- The Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities: Mission Statement
- Amor Mundi [The weekly publication of the Hannah Arendt Center]
- On Fake Hannah Arendt Quotations - Roger Berkowitz (08-04-2024)
- “The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie—a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days—but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.”
- On Fake Hannah Arendt Quotations - Roger Berkowitz (08-04-2024)
- Amor Mundi [The weekly publication of the Hannah Arendt Center]
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Humanism.spending a great deal of time and effort trying to figure out answers to questions Christians already have in the bible. Its sad to think that mankind turns it back on God and then ends up so close to finding Him only to claim it was humanities own ability that got mankind to the finish line.
This longer quote from the article you linked, @Terry_Sampson, is worth giving a public viewing. It fits many areas, including science. We saw the truth of it rampant during the main part of the most recent Pandemic:
“The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie—a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days—but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.”
@adamjedgar unfortunately in the U.S. Terry and I are watching the warning that Arendt gives in this quote unfold:
If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer.
Not even the words of Jesus.
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Yeah that is true Kendel (im assuming we are both also talking about a certain political leader and his antics?)
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I am listening on Audible to “The Emperor of All Maladies,” by Siddhartha Mukherjee, about cancer, where it discusses the hot air blown about whether tobacco smoke caused lung cancer. The common refrain by good scientists at the time was, “In God we trust, all others need data.”
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I see the spirit of the quote - but I would still see it a bit differently. The people who’ve been lied to keep going back to the liars for more - just like an abused person always returning to their abuser. Instead of being mad they’ve been lied to, they double down and go back to the same wolves who’ve enriched themselves on the ever-still-gullible sheep. It might actually be an improvement for them if they actually would start believing “in nothing” rather than the gods they’ve prostrated themselves before. But I suspect the human spirit can never, ever just “believe in nothing”.
We’re all being lied to, Mervin.
And we’re all all the more cynical for having been lied to.
Some of us are cynical and skeptical, while others are cynical as you describe.
“There’s all just in it for the money,” is one of the most common and cynical things I hear all the time.
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Not equally. It’s a false equivalency … Of course nobody is in complete possession of all truth, and of course nobody is or has access to any pristine source of always-true information. But if somebody is trying to sell me a “well - both sides are being lied to anyway” kind of narrative, then let’s just say … I refuse to believe it! 
Round-earthers may be wrong about a lot of stuff. But they aren’t wrong nearly so much or so consistently as flat-earthers manage to be. I cast my lot with those who at least maintain an interest in truth and reality and are reflective enough to at least orient themselves toward that pursuit even if it’s a car they know they’ll never catch. Better them than those who’ve abandoned any notion of truth in favor of enslaving themselves to their addiction for power.
[And by ‘casting my lot with’, I do not mean that I’m interested in seeing the other side as enemies. That would be to fall into the same trap myself. It means I refuse to pay any fealty whatsoever to those principalities and powers that have enslaved my brothers and sisters… And that continue to tempt us all as well. I look forward to our deliverance from that, which I know will happen, because to embrace evil is already a defeat from the get-go, and Christ has defeated that. ]
[p.p.s. … as heard recently (now paraphrased) from something R. Moore wrote: “Culture doesn’t reject Christianity because it can’t believe, but because they see the church doesn’t believe its own teachings. They see Jesus being used as a means toward other ends.”
That went up on my board for students to ponder.]
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It is really hard. In some cases, it really takes a lot to remember that people have good intentions. We lose perspective out of fear, defensiveness, etc. It’s the classic way of discarding anybody’s argument by ascribing bad intent to them. It’s okay to tell them that they are incorrect, but functionally, not only are we all trapped by our environment, but it’s hard to resolve a conflict by focusing on mal intent.
A classic conspiracy theorist fall back is to blame others for looking for money. Again, that comes out of fear and being overwhelmed I think.
In the story of Cain and Abel, Cain blamed his brother for a circumstance neither could control. It seems to play out very often in history.
That would be Asimov’s “Relativity of Wrong” (of which I am sure you are aware).
“When people thought the Earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the Earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the Earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the Earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.”–Isaac Asimov
The whole essay is worth a read:
https://hermiene.net/essays-trans/relativity_of_wrong.html
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No, Merv. It isn’t.
We ARE all being lied to all the time by the liars with power. They may not be the voices we seek, but they never stop lying. If you hear them, you are hearing lies.
I consulted my old friend Medline Plus the other day. Then I closed it and went to Mayo Clinic’s site and the NHS. Formerly reliable federal sources of information are being corrupted as I write this. I don’t have the background or skills to evaluate them, so I simply cannot trust them.
The deluge of lies is relentless and unstoppable.
When you no longer know who to trust, you trust no one.
That’s part of the goal. If the facts are against you create distrust of everything, and suddenly those facts aren’t a problem anymore. Lies are now equal with truth.
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I dare say that those who said that the Earth is flat, or that it is a sphere, knew that there were hills and valleys. The issue is more complicated with heliocentrism vs. geocentrism. I think that the opposing sides in the Gallieo case believed literally in the Sun or the Earth was motionless in the center off all. Galileo did argue for Galliean relativity of motion, but also believed that he had evidence for the absolute motion of the Earth. It is difficult to state today’s stance of helio- rather than geo-centism - something like, I’d say, that the Earth is no different from Mars and other planets in its motion - someone may do a better job than me.
In the Asimov example, the Earth is not a sphere. The Earth is actually an oblate spheroid with a bulge around the equator and a slightly larger Southern hemisphere. In other words, the Earth is pear shaped, not spherical.
In the Galileo case, the biblical interpretation of the church took scripture literally when it said the Earth did not move. Galileo proposed that the Earth moved about its axis and moved about the Sun, in direct contradiction to scripture in the eyes of the church.
“But to want to affirm that the Sun, in very truth, is at the centre of the universe and only rotates on its axis without traveling from east to west, and that the Earth is situated in the third sphere and revolves very swiftly around the Sun, is a very dangerous attitude and one calculated not only to arouse all Scholastic philosophers and theologians but also to injure our holy faith by contradicting the Scriptures….”–Cardinal Bellarmine, 1615
However, Bellarmine should be given some credit for admitting his own fallibility. From later in the same letter:
" Third, I say that, if there were a real proof that the Sun is in the centre of the universe, that the Earth is in the third sphere, and that the Sun does not go round the Earth but the Earth round the Sun, then we should have to proceed with great circumspection in explaining passages of Scripture which appear to teach the contrary, and we should rather have to say that we did not understand them than declare an opinion to be false which is proved to be true."
Added in edit: In keeping with Asimov . . . If you say the Sun moves about the Earth you are wrong. If you say the Earth moves about the Sun you are wrong*. However, if you think that thinking the Sun moving about the Earth is as wrong as the Earth moving about the Sun, then you are more wrong than both put together.
*Both the Sun and the Earth move about a barycenter.
One of the pieces of evidence that Galileo pointed to were the moons of Jupiter that he discovered, now called the Galilean moons (Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto). What really frustrated Galileo was the refusal on the part of the church to look through his telescope and observe the motion of those moons.
“My dear Kepler, what would you say of the learned here, who, replete with the pertinacity of the asp, have steadfastly refused to cast a glance through the telescope? What shall we make of this? Shall we laugh, or shall we cry?”–Galileo Galilei
The point that I was trying to make about the shape of the Earth was that everybody agreed that there are hills and valleys which make the shape of the Earth not a perfect simple shape, not a plane (not perfecty flat), and not a perfect sphere. And it isn’t a prefect spheroid (whether oblate or prolate) etc. (Actually, the deviations from a sphere are relatively small, so that those big globes that one sees in a library is quite accurate.
As far as the Galeleo case, I’m sorry that I brought that up. The are complications. Not that i am trying to defend the Church. But even if Galileo’s opponents had admitted that there were satellite of Jupiter, that does not show that the Earth was in motion. (And sme of hs opponents were more recalcitrant than others. For example, some said that if there any comentators on Scripture who had amitted the possibility, or if there was some physical
evidene of the Earth’s motion …).Galileo thought that the tides on Earth was evidence of the motion of the Earth, but he was mistaken. The point that I was trying to make that it is not a simple thing to state what the difference is of the modern understanding of heliocentrism (as someone might say that “noting in astronomy makes sense except in the light of heliocentrism”) vs, geocenrism. I;m sorry that I brought that up. Please, let us not get into the mess about the Galileo case.
Most of us are trapped in the context where we live. Quite large part of people in Finland follow the international news and may be astonished how people in many countries skip or downplay the facts that are against their hopes or culture. As an outsider, it is easier to see the weaknesses in the behaviours or the system. It applies to countries but also to churches and other communities.
When I listen to these ‘outsider critics’, it makes me wonder what outsiders would say about the way how we believe and behave in our context? We cannot be the only ones who are not blinded by the context where we live.
Accepting ‘outsider critics’ may be difficult because it may challenge the core of what we believe or may hit in a weak spot. Sometimes the ‘outsider critics’ may be wrong, they may have understood the details wrongly and blames people within the system for something that is not or only partially true. Yet, often there is something truthful in the criticism and accepting that possibility may give a possibility to think of new solutions to the weaknesses.
I agree that taking a stubborn attitude towards those who think differently and assuming that they have bad intent, or are lead by someone with bad intent (or even by the devil), does not help. It pushes away the possibility to improve our own situation, cuts potentially beneficial relationships and makes us vulnerable to exploitation by people who utilize the situation.
During the old Soviet regime, KGB classified known foreigners. One class was named ‘useful fools’. They were people who might advance the goals of the Soviet regime without direct acts by the Soviet players because the ‘useful fools’ had adopted useful (usually false) beliefs and promoted actively these beliefs. That class of humans did not disappear with the old Soviet regime.
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