[atlantic]

Thanks for the passages from Arendt - very well selected. But we could do without the histrionics in your final paragraphs. I'm not sure there is anything that could have been done to prevent the world wars and totalitarianism of the 20th century. IMO, there were historical processes at work well beyond any individual's ability to stop. Not a very popular stance, I'm sure, but at least as plausible as your position.

[knockingat3am]

At a very basic level, looking away enables the situations and power structures to come about which then are used to excuse that looking away.

Any individual's act of looking away, is completely within the power of that individual. You can't save your life anyway, nobody can, but only you can kill your soul. You can that "histrionics", I call it a shorthand. Speaking of shorthands,

> IMO, there were historical processes at work well beyond any individual's ability to stop.

These "historical processes" are 100% made up of the acts and failures to act of individuals. When I said "wanting to act but being unable to" that acknowledges that you can't always do much or anything. That's the whole point of even making that distinction, I made a difference between "looking away", and for some reason "being unable or not daring to speak".

But still I don't take the average of what people did, or what people currently do, and call it good as if I was blind and deaf and had no instruments of measurement of my own. A lot of people showed tremendous courage, and saved a lot of lives. Those are the standard to aspire to, not the excuse makers any dark time has. For everybody who had excuses, you'll find someone who risked and endured orders of magnitude more, and didn't want to hear any praise for it.

[atlantic]

> These "historical processes" are 100% made up of the acts and failures to act of individuals.

That's obviously false. Trivial example: a volcanic eruption or some other natural catastrophe can change the course of a country's history. You can look at Mount Vesuvius all you want, it won't stop it from erupting.

Modern democracies are in fact the exact opposite of what you are describing. They are not made up of countless individual acts. Politicians ignore most people's opinions, and turn their backs on their own electoral promises once in power. Democracies are gamed so that the lobbies who finance political campaigns wield the real power, and these lobbies represent a tiny sliver of the population composed of very wealthy individuals. They launch their own "grassroots" campaigns to create an illusion of numbers behind them, but they are extremely elitist. Face it: democracy is a sham.

As for saving people: it's human, it's compassionate, it is valuable in itself. Congratulations to those who do it. But historically it changes nothing. History rolls on.

[knockingat3am]

> a volcanic eruption or some other natural catastrophe can change the course of a country's history

Affecting history doesn't make it a "historic process" in the sense we are talking about where people have no choice but to follow along. History isn't something like gravity, it's us recording descriptions of what happened (volcano erupting) and what people did (politics).

> Politicians ignore most people's opinions

Which is an action on their behalf, not some kind of magic force. If people in turn ignored such politicians, many politicians would struggle to find even basic constructive work, and none would enjoy power over others.

> Face it: democracy is a sham.

Face it, that does not excuse looking away. You seem to be saying looking away isn't making a difference anyway, so it's not actually looking away. Or maybe that if someone might lose their life when standing up for themselves or someone else, they do not have the option of standing up. Despite many people having proven that wrong.

And you say even those little acts of courage didn't change history, but how you can even know how much worse it would be without those? I'm not accepting that, even though it's an additional discussion to original point, which is that these acts change all of the history of the person doing or not doing them.

Hitler was a very crazy, very driven person taken over some fourth rate right-wing... club. It's not like history would have created someone similar if Hitler had broken his neck on the way to the first meeting. I mean sure, Europe was pretty fucked up, fascists and communists were being ugly either way, I'm not saying it would have been great, but it's still not like that there is some sort of historic force outside of human actions and humans just "align" with it, and it's not as if history selects or even creates a vessel for something it would "do" anyway.

I'm not trying to put these words in your mouth, but as something that is essential to totalitarianism (this pseudo-scientific view of history and spooky forces greater than the individuals) I just want to drive it home. Nations, corporations, and history don't do shit. People do, and then we cluster and group and view it in abstract ways that are easier to handle, and sometimes useful, but putting the cart before the horse is overdoing it.

> Caution in handling generally accepted opinions that claim to explain whole trends of history is especially important for the historian of modern times, because the last century has produced an abundance of ideologies that pretend to be keys to history but are actually nothing but desperate efforts to escape responsibility.

-- Hannah Arendt

That totalitarianism book is thick, but it's worth it. In an interview 1964 she said:

> When we think of a criminal, we imagine someone with criminal motives. And when we look at Eichmann, he doesn't actually have any criminal motives. Not what is usually understood by "criminal motives." He wanted to go along with the rest. He wanted to say "we," and going-along-with-the-rest and wanting-to-say-we like this were quite enough to make the greatest of all crimes possible. The Hitlers, after all, really aren't the ones who are typical in this kind of situation--they'd be powerless without the support of others.

This is kinda of what "democracy is a sham, history rolls on" means in practice, ultimately. There's a lot of video footage of the Eichmann trial on YouTube last time I checked, it's very depressing. All it takes for a person to lose themselves is to look away, and all it takes for that to happen is to not think. Not think bad things, just don't (really) think. And if it doesn't matter either way, if history just "rolls on", why would one think, especially about not so nice things?

> Well, I think here you point out to one, really, of the basic defects of our system: that the individual citizen has very little possibility of having any influence - of making his opinion felt in the decision-making. And I think that, in itself, leads to a good deal of political lethargy and stupidity. It is true that one has to think first and then to act - but it's also true that if one has no possibility of acting, one's thinking kind of becomes empty and stupid.

-- Erich Fromm ( http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/multimedia/video/2008/wallace/from... )

He totally acknowledges what you say, just like none of what I said implied a denial of it. But that's the starting point, the issue to work on, an issue to exercise agency about, not an excuse for people having no agency. Even if it's just the choice of being tortured to death by Big Brother, or being tortured, agreeing to love Big Brother, and then getting murdered, if you're reading this, you have a lot of choices. Not as many as you deserve, maybe not as many as other people have, but plenty.

[atlantic]

> Affecting history doesn't make it a "historic process" in the sense we are talking about where people have no choice but to follow along. History isn't something like gravity, it's us recording descriptions of what happened (volcano erupting) and what people did (politics).

Well, no. "History" is both an academic discipline (humans narrating what happens), and the process of events itself. That process involves a lot of non-human factors, which are deterministic. And human action itself is arguably also deterministic, especially in democracy, because the masses can most certainly be manipulated, and respond quasi-mechanically to mass stimuli.

> Which is an action on their behalf, not some kind of magic force. If people in turn ignored such politicians, many politicians would struggle to find even basic constructive work, and none would enjoy power over others.

But they know people won't take action against them. Why? Because their attention-span, taken as a crowd, is too short. They respond to immediate stimuli, not longer-term phenomena, and to emotion, not reflection. Democracy takes place on Twitter, not in the reading room of the British Museum.

> Nations, corporations, and history don't do shit. People do, and then we cluster and group and view it in abstract ways that are easier to handle, and sometimes useful, but putting the cart before the horse is overdoing it.

Sorry, not buying it. All the classical political theorists agree on this one point, that once you establish democracy, you're catering to the lowest common denominator, and that mass of people is very easy to direct with the right tools (mass education, mass media, mass incarceration,...).

> Hitler was a very crazy, very driven person taken over some fourth rate right-wing... club. It's not like history would have created someone similar if Hitler had broken his neck on the way to the first meeting.

Wrong. Historians agree that Germany got a very raw deal at the Treaty of Versailles, which led inexorably to the Weimar Republic, and therefore a European war of some kind was on the cards from day one. If it hadn't been, France would not have spent two decades building up the Maginot Line. It's Hitler's very mediocrity that best illustrates the strength of the historical forces pushing him along.

[forapurpose]

> Politicians ignore most people's opinions, and turn their backs on their own electoral promises once in power.

That always happens to a degree, of course, but I find, and IIRC research shows, that politicians generally follow the policies they proclaimed during their campaigns. Certainly I am not surprised by much done by Obama, Trump, May, Merkel, Abe, etc. And those disliked by the public, reflected by low polling, are voted out of office.

Also, we can judge by the enormous sums invested by all sides in persuading and manipulating public opinion that public opinion is highly influential. Finally, democracies have limited government and the rule of law; politicians cannot limit human rights and are subject to the law.