Jenny Connected

Universities and the Future of Civilisation. A talk by Iain McGilchrist to Ralston College, Savannah, Georgia, USA.

January 1, 2026January 1, 2026jennymackness2 Comments

Last month I listened to a lecture on Higher Education given by Iain McGilchrist to Ralston College in Savannah, Georgia, USA. Iain has recently been made Chancellor of Ralston College succeeding Jordan Peterson who was Chancellor for the preceding three years.

I have long been interested in the work of Ralston College which offers a unique and intensive MA in the Humanities, where the students spend their first semester in Greece, learning the language and studying ancient Greek philosophy. They then return to Savannah to complete their studies over the remaining three semesters.

Ralston College’s mission is to model ‘a humanities education worthy of that name, set within a scholarly community that aspires to truth, beauty, freedom, and fellowship’. It seeks a ‘revival and reinvention of the traditional university. A fellowship for anyone, anywhere who seeks the truth with courage’.

It was within this context that Iain McGilchrist was invited to speak to an audience at Ralston College (and online) about Universities and the Future of Civilisation. As yet a recording of this talk has not been posted on Ralston College’s website, so what follows are the brief notes I made as I listened to this talk. (Any errors within these notes are, therefore, of course, mine!).

I have heard Iain McGilchrist talk about education in general before, but never about universities specifically.

For McGilchrist universities are the cornerstones of civilisation; they are of medieval origin. Interestingly I recently had a conversation with my son who told me that our local vicar had preached a sermon about how universities in medieval times were set up by the church and how this connection with the church is now broken. I am sure McGilchrist would concur with this.

These days, McGilchrist told us, tradition has a bad reputation, because it is being ossified, but he said, tradition is inherently dynamic, a living phenomenon. Universities must introduce a grounding of tradition because nothing creative can be done without tradition. Music, art, literature and poetry all build on tradition and take it further. There is nothing stultifying about tradition. It is not static. It is constantly in flow, evolving powerfully. Universities today are neglecting tradition. We need to understand the context in which new inventions arise.

McGilchrist believes that universities have lowered expectations of students, increased specialisation and narrowed discussion, but that free discussion must be of the essence. A university should offer a universe of subjects, including the humanities, so that students can see things in the broader perspective of the whole. Losing the humanities means that we lose learning about what it means to be human. Education has become skewed by economic considerations. Lowering of standards leads to passive learning.

Education is not about putting something in (to the minds of students) but clearing away obstacles and allowing something to come out. As Plutarch said, the mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be lit. We need imagination and intuition as well as techniques. Students must be held to high standards to do and learn more. Teachers can show the way because education is relational. Machines fail at the first hurdle, but teachers can communicate a spark to students. Teachers must talk about what excites them and help students select the best way of being in the world. McGilchrist believes that Ralston College makes education as hard as possible to take students to a higher order purpose and encourage them to go as far as they can.

He said we take it for granted that there is linear progress, that what comes next is better than what comes before, but this is not necessarily the case. The current philosophical position is not only depressing but also false. The 1970s saw deconstructionist and post-modernist attacks on truth, but McGilchrist believes that if there is no truth, universities are a waste of time. Popular culture has led to life with no purpose, no meaning, no values, and a fragmented world. But there needs to be truth and some things are truer than others.

Moving on requires not just acquisition of knowledge and information, but also wisdom and understanding. These represent the two kinds of knowing that McGilchrist has often talked about and I have written about before. The one is narrow and analytical and the other is holistic. In some languages, e.g. French, there are different words for these two kinds of knowing (savoir and connaitre), but in English we just have the one word. McGilchrist believes that our education systems are skewed towards narrow, analytical ways of knowing, and that we have sold out to this way of thinking. Universities need to change hearts and minds. Intelligent communities need to re-vision what is important, by shifting away from mechanistic ways of thinking and seeing. We should ask ourselves the question, ‘What does my way of thinking stop me from seeing?

Wisdom and creativity don’t come from what you do, but from what you don’t do. Creativity will find you. You don’t find it. Truth, goodness, beauty and the sacred all come to us in this way, but for this we need to have an open disposition towards the world.

These days everything must have an instrumental value. Everyone questions the use of value – useful for what? This focus on utility is narrow minded and short sighted. The important point of education is about the genesis of fulfilled human beings.

Universities have an influence on the way culture is evolving. There are high intellectual goods, such as beauty, goodness and truth, which can pull you forward, but you need to have ideals, and be drawn from the front.

McGilchrist believes that we need to be led out of the prison we are in (Plato’s Cave) and that a good College will cause the student to grow towards the light. At the heart of regeneration of culture is how human beings relate to the whole. For McGilchrist, universities and their students need

Openness to truth wherever it might lead
To think and talk about everything in a civilised way
New beliefs
To get back a sense of the spiritual
To acknowledge that there is something more than we know
To go where intuitions lead us, informed by lives guided by goals of reflecting back to the universe goodness, beauty and truth.

McGilchrist believes that Ralston College, by encouraging students to work hard and think deeply and freely, is doing this. In his response to the invitation to become Chancellor of the College he wrote:

“I am truly honoured by the invitation to take on the role of Chancellor at Ralston College, that new bright star in the firmament of academe. Universities are a cornerstone of our civilization, and I believe that their future in the West lies in the balance: nothing less than our integrity as a society depends on getting them back on course.

“The stakes, then, are high; and I know of no better institution than Ralston College to champion, tirelessly and courageously, freedom of thought, true scholarship, a love of excellence and deep engagement with the richness of the humanities.

“May God bless its every endeavour and help me to do what I can to encourage Ralston on its path to the greatness of which it is assured.”

Image Attribution

By Pieter Brueghel the Elder – Levels adjusted from File: Pieter_Bruegel_the_Elder_-_The_Tower_of_Babel_(Vienna)_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg, originally from Google Art Project., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=22179117

Ayn Rand (1905-1982) Introductory Notes

September 19, 2025jennymackness7 Comments

Earlier this month a member of my local U3A philosophy group gave us a talk on Ayn Rand. I had heard of her before, but didn’t really know anything about her.

Source of image: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayn_Rand

On entering the room, the first slide of the speaker’s PowerPoint presentation was already on display. It read:

Atheism is good
Capitalism is good
Selfishness is good
Altruism is evil

The speaker had warned us that Ayn Rand was/is a controversial figure, but on reflection, I wonder whether this opening slide set us up to think negatively about her. In the feedback session at the end of the talk, Rand was variously described as dangerous, deluded, and a narcissistic psychopath deserving of more than a slap. This is an indication of the emotions that were stirred up during the session. But perhaps a more balanced, informed and nuanced view is required.

Ayn Rand was born Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum in Russia, but moved to America, where she stayed for the rest of her life in 1926. Ayn Rand was her pen name.

She is known for her philosophy which she named Objectivism and for four novels:

We the Living (1936) – Rand’s first statement against communism
Anthem (1938) – about a dystopian future world in which totalitarian collectivism triumphs to the exclusion of ‘I’
The Fountainhead (1943) – about an unconventional architect who struggles against a conformist society
Atlas Shrugged (1957) in which Rand develops her philosophy of Objectivism

Objectivism offers several life lessons, primarily emphasising reason, self-interest, and individual rights. Rand described the essence of Objectivism as ‘the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity and reason as his only absolute’. She believed that reality is perceived by our senses; reason makes sense of that reality; the pursuit of happiness, through a focus on self-interest is the moral purpose of life; capitalism is the best (only) way for individuals to be free. ‘Objectivism encourages individuals to be honest with themselves and other, to avoid playing the victim, and to develop self-esteem’ (quoted from session notes).

The notes provided at the session included the following key lessons:

“Use reason:

Rand stressed that reason is humanity’s primary tool for survival and progress. She believed individuals should rely on logic and evidence to understand the world and make decisions.

Pursue self-interest:

Rand argued that acting in one’s own self-interest is not only rational but also morally right. This doesn’t mean harming others, but rather, focusing on one’s own well-being and happiness as the primary moral goal.

Respect individual rights:

Rand believed that every individual has the right to their own life, liberty, and property. This includes the right to act on their own judgment and to keep the fruits of their own labour, as long as they don’t infringe the rights of others.

Embrace self-esteem:

A core principle of Objectivism is the importance of self-esteem, which Rand defined as the conviction that one is worthy of happiness. She believed that self-esteem is earned through productive work and ethical behaviour.

Value production and achievement:

Rand emphasised the importance of productive work and achievement as the foundation of human value. She believed that individuals should strive to create value in the world, whether through their work or other contributions.

Be honest:

Honesty is a fundamental virtue in Rand’s philosophy. She believed that individuals should be honest with themselves and others, and that dishonesty is ultimately self-destructive.

Don’t be a victim:

Rand’s philosophy rejects the idea of ‘victimhood’ and encourages individuals to take responsibility for their own lives and happiness. She believed that people should not passively accept suffering or misfortune, but rather, actively work to overcome challenges.”

Some of these key ideas seem reasonable and positive, e.g. Be honest and Don’t be a victim. I think it was the ethics of individualism that disturbed our U3A group members. Rand rejected collectivism and thought working for the good of others is wrong, that selfishness is a virtue and there is no such thing as altruism. She believed that all forced taxation is theft, and that people should not be forced to pay for benefits they may never receive. Ultimately, she was accused of hypocrisy, because when it came to the crunch and having publicly advocated against welfare programmes, she did collect Social Security and Medicare benefits under her husband’s name. Was this a double standard or was it an instance of radical selfishness where she used the system to serve her own self-interest?

In my group’s post talk discussion at the U3A meeting, the view was expressed that Rand’s whole philosophy, whilst containing elements of truth, is a house built on sand; human beings cannot function as individuals, we are all in relationships, we are built to be social. The groups felt that Objectivism is not a philosophy, more a modus operandi which is attractive to people who are already in dominant positions.

Many politicians have been and still are influenced by Ayn Rand’s ideas. Margaret Thatcher famously said: “There’s no such thing as society” but she was not thought to be an objectivist or a follower of Rand’s philosophy. Some UK conservative MPs (e.g. Boris Johnson, Rishi Sunak, Sajid Javid) are all thought to be fans of Ayn Rand, and a lot of influential American politicians cite Rand as a major influence, e.g. Reagan and Nixon. According to an article written in The Guardian by Jonathan Freedland in 2017, Rand’s novel The Fountainhead is one of the few works of fiction that Donald Trump likes. Freedland ends this article with the following paragraph.

“So Rand, dead 35 years, lives again, her hand guiding the rulers of our age in both Washington and San Francisco. Hers is an ideology that denounces altruism, elevates individualism into a faith and gives a spurious moral licence to raw selfishness. That it is having a moment now is no shock. Such an ideology will find a ready audience for as long as there are human beings who feel the rush of greed and the lure of unchecked power, longing to succumb to both without guilt. Which is to say: for ever.”

Since the cult of individualism seems to be growing across the world, I wonder how Ayn Rand would respond were she alive today. Would she feel validated in her thinking or begin to doubt her philosophy of Objectivism?

Beyond this introductory post, The Ayn Rand Institute’s website https://aynrand.org/ provides further information about her life and work, and the YouTube video in which Mike Wallace interviews Ayn Rand, originally broadcast in 1959, gives you a sense of her as a person.

Fine Words Butter No Parsnips

August 18, 2025jennymackness2 Comments

Last week I spent most of the week on a literature course (part of the North West Region U3A’s summer school) at Manchester Metropolitan Museum in Manchester.

The title of the course, which was led by the wonderful Meg Shaw, was ‘I have something to say’. In her introduction Meg wrote ‘We shall listen to three voices, three novelists over three centuries, who spun their yarns around Manchester, Elizabeth Gaskell (‘Mary Barton’), Howard Spring (‘Fame is the Spur’) and Jeanette Winterson (‘Oranges are not the Only Fruit’). Obviously, we discussed the three books, but we also had broader discussions on topics such as the campaigning novel, changes in the novel and ‘The North’ as a literary symbol. There were 17 people in the group, all women, and most (but not including me) seemed to be very well-read English graduates, so the level of discussion was challenging and stimulating. Meg herself, was impressively well read across both literature and philosophy.

There is so much that I could share from this course, but in this post, I am going to focus on our very first session, when I knew that I was in for a good week, and which set the tone for the following few days. The title of this session was ‘Literature Butters No Parsnips’. To the surprise of my discussion group members, I had never come across this expression before. The original expression was ‘Fine Words Butter No Parsnips’ (the title of this post). Evidently this is an old English proverb dating back to the 17^th century. Parsnips were a staple in the English diet before potatoes became common and the addition of butter made them more palatable. The expression means that empty talk, or promises are not enough to achieve anything tangible or real – so if we change this, as Meg did, to Literature Butters No Parsnips, we can question whether literature is simply empty talk and promises or can achieve anything tangible or real.

How does fiction work in the human brain? Is there a scientific explanation?

Neuroscientists have been working on how fiction influences the mind. There are chemical changes in the brain as we read. Repeated scanning eye movements help to clean the brain. This may mean that reading on a Kindle or iPhone is not as good for the brain. This is an emerging area, but current thinking is that literature sustains us, quells negativity, helps us build relationships and bolsters well-being.

Literature as sustaining

Literature gives us peace of mind and offers control. The narrator’s voice encourages us to find our own voice. The story gives us hope. Good luck is always a possibility. Literature allows us to be free in a world not of our making. It promotes imagination and frees the mind. It gives us tools to express what is in our heads. Through literature we can say something that we can’t say in any other way.

Literature quells negativity

Literature provides a tool to heal grief. We can go through the process of grief safely. It is a tool for encouraging self-acceptance. It helps us to manage despair and human limitations. It helps us to bounce back from our failure to understand the world.

Literature helps us build relationships

Through self-disclosure literature produces wonder and triggers love. When we see this in a novel, we realise that we can do this too. It is a tool to lessen loneliness and connect with other minds. We share the company of others. Literature allows us to enter someone else’s thoughts. We can identify with the author and the novel’s characters.

Literature bolsters well being

It empowers us and teaches us to self-trust. We can see the value of our own opinions and combine these with others. In the novel we can do this in safety. Literature lays before us choices that we would not see ourselves. We can consider alternative opinions in safety.

Reading is a tool for general well-being. It is good for us. It provides:

Distraction – passing the time without too much effort
Comfort – it is soothing, reassuring, temporary
Consolation – it helps us to come to terms with endemic problems, such as death
Enlightenment – it helps us to see the world in a different way
Inspiration – it gives us the means to go forward.

The question for the first discussion of the course was: Why do we read novels? Is it for any of the reasons mentioned above, or do you have an alternative explanation? I have read a lot of novels this year – not necessarily literature, but that’s another discussion! My reason has been escapism. Reading has kept me going through sleepless nights, so I enjoyed this first session of the course, despite not being an English graduate. There was so much I could relate to.

And far from being the bleak, grey, wet, dirty, impoverished city depicted in the novels we read and discussed, Manchester shone and gleamed through the bright sunny hot week. All in all, a very enjoyable experience.

Hannah Arendt’s Thinking

July 10, 2025jennymackness1 Comment

Photographer: Barbara Niggl Radloff – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannah_Arendt

This is my fifth and final post about Hannah Arendt’s perspective on the importance of thinking.

Here are links to the previous posts.

Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt on the Importance of Thinking

Hannah Arendt as a Teacher of Thinking

Hannah Arendt on Thinking, The Nature of Evil and Totalitarianism

In these I share the notes I made for a talk to my local U3A (University of the Third Age) philosophy group. These notes provide a very brief introduction to some of Hannah Arendt’s ideas on thinking. I did not have time to include reference to content in her book The Life of the Mind. This book was planned to be in three parts, Thinking, Willing and Judging, but Hannah Arendt had only written parts 1 and 2, before she died of a heart attack in 1975. Ultimately her friend Mary McCarthy edited and published the first two volumes in 1977 and 1978. For a more in depth exploration of Arendt’s ideas on Thinking it would be important to read The Life of the Mind.

Roger Berkowitz of Bard College is currently leading a reading group on The Life of the Mind.

In this final post, I think it is important to acknowledge that Hannah Arendt did not always get it right. Sometimes her thinking failed her.

Her lifelong project was to try and understand how the holocaust could have happened, how totalitarian regimes arise, the nature of evil, what it means to be a stateless refugee, what it means to be human and much more, but most importantly what it means to think. She refused to blindly accept prevailing opinion and had a lifelong political and intellectual commitment to think from another’s point of view.

But she was sometimes arrogant and sometimes, by expressing her opinions in the strongest possible language, she touched raw nerves and provoked sharp criticism. She was often insightful but sometimes insensitive to the complexities of reality.

Some of the prominent criticisms that have been levelled at Hannah Arendt are that:

She was racist. This was because she described Africa as the dark continent whose inhabitants were savages and barbarians. She later acknowledged this criticism saying that she had not understood the depth and political consequences of vicious discrimination against Blacks in America. (For further discussion about this criticism, see Deumert, A. (2020). On racism and how to read Hannah Arendt. Diggit Magazine)

She was flippant and malicious. This criticism arose from her use of irony in her writing. She defended herself against this criticism saying that her ironic writing style was deliberate. She used irony to protect herself from painful and difficult ideas, and to keep enough critical distance to try and understand.

She was too sympathetic to Eichmann. She had been taken in by him. The banality of evil concept trivialised the extermination of millions of Jews.

She was harsh in her judgment of Jewish leadership and the role of the Jewish Council during World War II.

I think it is important to be aware of these criticisms. They show that even for the best of thinkers, justified critical thinking can be hard to achieve. I only had time to briefly mention them in my U3A talk, but, I think, any knowledge and understanding of Hannah Arendt’s work should include knowledge and understanding of the criticisms levelled against her.

What Hannah Arendt’s supporters say is that she must have loved her people and the world very much to go to such lengths to try and understand what happened, why it happened, how could it have happened.

Hannah Arendt did not provide us with a framework for thinking. She did not tell us what to think. Rather, through her writing, she showed us how to think. She provided us with a model for engaging in serious self-reflective critical thinking.

She wrote:

“If the ability to tell right from wrong should turn out to have anything to do with the ability to think, then we must be able to ’demand’ its exercise from every sane person, no matter how erudite or ignorant, intelligent or stupid, he may happen to be.” (The Life of the Mind)

Hannah Arendt believed that thinking does not belong to some rarefied world of professional thought. She believed that

To stop and think what we are doing is an ethical imperative

And that

We all have a human duty to think.

References

Arendt, H. (1951). The Origins of Totalitarianism, New York, Harcourt

Arendt, H. (1958). The Human Condition, Chicago, University of Chicago Press

Arendt, H. (1961). Between Past and Future, London, Faber & Faber

Arendt, H. (1963). Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, London, Faber & Faber

Arendt, H. (1964). Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship. In Kohn, J. (ed.) (2003). Responsibility and Judgment. Schocken Books, New York

Arendt, H. (1978). The Life of the Mind, 2 vols., London, Secker & Warburg

Bernstein, R. J. (2018). Why Read Hannah Arendt Now. Polity Press

Buxton, R. (2020). Hannah Arendt, in Buxton, R. and Whiting, L. (2020). The Philosopher Queens. Unbound

Stonebridge, L. (2024). We are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience. Jonathan Cape

Tubali, S. (2018). Hannah Arendt and the Human Duty to Think. Philosophy Now

Secondary Sources

The Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College https://www.bard.edu

Reflections by Samantha Rose Hill Substack https://substack.com/@samantharosehill

Hannah Arendt on Thinking, The Nature of Evil and Totalitarianism

July 9, 2025jennymackness5 Comments

Hannah Arendt was a prolific writer. I have barely skimmed the surface of all she has written. Recently I heard Roger Berkowitz of Bard College, New York, say that even after 10 years of reading Arendt for his job as the Academic Director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities and Professor of Politics, Philosophy, and Human Rights, he is still discovering things he hasn’t read or thought about before.

I am writing these posts to share the notes I made for a talk I recently gave to my local U3A philosophy group (University of the Third Age) in which I focussed on Hannah Arendt’s ideas on Thinking. The talk was only 30 minutes long, so was just an introduction to some of Hannah Arendt’s ideas.

This is my fourth post. Here are links to the previous three:

Thinking and the Nature of Evil

Hannah Arendt is perhaps best known for her phrase ‘the banality of evil’. She was a controversial figure who was often criticised for her work and thinking, not least for her report on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, which was where the phrase ‘the banality of evil’ first appeared.

Adolf Eichmann was the official in the Nazi Party who organised the transportation of six million Jews to the concentration camps or ‘corpse factories’ as Hannah Arendt called them. She also called them ‘holes of oblivion’. At the end of the war Eichmann fled Germany for Argentina where he lived under an assumed name until he was captured by the Israelis in 1960 and smuggled out of the country and back to Jerusalem to stand trial.

When Arendt heard this news, she immediately contacted the New Yorker and offered to report on the trial. She said she would never forgive herself if she didn’t go to Jerusalem and look at this human disaster face to face. The trial lasted four months resulting in the publication in 1963 of five articles which were later collated into her book, ‘Eichmann in Jerusalem. A Report on the Banality of Evil’. The book upset a great many people, particularly the Jews, and still negatively affects her reputation to this day.

How did this phrase – the banality of evil – that upset so many people, come about?

When Hannah Arendt went to Jerusalem in 1961 as a reporter to collate the facts, she expected to be faced by evil in the form of Adolf Eichmann, but she found her thinking challenged and began to question her presuppositions. She had followed the Nuremberg trials in Berlin in the 1940s and at that time thought of evil as ‘radical’. In the Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951, she wrote of radical evil, which she explained as demonic evil inherent in human beings. But in Jerusalem she came to realise that this thinking needed to be revised. She thought that the deeds of the Nazis could not be simply explained away by portraying them as monsters and demons. She came to think that evil is banal. By this, she did not mean that evil does not exist. Rather that the banality of evil is the nature of the human capacity to do wrong when you stop thinking, or simply the reluctance to ever imagine what the other person is experiencing.

What Hannah Arendt found in Jerusalem was not a figure of radical, awful evil, but a small, pompous man, who was self-important and talked in cliches and was radically unable to think about where he was and who he was talking about. She did not think he was a sociopath or driven by extreme ideology but rather an extremely average person who had no internal moral conversations about his actions.

Arendt viewed thinking as an active internal dialogue where we have conversations with ourselves. She thought that Eichmann didn’t do this. He was a thoughtless bureaucrat. His actions were not banal. His thinking was banal.

“The sad truth is”, she wrote, “that evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.” (The Life of the Mind)

Evil comes from a failure to think. Eichmann failed to use self-reflection as a basis for judgment.

In writing Eichmann in Jerusalem and about the banality of evil, Arendt was writing about a very particular form of thinking. By saying that Eichmann lacked the capacity to think, she meant that he lacked the ability to imagine the world from the perspective of another. The banality of evil equates to a lack of empathetic imagination. Obviously, Eichmann could think, but his thinking was banal.

Hannah Arendt believed that everybody is capable of self-reflective critical thinking. In her essay on ‘Personal Responsibility under Dictatorship’, she wrote:

“The difference between those who decided to go along with the Nazis and those who decided to resist, was that those who decided to resist chose to think for themselves.”

She believed that when moral norms and laws within society can no longer be counted on, we have the right to disobey. If we think, we can choose to resist.

Thinking and Totalitarianism

Hannah Arendt thought that all thought process moves from personal experience. This can be seen in all her writing. By the time she was 35, her personal experience was that she was a stateless Jew in exile at the time of the holocaust, who had lost many of her friends and family members to the death camps. She had also lost her home, her language, her living and her entire way of life. Her first book, ‘The Origins of Totalitarianism’, published in 1951, ten years after arriving in New York, is a response to all this experience. It is her longest and most meticulously researched book.

In it she traces the rise of totalitarianism through antisemitism (which I have written about on this blog) and imperialism, and she tries to understand, What happened? Why did it happen? How could it have happened?

Arendt believed that we must think critically and constructively about our history, and we must avoid the temptation of simply looking down on those who got it wrong.

In the Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt tries to alert us to the key features of totalitarianism. Some of these are:

Toying with the truth
Deliberate confusion of fiction and reality
Incessant use of mass media to manipulate the way people experience the world
Use of propaganda and conspiracy to change the perceived structure of reality

She believed that totalitarian regimes actively undermine the ability to distinguish between truth and falsehood, and that it is the failure to engage critically with our own ideas that draws us into this.

She wrote: “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced communist, but the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction no longer holds.” (The Origins of Totalitarianism)

Arendt believed that this happens because totalitarianism takes over people’s minds and by extension the whole of society. Totalitarian regimes dominate thinking through propaganda and fear. They make individuals more vulnerable to manipulation and control.

She also thought that the ultimate aim of totalitarianism is to make human beings, as human beings, superfluous, by

treating them as objects or obstacles to the state’s goals
deeming them of having no value within a particular social, political or economic system
stripping them of citizenship and individuality
making them stateless
deeming them expendable; marginalising and eliminating them

“What totalitarian ideologies aim at”, she wrote, “is not the transformation of the outside world or the revolutionising transmutation of society, but the transformation of human nature itself”. (The Origins of Totalitarianism)

And she predicted in 1951 that totalitarian regimes can persist even after the regime has fallen.

“Totalitarian solutions 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 and economic misery in a manner worthy of man.” (The Origins of Totalitarianism)

So, for Hannah Arendt, a key feature of totalitarian regimes is that they undermine the ability to think for oneself. She believed that thoughtlessness is a part of a totalitarian regime, just as it is a cause of evil.

Bibliography