A Lack of Control Over our Own Lives

Jitarth Jandeja:  “Anderson, I thought you did that. And I would like to apologize for that right now. So I apologize for thinking you ate babies.”

Anderson Cooper: I’ve tried to engage sometimes with some of them who contact me, and there’s no rational way to prove you haven’t committed a crime.

Jandeja: There’s nothing you can say, whatever you do or don’t do will be more proof of your guilt.  But the thing is, this isn’t really about you, in their mind.  This is about them, this is about their internal fears, their internal projections, their internal lack of control over their own life. (TMZ, 2021)

Hannah Arendt’s 1951 book, The Origins of Totalitarianism provides insight to the socio-political factors that produce a totalitarian movement as witnessed during Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union’s Bolshevik regime.  While the book provides a larger argument about the role of antisemitism, racism and imperialism as both required and fundamentally different from totalitarianism, it is Arendt’s chapter on Ideology and Terror that seems most pertinent to our American state of affairs today, especially of the QAnon movement that emerged from the depths of the interweb. 

Arendt posits that loneliness, different from isolation or solitude, provides the common ground for a grooming through terror and ideological logicality.  “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. (p. 475). 

Bryan Brayboy and company’s (2012) chapter on Critical Indigenous Research Methodologies (CIRM), which argues that Western prioritization of objectivity, method and singular Truth “has functionally served to vivisect the world, cutting across interconnections, lives, cultural knowledge, and bodies…Such dissections leave the objects of research scarred, producing and reproducing knowledge that defines the borders of exclusion and projects denigrated caricatures of the other to be internalized as grotesque truths about one’s own being and community (p. 429).  Here, I imagine colonization as shears, extracting material resources and bodies, while cutting apart networks – the colonizer needing to cut boundaries and rationalize the Other, but in so doing, isolating, and then disconnecting themselves.

Colonization and its economic enactments as capitalism and neoliberalism have created “a world whose chief values are dictated by labor…only the effort to keep alive,” and thus have cut away and sold our own identities.  In a finite world, we eventually extracted and sold ourselves. 

Arendt seems to offer hope, in the recognition of the freedom inherent in thought and political action, in rebirthing ourselves as individuals and not One, in reclaiming our truths as localized and not universal, in ensuring we are human and not animal.  This reclaiming of humanity, of our individual identities within the masses, while an avoidance of total domination, may only offer a continuation of our plight.  Are we fighting domination with the tools of domination?

If “totalitarian domination, like tyranny, bears the germs of its own destruction,” might our current state of affairs be similar?  Are Donald Trump, and his mass Qanon and other loyalists, the inevitable product of a colonial turned neoliberal market?  Is thought and action, especially thought and action rooted in Western individualism, enough to reclaim identities and reconnect lost souls?  Ultimately, does democracy unbind us from this present course – or might it also, fall short?  What even is democracy if not a market for the masses?