Language determines what’s thinkable, right? I mean, it’s very hard to think a thought that you don’t have a word for - it’s impossible, in fact.īut there’s a huge difference between that limitation, which is just part of the human condition, and being in an encapsulated, ideological world that is divorced from the reality you can experience.
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For Arendt, at least, if all we know about politics comes to us via slogans and talking points and soundbites, then that doesn’t just determine how we talk about politics, it determines what’s actually thinkable in the first place. This is why I wanted to ask you about language. Something similar happens in non-totalitarian societies, though it’s even harder to detect. Robbing someone of their ability to form opinions is an interesting way to put it. And this not knowing what you’re supposed to give the regime in order for it to leave you alone robs the individual of the very ability to form opinions, and I think that’s also at the root of this idea of thoughtlessness, because the goal of the totalitarian regime is to make it impossible to think. So you can’t perform totalitarianism in the same way. Whereas under totalitarianism, because of terror and because terror depends on being unpredictable, you never know what is expected of you. A certain kind of performance from citizens is traded for some security that still leaves the person intact. She says that under tyranny, a certain set of behaviors, a certain set of statements, is expected. In the last chapter of The Origins of Totalitarianism, she talks about the difference between tyranny and totalitarianism. When writes about totalitarian societies in particular, there’s something really important that is so hard to grasp. How do you see the problem of thoughtlessness today? Masha Gessen Hannah Arendt, the great 20th-century political theorist, had this notion of “thoughtlessness,” referring to the inability of people in totalitarian societies to think beyond clichés and slogans. I spoke with Gessen by phone about the relationship between language and power, and why our inability to exist in the same reality is paving the way for authoritarian government.Ī transcript of our conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity, follows. But this book, more than any other Trump book I’ve read, focuses on “the corruption of language” and the subsequent loss of a collective space for what we typically think of as politics. Their coverage of Trump and Trumpism has been among the best anywhere. Gessen grew up in the Soviet Union and spent many years covering the ascendance of totalitarian rule in that country.
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Politics, in Gessen’s words, is an ongoing discussion about how we’re going to live together tomorrow: “We can’t do politics if we can’t talk to one another. In their new book Surviving Autocracy, New Yorker staff writer Masha Gessen argues that the collapse of a common language, or a common experience of the world, is essentially the death of democratic politics as such. What does it mean to live in a “post-truth” moment? On one level, the ramifications are obvious: In a world where we can’t even agree on basic facts, persuasion and dialogue become all but impossible.īut the problem with post-truth might run even deeper.