Ingeborg Morath :: Charles Eames posing with a Book ‘Mask’ of Picasso’s Eyes, 1959 :: more [+] by this photographer
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Movements thrive on the destruction of reality. Because the real world confronts us with challenges and obstructions, reality is uncertain, messy, and unsettling. Movements work to create alternate realities that offer adherents a stable and empowering place in the world. Amid economic dislocation and the loss of stable identities, the Nazis’ promise of Aryan superiority is stabilizing. Stalin understood that people would easily overlook lies and mass murder if it were in their interest to do so. Above all, movements promise consistency. Movements “conjure up a lying world of consistency which is more adequate to the needs of the human mind than reality itself.” … Simone Weil wrote that “to be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.” The modern condition of rootlessness is a foundational experience of totalitarianism; totalitarian movements succeed when they offer rootless people what they most crave: an ideologically consistent world aiming at grand narratives that give meaning to their lives. By consistently repeating a few key ideas, a manipulative leader provides a sense of rootedness grounded upon a coherent fiction that is “consistent, comprehensible, and predictable.” The reason fact-checking is ineffective today — at least in convincing those who are members of movements — is that the mobilized members of a movement are confounded by a world resistant to their wishes and prefer the promise of a consistent alternate world to reality. [Rebecca Solnit and Why Arendt Matters: Revisiting “The Origins of Totalitarianism”] By Roger Berkowitz
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