS (at taxpayer expense while making it seem as if the only reason the taxpayer would have to spend that money is because of the behavior of the black man.
Anyway: more to explore tomorrow.