Post #3490888

Hannah Arendt always an inspiration. The antidote to totalitarianism #democracy #politics #oligarchy #technology So let me name the soil that all of this grows in. One word: loneliness. And I mean something exact by it - not solitude, which is being alone with yourself and and your thinking, something every good mind needs. Loneliness is the opposite. It is being deserted by everyone, including finally yourself - cut off so completely that you lose even the inner companion that thinking provides. Terror needs that condition. #activism #protest It cannot rule people who are still genuinely connected to one another, who still act together. So its first task is to drive them apart so each person stands alone and therefore powerless. Power, after all, only ever comes from people acting in concert. And this is why I refuse to end in despair, however dark the material. Because if loneliness is the ground, then the antidote is not mysterious. It is plurality. It is people in their differences, choosing to act together, beginning something new. The capacity to begin - that is what no terror can fully extinguish, because every single human birth is proof that the world can still be surprised. These movements promise the masses an iron certainty – that history is settled, the future already written and you need only fall in line. I am telling you the opposite. Nothing about the human story is settled, because nothing is finished while people are still free to begin again. That is not consolation. It is a responsibility and it is handed every morning to you. https://youtube.com/shorts/uHmFuGNwuwQ