Rereading Arendt : Thinking again in the face of the void
Totalitarianism isn’t dead. It’s been digitized, streamlined and normalized. It’s back not in boots, but in interfaces. As long as we scroll more than we think, history will keep repeating itself—sanitized, maybe, but no less brutal. In an age where governance is mistaken for obedience, rereading Arendt is an act of resistance. Either we engage our minds… or we let the void think for us.
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Do you think that totalitarianism is a relic of the past? That it’s just a nightmare from the 20th century? Well, think again. Hannah Arendt didn’t write The Origins of Totalitarianism for historians; she wrote it for those of us who refuse to sleepwalk through history. What she unpacks isn’t just a political regime—it’s a machinery for destroying thought, a cold, rational logic that’s resurfacing today in softer, more technological forms, but just as corrosive. Rereading Arendt isn’t about revisiting a bygone past: it’s about confronting a present that’s falling apart around us.
The work of Hannah Arendt The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), Between Past and Future (The Crisis in Culture, 1961) as well as The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff (PublicAffairs, 2019), and Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World by Hartmut Rosa and James Wagner (Polity 2019).
1. The void as foundation
Totalitarianism doesn’t grow on fertile ground: it thrives in wasteland. Not the wasteland left behind by war or material collapse, but a more insidious kind of disconnection, apathy, and disenchantment. Arendt saw this clearly: it’s not poverty that makes people susceptible to horror, but the loss of a shared world. When words lose their meaning, when facts become negotiable, when nothing connects people except fear or distrust—that’s when the ground is ready.
The isolated citizen no longer has a story of their own. They lose faith in politics, distrust institutions, and no longer believe in others—or themselves. They stop seeking to understand: they want to belong. To be taken care of. To dissolve into a cause that gives them back a sense of place in the world. That longing for fusion, that existential panic in the face of chaos—that’s what totalitarianism feeds on. It offers a total explanation, the illusion of clarity, the comfort of coherence.
And today? Nothing has changed. We’re flooded with tools for communicating, but starved of a shared language. The modern citizen walks alone through a world where everything is relative, where every opinion masquerades as truth, and nuance is seen as treachery. Institutions feel distant or corrupt. Reality is a stream, words are unstable, emotions replace facts. It’s not that we no longer know what’s true; it’s that we’ve stopped even trying to find out.
In this climate, the return of the totalizing narrative, the simplistic answer, the unifying storyline becomes tempting… deeply tempting. That’s the real danger: when the void craves to be filled, and what fills it is an authoritarian ideology—rational on the surface, brutal underneath.
Arendt was right: totalitarianism does not arise from chaos—it seeps in through silence. It doesn’t take over by force, but through exhaustion. Through surrender.
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