Adam S. Rust
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asrust.bsky.social
Adam S. Rust
@asrust.bsky.social
3.4K followers 100 following 650 posts
Lawyer, writes on law things, writings have appeared in Liberal Currents and Balls & Strikes, based in the SF Bay Area.
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asrust.bsky.social
Arendt, after warning us that totalitarianism will now always be with us "as a potentiality and ever-present danger" ends her book by reminding us we can always begin again. It is the foundational thing that makes us human. There are no Final Solutions to human life.
"Apart from such considerations-which as predictions are of little avail and less consolation-there remains the fact that the crisis of our time and its central experience have brought forth an entirely new form of government which as a potentiality and an ever-present danger is only too likely to stay with us from now on, just as other forms of government which came about at different historical moments and rested on different fundamental experiences have stayed with mankind regardless of temporary defeats-monarchies, and republics, tyrannies, dictatorships and despotism. But there remains also the truth that every end in history necessarily contains a new beginning; this beginning is the promise, the only "message" which the end can ever produce. Beginning, before it becomes a historical event, is the supreme capacity of man; politically, it is identical with man's freedom..." "... Initium ut esset homo creatus est "that a beginning be made man was created" said Augustine. This beginning is guaranteed by each new birth; it is indeed every man."
November 7, 2025 at 5:16 AM
asrust.bsky.social
It really is noteworthy that in Genesis, God pronounces everything in Creation good except one thing — "it is not good that the human is alone."
"That thought processes characterized by strict self-evident logicality, from which apparently there is no escape, have some connection with loneliness was once noticed by Luther (whose experiences in the phenomena of solitude and loneliness probably were second to no one's and who once dared to say that "there must be a God because man needs one being whom he can trust") in a little-known remark on the Bible text "it is not good that man should be alone": A lonely man, says Luther, "always deduces one thing from the other and thinks everything to the worst." The famous extremism of totalitarian movements, far from having anything to do with true radicalism, consists indeed in this "thinking everything to the worst," in this deducing process which always arrives at the worst possible conclusions."
November 7, 2025 at 5:08 AM
asrust.bsky.social
We need solitude to know ourselves, we need community to confirm it. Totalitarianism denies us both the privacy of our thoughts and the community of equals necessary for full selfhood.
"What makes loneliness so unbearable is the loss of one's own self which can be realized in solitude, but confirmed in its identity only by the trusting and trustworthy company of my equals. In this situation, man loses trust in himself as the partner of his thoughts and that elementary confidence in the world which is necessary to make experiences at all. Self and world, capacity for thought and experience are lost at the same time."
November 7, 2025 at 5:00 AM
asrust.bsky.social
The fact that we inhabit the world with others gives us confidence of its existence. Hence totalitarianism's reliance on loneliness. Our sense of reality can be destroyed if we are not permitted to connect with others.
November 7, 2025 at 4:54 AM
asrust.bsky.social
Totalitarianism feeds on, and perpetuates, loneliness — the feeling that one is not at home in the only world we know for certain we have.
"While isolation concerns only the political realm of life, loneliness concerns human life as a whole. Totalitarian government, like all tyrannies, certainly could not exist without destroying the public realm of life, that is, without destroying, by isolating men, their political capacities. But totalitarian domination as a form of government is new in that it is not content with this isolation and destroys private life as well. It bases itself on loneliness, on the experience of not belonging to the world at all, which is among the most radical and desperate experiences of man."
November 7, 2025 at 4:51 AM
asrust.bsky.social
Totalitarian thinking is taking a pure idea seriously and to its logical conclusion in this world.
"The device both totalitarian rulers used to transform their respective ideologies into weapons with which each of their subjects could force himself into step with the terror movement was deceptively simple and inconspicuous: they took them dead seriously, took pride the one in his supreme gift for "ice cold reasoning" (Hitler) and the other in the "mercilessness of his dialectics," and proceeded to drive ideological implications into extremes of logical consistency which, to the onlooker, looked preposterously "primitive" and absurd: a "dying class" consisted of people condemned to death; races that are "unfit to live" were to be exterminated. Whoever agreed that there are such things as "dying classes" and did not draw the consequence of killing their members, or that the right to live had something to do with race and did not draw the consequence of killing "unfit races," was plainly either stupid or a coward. This stringent logicality as a guide to action permeates the whole structure of totalitarian movements and governments. It is exclusively the work of Hitler and Stalin who, although they did not add a single new thought to the ideas and propaganda slogans of their movements, for this reason alone must be considered ideologists of the greatest importance."
November 7, 2025 at 4:38 AM
asrust.bsky.social
All ideologies are totalitarian regimes in waiting. Which ideologies become totalitarian is a matter of historical contingency.
"The Weltanschauungen and ideologies of the nineteenth century are not in themselves totalitarian, and although racism and communism have become the decisive ideologies of the twentieth century they were not, in principle, any "more totalitarian" than the others; it happened because the elements of experience on which they were originally based-the struggle between the races for world domination, and the struggle between the classes for political power in the respective coun-tries-turned out to be politically more important than those of other ideologies. In this sense the ideological victory of racism and communism over all other isms was decided before the totalitarian movements took hold of precisely these ideologies. On the other hand, all ideologies contain totalitarian elements, but these are fully developed only by totalitarian movements, and this creates the deceptive impression that only racism and communism are totalitarian in character. The truth is, rather, that the real nature of all ideologies was revealed only in the role that the ideology plays in the apparatus of totalitarian domination. Seen from this aspect, there appear three specifically totalitarian elements that are peculiar to all ideological thinking."
November 7, 2025 at 2:48 AM
asrust.bsky.social
"Ideologies are never interested in the miracle of being."
"An ideology is quite literally what its name indicates: it is the logic of an idea. Its subject matter is history, to which the "idea" is applied; the result of this application is not a body of statements about something that is, but the unfolding of a process which is in constant change. The ideology treats the course of events as though it followed the same "law" as the logical exposition of its "idea." Ideologies pretend to know the mysteries of the whole historical process-the secrets of the past, the intricacies of the present, the uncertainties of the future-because of the logic inherent in their respective ideas. Ideologies are never interested in the miracle of being. They are historical, concerned with becoming and perishing, with the rise and fall of cultures, even if they try to explain history by some "law of nature." The word "race" in racism does not signify any genuine curiosity about the human races as a field for scientific exploration, but is the "idea" by which the movement of history is explained as one consistent process."
November 7, 2025 at 2:43 AM
asrust.bsky.social
"The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any."
November 7, 2025 at 2:36 AM
asrust.bsky.social
The world of modernity conspires to create the conditions which make the totalitarian call for elimination of the superfluous seem like a difference of degree rather than type. If we do not come up with ways to ameliorate these problems the totalitarian risk is always present.
"It is inherent in our entire philosophical tradition that we cannot conceive of a "radical evil," and this is true both for Christian theology, which conceded even to the Devil himself a celestial origin, as well as for Kant, the only philosopher who, in the word he coined for it, at least must have suspected the existence of this evil even though he immediately rationalized it in the concept of a "perverted ill will" that could be explained by comprehensible motives. Therefore, we actually have nothing to fall back on in order to understand a phenomenon that nevertheless confronts us with its overpowering reality and breaks down all standards we know. There is only one thing that seems to be discernible: we may say that radical evil has emerged in connection with a system in which all men have become equally superfluous. The manipulators of this system believe in their own superfluousness as much as in that of all others, and the totalitarian murderers are all the more dangerous because they do not care if they themselves are alive or dead, if they ever lived or never were born. The danger of the corpse factories and holes of oblivion is that today, with populations and homelessness everywhere on the..." "...increase, masses of people are continuously rendered superfluous if we continue to think of our world in utilitarian terms. Political, social, and economic events everywhere are in a silent conspiracy with totalitarian instruments devised for making men superfluous. The implied temptation is well understood by the utilitarian common sense of the masses, who in most countries are too desperate to retain much fear of death. The Nazis and the Bolsheviks can be sure that their factories of annihilation which demonstrate the swiftest solution to the problem of over-population, of economically superfluous and socially rootless human masses, are as much of an attraction as a warning. 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, or economic misery in a manner worthy of man."
November 6, 2025 at 8:44 PM
asrust.bsky.social
The supersense of ideological coherence required for totalitarianism necessitates the eradication of those in the way of that vision. To allow them to exist means admitting an alternative world can exist to the totalitarian one. Totalitarianism cannot admit this and remain total.
"It is chiefly for the sake of this supersense, for the sake of complete consistency, that it is necessary for totalitarianism to destroy every trace of what we commonly call human dignity. For respect for human dignity implies the recognition of my fellow-men or our fellow-nations as subjects, as builders of worlds or cobuilders of a common world. No ideology which aims at the explanation of all historical events of the past and at mapping out the course of all events of the future can bear the unpredictability which springs from the fact that men are creative, that they can bring forward something so new that nobody ever foresaw it."
November 6, 2025 at 8:35 PM
asrust.bsky.social
For the totalitarian "nothing matters but consistency" from the starting premises.
November 6, 2025 at 8:31 PM
asrust.bsky.social
Totalitarianism emerges when absurd premises are treated with complete logical seriousness, independent of the facts on the ground.
"While the totalitarian regimes are thus resolutely and cynically emptying the world of the only thing that makes sense to the utilitarian expectations of common sense, they impose upon it at the same time a kind of supersense which the ideologies actually always meant when they pretended to have found the key to history or the solution to the riddles of the universe. Over and above the senselessness of totalitarian society is enthroned the ridiculous supersense of its ideological superstition. Ideologies are harmless, uncritical, and arbitrary opinions only as long as they are not believed in seriously. Once their claim to total validity is taken literally they become the nuclei of logical systems in which, as in the systems of paranoiacs, everything follows comprehensibly and even compulsorily once the first premise is accepted. The insanity of such systems lies not only in their first premise but in the very logicality with which they are constructed. The curious logicality of all isms, their simple-minded trust in the salvation value of stubborn devotion without regard for specific, varying factors, already harbors the first germs of totalitarian contempt for reality and factuality."
November 6, 2025 at 8:30 PM
asrust.bsky.social
The concentration camp, and totalitarianism generally, runs on the premise that all humans are superfluous. But non-totalitarian modernity produced that feeling in the people attracted to totalitarianism already.
"The totalitarian attempt to make men superfluous reflects the experience of modern masses of their superfluity on an overcrowded earth. The world of the dying, in which men are taught they are superfluous through a way of life in which punishment is meted out without connection with crime, in which exploitation is practiced without profit, and where work is performed without product, is a place where senselessness is daily produced anew. Yet, within the framework of the totalitarian..." "... ideology, nothing could be more sensible and logical; if the inmates are vermin, it is logical that they should be killed by poison gas; if they are degenerate, they should not be allowed to contaminate the population; if they have "slave-like souls" (Himmler), no one should waste his time trying to re-educate them. Seen through the eyes of the ideology, the trouble with the camps is almost that they make too much sense, that the execution of the doctrine is too consistent."
November 6, 2025 at 8:26 PM
asrust.bsky.social
The concentration camp transforms the human individual "into specimens of the human animal". We have a human nature only when given the ability to become fully human, an "unnatural" condition.
"The killing of man's individuality, of the uniqueness shaped in equal parts by nature, will, and destiny, which has become so self-evident a premise for all human relations that even identical twins inspire a certain uneasiness, creates a horror that vastly overshadows the outrage of the juridical-political person and the despair of the moral person. It is this horror that gives rise to the nihilistic generalizations which maintain plausibly enough that essentially all men alike are beasts. Actually the experience of the concentration camps does show that human beings can be transformed into specimens of the human animal, and that man's "nature" is only "human" insofar as it opens up to man the possibility of becoming something highly unnatural, that is, a man."
November 6, 2025 at 8:13 PM
asrust.bsky.social
Totalitarian regimes destroy the moral human by forcing moral questions to which there are only immoral answers.
"This attack on the moral person might still have been opposed by man's conscience which tells him that it is better to die a victim than to live as a bureaucrat of murder. Totalitarian terror achieved its most terrible triumph when it succeeded in cutting the moral person off from the individualist escape and in making the decisions of conscience absolutely questionable and equivocal. When a man is faced with the alternative of betraying and thus murdering his friends or of sending his wife and children, for whom he is in every sense responsible,..." "... to their death; when even suicide would mean the immediate murder of his own family-how is he to decide? The alternative is no longer between good and evil, but between murder and murder. Who could solve the moral dilemma of the Greek mother, who was allowed by the Nazis to choose which of her three children should be killed?"
November 6, 2025 at 7:59 PM
asrust.bsky.social
Arbitrary mass murder means martyrdom is impossible. The victims are not imprisoned for their principles but for the purpose furthering and illustrating the fundamental fictions of the totalitarian regime.
"The next decisive step in the preparation of living corpses is the murder of the moral person in man. This is done in the main by making martyrdom, for the first time in history, impossible: "How many people here still believe that a pro-test has even historic importance? This skepticism is the real masterpiece of the SS. Their great accomplishment. They have corrupted all human solidarity. Here the night has fallen on the future. When no witnesses are left, there can be no testimony. To demonstrate when death can no longer be postponed is an attempt to give death a meaning, to act beyond one's own..." "... death. In order to be successful, a gesture must have social meaning. There are hundreds of thousands of us here, all living in absolute solitude. That is why we are subdued no matter what happens. ""
November 6, 2025 at 7:54 PM
asrust.bsky.social
The image of the skeletal camp survivor is the final, but not even close to complete, image of the Nazi camp's horrors.
"138. It is of some importance to realize that all pictures of concentration camps are misleading insofar as they show the camps in their last stages, at the moment the Allied troops marched in. There were no death camps in Germany proper, and at that point all extermination equipment had already been dismantled. On the other hand, what provoked the outrage of the Allies most and what gives the films their special horror-namely, the sight of the human..." "... skeletons-was not at all typical for the German concentration camps; extermination was handled systematically by gas, not by starvation. The condition of the camps was a result of the war events during the final months: Himmler had ordered the evacuation of all extermination camps in the East, the German camps were consequently vastly overcrowded, and he was no longer in a position to assure the food supply in Germany."
November 6, 2025 at 4:02 PM
asrust.bsky.social
Arendt identifies a unifying principle for a new international that will never exist: The Grand Anti-Totalitarian.
"Thus the fear of concentration camps and the resulting insight into the nature of total domination might serve to invalidate all obsolete political differentiations from right to left and to introduce beside and above them the politically most important yardstick for judging events in our time, namely: whether they serve totalitarian domination or not."
November 6, 2025 at 3:44 PM
asrust.bsky.social
Arendt, trying to get her mind around one wholly new and destructive force in the 20th century political order, drops a footnote to observe she won't be addressing a second one.
"133. In order to avoid misunderstandings it may be appropriate to add that with the invention of the hydrogen bomb the whole war question has undergone another decisive change. A discussion of this question is of course beyond the theme of this book."
November 6, 2025 at 3:37 PM
asrust.bsky.social
The totalitarian crime is flagrant and huge so that people will believe the lie that it didn't happen because they don't want to believe the alternative.
"This doubt of people concerning themselves and the reality of their own experience only reveals what the Nazis have always known: that men determined to commit crimes will find it expedient to organize them on the vastest, most improbable scale. Not only because this renders all punishments provided by the legal system inadequate and absurd; but because the very immensity of the crimes guarantees that the murderers who proclaim their innocence with all manner of lies will be more readily believed than the victims who tell the truth. The Nazis did not even consider it necessary to keep this discovery to themselves. Hitler circulated millions of copies of his book..." "... in which he stated that to be successful, a lie must be enor-mous-which did not prevent people from believing him as, similarly, the Nazis' proclamations, repeated ad nauseam, that the Jews would be exterminated like bedbugs (i.e., with poison gas), prevented anybody from not believing them."
November 6, 2025 at 3:24 PM
asrust.bsky.social
The concept of the concentration camp is so unbelievable even people who live through it doubt it actually happened to them.
"128. See especially Bruno Bettelheim, op. cit. "It seemed as if I had become convinced that these horrible and degrading experiences somehow did not happen to 'me' as subject but to 'me' as an object. This experience was corroborated by the statements of other prisoners. It was as if I watched things happening in which I only vaguely participated.... 'This cannot be true, such things just do not happen.' ... The prisoners had to convince themselves that this was real, was really happening and not just a nightmare. They were never wholly successful." See also Rousset, op. cit., p. 213. "... Those who haven't seen it with their own eyes can't believe it. Did you yourself, before you came here, take the rumors about the gas chambers seriously? "No, I said. "You see? Well, they're all like you. The lot of them in Paris, Lon-still don, New York, even at Birkenau, right outside the crematoriums incredulous, five minutes before they were sent down into the cellar of the crematorium...."
November 6, 2025 at 3:15 PM
asrust.bsky.social
He sounds just like he writes imho.
November 5, 2025 at 6:27 PM
asrust.bsky.social
This last bit above makes me think of the 9.5 hour documentary "Shoah" (1985) about the Holocaust told almost entirely through first person interviews of victims, perpetrators, and bystanders. A disquieting meditation on what it means to "know" something. Worth a watch.
November 5, 2025 at 4:21 PM
asrust.bsky.social
Totalitarian governments rely on people being unable to imagine someone doing what they are doing. And it provides people living under the regime with plausible deniability about the moral trade offs they are making for the life they are enjoying (while they can).
"For a considerable length of time the normality of the nor-mal world is the most efficient protection against disclosure of totalitarian mass crimes. "Normal men don't know that every-thing is possible, "123 refuse to believe their eyes and ears in the face of the monstrous, just as the mass men did not trust theirs in the face of a normal reality in which no place was left for them. 124 The reason why the totalitarian regimes can get so far toward realizing a fictitious, topsy-turvy world is that the out-side nontotalitarian world, which always comprises a great part of the population of the totalitarian country itself, indulges also in wishful thinking and shirks reality in the face of real insanity just as much as the masses do in the face of the normal world. This common-sense disinclination to believe the monstrous is constantly strengthened by the totalitarian ruler himself, who makes sure that no reliable statistics, no controllable facts and figures are ever published, so that there are only subjective, uncontrollable, and unreliable reports about the places of the living dead. Because of this policy, the results of the totalitarian exper-iment are only partially known. Although we have enough reports from concentration camps to assess the possibilities of total domination and to catch a glimpse into the abyss of the "possible," we do not know the extent of character transforma-tion under a totalitarian regime. We know even less how many of the normal people around us would be willing to accept the totalitarian way of life that is, to pay the price of a consider-ably shorter life for the assured fulfillment of all their career dreams. It is easy to realize the extent to which totalitarian propaganda and even some totalitarian institutions answer the needs of the new homeless masses, but it is almost impossible to know how many of them, if they are further exposed to a..." "... constant threat of unemployment, will gladly acquiesce to a "population policy" that consists of regular elimination of surplus people, and how many, once they have fully grasped their growing incapacity to bear the burdens of modern life, will gladly conform to a system that, together with spontaneity, eliminates responsibility. In other words, while we know the operation and the specific function of the totalitarian secret police, we do not know how well or to what an extent the "secret" of this secret society corresponds to the secret desires and the secret complicities of the masses in our time."
November 5, 2025 at 4:18 PM