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 relationships 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 (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.
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About Hannah Arendt
Hannah Arendt was a 20th-century American and american historian and philosopher. Hannah Arendt was a German and American historian and philosopher. She was one of the most influential political theorists of the twentieth century. Read more on Wikipedia →
Themes
- Truth — Meditations on honesty, authenticity, and the search for truth