240. Hannah Arendt, a thinker for our times

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We live in dangerous times, at least in a precarious equilibrium. It is easy to dismiss warnings about current terminal threats to democracy and the nihilist autocratic attack on the institutions of many countries as exaggerated and over dramatic. To those who may be flippantly of this opinion, I recommend reading Hannah Arendt, witness to the rise of totalitarianism in the 1930s. When you read her naked analysis of the totalitarian takeover, you are shocked by how relevant it is to current times. Practically any Arendt quote you choose can be applied, unedited, to today’s politics. This is a warning. Even though very few of us were alive in the 30s, we don’t need reminding of how they ended and how close to an existential cliff edge our species was. The aftermath of a great recession and fast geopolitical change conflated, as they do today, with overconfidence by the media and our institutions to allow a monster to rise which took all the will of humanity, and many lives, to defeat 

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Location: Hereford, UK

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