The Germans: Hannah Arendt

Good evening ladies and gentlemen, this lecture on Hana's rental is coming to you from a remote place where we are all very safe, there won't be a crowd tonight, but I thought it would be good to keep giving the lectures and, you know, give us something to think. We talk and reflect as we go through these difficult times, but speaking of difficult times, I think when you look at the life of a thinker like Hana, you don't realize that you know it's not that bad because you know that she was born in Germany in 1906. as a woman Jewish, it's like, Spurs, you look at those dates and you look at her position and you think, wow, this is going to be worrying, she's on a long road and she was, but she did an incredible job throughout her life and I.

I think one of the most surprising things about thinkers like Hana Renton and Carly a Spurs is that, in the midst of incredible turmoil over the personal loss of Accra Feist, they still work, they still manage to produce, and they find the joy, the energy and interest in their lives. and the passions of their thought that they were then able to share with the world, so I think we can take a lot of heart from that and from their example and particularly in their case, you know their example of being so clear and concise and unique. thinker now she didn't like calling herself a philosopher because she felt like she had abandoned philosophy or she had left philosophy to become more or less a political scientist but she really wasn't anything I mean this is one of the keys to understanding her work is that she was not associated with nothing in particular, he didn't feel like he had to please anyone in particular and so he did it constantly throughout his life and certainly after leaving Germany, he left Germany in 1933 and pursued a constantly developing intellectual life in What once It occurred to her at that moment that she was interested in what she was going to work on and she would pursue it as best she could until it was completed and then move on to something else, I mean, she was really always interested in this incredibly unique style and that's one one of the things I want to focus on because in her life she really seemed to reject broad and abstract thinking and this is one of the things that when you read it there is a certain clarity because she is very interested in particular, she wrote a lot about history, but not is that she was really a historian, but she always was, if he is always interested in very specific particular moments, places, people, things, ideas, instead of trying to generate these big schematic overviews of history. about the world and development and all this, she is kind of the ultimate anti-Hegelian and the reason she doesn't call herself a philosopher but rather something like a political scientist is because she thought that's what philosophy was or at least that was what philosophy had become.

In her time there were models of people like Hegel and Kant who were trying to create these huge categorical systems with all these rules and schemes and then you fit everything into the schemes. For Hana, she thought this really undermined the immediacy. and the complexity of human existence and she was really focused on the human and the particularity of being human, so raised in Germany she was a prodigy basically in her entire life, she was always brilliant, recognized as brilliant, she did very well, but You know it was. She went to university during the difficult years of the Aimar Republic, when you know poverty stalks the land and total instability, and yet she produced work of surprisingly high quality throughout that time.

Her thesis was on Thomas Aquinas's theory of love, which she more or less argues. that Aquinas is not really a theologian, which is an interesting argument, but again she was looking at the details of his arguments and concepts in the context of a kind of theological infrastructure in this grand scheme that had grown up around him and she was trying in a way, it's part of what she's doing, she knows a lot of things, of course, she was trying to recognize Recker as to rescue the particularity of Aquinas as a work, so when Arendt goes and starts investigating This, she says, you know there are The details of their love get lost in all these theological abstractions and so even from her early work there was this critical focus on getting rid of schema and infrastructure and a kind of institutionality.

I think it's fair to say that the institutional nonsense that was taught for reasons that have nothing to do with the philosopher or the thing or the famous person that she was, as I mentioned last time at the Spurs conference, she was a student of Martin Heidegger and Karl Jasper, which you already know very well for him. to incredible and influential thinkers in her time and you can see the influence of both on her thinking, but she was a unique thinker, you can see parts of her ideas, you can see a lot of influence from the Spurs perspective.

Not necessarily yes, the Spurs work itself, but her point of view is in her writings, but already and I think the reason why they were both very attracted to her. Heidegger, of course, that affair with her, but intellectually attracted to her, is that her mind was so powerful and. unique and incisive, you know you wanted to do it, you wanted to work with her, you want to be with her because she was just brilliant and that brilliance is also, by the way, I think part of her downfall because she loved the particular thing that used to annoy. all the time and that's something I want to look at as we go through some of his greatest works: his ability to piss off even people who he would think would be his native supporters, but she knew he was going to do this because I've always said that basically, if you once subscribe to any theory, once you subscribe to a party, an institution or a group and let that determine your way of thinking, you have basically given up a sign that you can be part of your humanity with that thought. for ourselves to talk to people to investigate get closer to participate she was not surprising to withdraw from life by any means, but what had to be done was always to try to maintain freedom of thought and once you said well, she better agree with this because Allah allows me to do so. to keep my job or allow me to advance in my career or avoid upsetting my friends she wasn't your woman I mean no way she wasn't she was never going to do that I might be okay with being wrong but I would never be okay I was following the game and she just thought because this is what other people said, in fact, this was one of her great fears, she thought that this was how we will see one of the roots of totalitarianism.

In some ways I thought I'd start and in some ways the other way around because of that and because I think it's helpful to understand a lot of what his career was about if you reflect on some of his more controversial moments and you can see what's going on here, so he wrote an essay on Brown v. Board of Education about desegregation and the outcome of this and some of her other writings, since she has been accused of being racist because she opposed the forced integration of public schools, she thought this was a mistake and that the Supreme Court had I made a mistake in doing this and this is where you know I'll clear it up.

The thought is so powerful because you know as I grew up, most of us grew up, of course, you know, Brown versus the Board of Education, one of those fundamental decisions comes from the Supreme Court we know it was good segregation was bad great you know there are the good guys here are the bad guys and we know what to think about this and we are wrong, right? Basically, we don't have to think about it. Well, she wasn't going to not think about that and because she was basically a Jewish refugee, very progressive and a lot of her ideas, of course, almost all of her friends know the people she knew or thought she had lost her mind, was she?

What are you talking about? of course you have to be for this, this is just the most obvious thing, but to her it wasn't obvious at all and she makes a couple of points where you agree or disagree with her, that's not the important thing, but it makes a couple of points. really great points and I think they highlight the clarity of her thinking on this, so one of the points she makes that really resonated with me as I worked through this essay quite slowly is that she said well, but by the way, it's important Keep in mind that she thinks Legal segregation should be repealed totally and completely against legal segregation in all its manifestations, which is why you will see articles that say: Oh, you know, she was against segregation.

That is not true. She thought there should be no laws allowing people to be segregated. She thought that was wrong, her problem and what she was seeing was social segregation. Where do you draw those lines and win? It's the right of people to decide who they want to spend time with and she felt that in a free society free association was one of those basic principles, oh, and she thought that the forced integration of schools was essentially damaging that principle. Now it can be argued that integration was more important than the principle of free association, but it is a very interesting point, however, a second aspect of this that I consider.

The one that really resonated with me was what he said: If you want to do this, why are you starting with children? Why are you making the most vulnerable, the weakest people, take on this incredibly difficult and daunting social task? ? Let me have you know, she said that she just thought it was shameful that they would put children with this burden of working and that they would be forced to go through the stress and strain instead of choosing other aspects of society. She thought, for example, about the fact that there were laws against miscegenation that blacks and whites couldn't marry, she said that one should have been repealed and B, that's what you should start seeing, like, hey, we have to look at the things that influence adults and so part of his issue in this is that he said look. there is a political realm which is the realm of law and performance in government and she said it is absolutely wrong that there are segregation laws politically so at least again that is why she thought they should go after Asian massage laws because Clearly, if two adults want to get married, they should absolutely have that right, and they have laws against it, by the way, that haven't been repealed for decades.

You know, that's the real crime and then she thought there was a private sphere and now the private. The kingdom is what you do in your own apartment, your house, with your friends and she said certainly the government can't force you to integrate there, they can't tell you who you should basically choose to have as friends, that's wrong, your family and your family. friends, you know, that depends on you how you choose to build those circles, but then she said that there is a third space which is the social space, the space is not totally political and it is not totally private, but it is that strange mix as you know, should not. cinemas, museums, being fully integrated, she thought yes, those were social spheres that should be integrated, so what she does, she takes something that everyone thought was clear and raises these issues that could be profound, but by the way, again, To be clear, he thought. legal segregation was an abomination and needed to be eliminated and she went much further than many other thinkers were at the time, for example, when she talked about miscegenation, the point she ends up making, which I think, or another point that ends up posing and It's interesting that she said she doesn't think this is going to work.

I mean, there is both the problem of ethics and free association, but also the problem that she, she looks, it is almost impossible for the government to deploy enough force in a society that you want. live to make people do this and sure enough, here we are what we are 60 years later, since Brown versus the Board of Education and in many parts of the countries the schools are still incredibly segregated, they had the institution of flight from the whites, etc. you know, all the kinds of problems with charter school school boundaries in me, we have this whole story of this incredibly complex world of school segregation that is crazy in a theoretically free country where everyone can go anywhere and, without However, our school systems are still you.

I know I've been pretty much as segregated as ever in a lot of places in a lot of the country, not just a small part of the country, but a lot of the country, so their pragmatism and their ethic was just to say, hey, here we have the values ​​we want. thinking about them and then her pragmatism to say this is going to work she thought she didn't say she basically thought this isn't functional so you're putting this enormous burden on children you're forcing the government to use force against its people There's always something to what you want to be really worried about: she comes from Nazi Germany, she's seen this and you're doing something that probably won't work anyway, so when you look at it historically you're like, wow, that's a lot to take in.

She really thought about that clearly and again you can disagree with her and say no, we thought maybe that was necessary, that's fine. In fact, I don't think she cared that people disagreed with her. She caredthat no one seemed to disagree. although everyone seemed to see well, here we go, this is the right thing to do, she said, wait, shouldn't we all continue, here are other topics to ponder, so it offended a lot of people, even now you will find, as I said, essays and The article He says, well, she's racist, she's against desegregation again, it's not true, you know?

But she was just trying to open her eyes and be very realistic about it, so you know that's something that needs to be made clear, but it irritates almost everyone. time because she's never with your program, whatever your program is, if you read Hana Arendt you're going to get a lot of great information and then you're going to get something that just irritates you and you wait and you go oh oh yeah, look at that, yeah. She's making a good point, something that I thought well, that is very easy to understand or very well founded, as you know, Brown versus the Board of Education have to integrate those schools.

She told him, well, you know, let's think about them a little more. I'm not from but she's not conservative she's not liberal she's very powerful I could say maybe progressive but she really was her, that's how she was and she wasn't a member of any particular group or party, but the clarity of the ideas that this brought It was because her mind was so brilliant and powerful she gives you all kinds of passages that are relevant today, another example of her work, a famous work that got her into trouble is Eichmann in Jerusalem, so this was another kind of cause famous, but he gives you this exploration of his mind, so Aikman had basically taken care of the logistics of the death camps for the Nazis and that's why he was extradited to Israel to be tried for that crime and again, how do you understand this look?

It's clear, this is not a problem, he is evil, the Nazis are evil, you send him to Jerusalem you find him guilty you execute the order you put him in prison for life end of the matter he is a bad guy we are the good guys the trial is for that we celebrate our triumph of good over evil you know it's like medieval put him on the blocks drag him around the city throw him tomatoes and rotten vegetables and then hang him in the square that's what we're doing here um but of course she wasn't going to go for this she wanted to go see so she again the particular if you wanted to be there and what she found and coined this phrase that got her in trouble and got her in trouble with many people in many ways as she called it the banality of evil and Other scholars have commented that she really should have said the banality. of Eichmann, but look what she was trying to say here was that Eichmann is not an evil person, he did, they couldn't find evidence that he particularly hated Jews or even was particularly anti-Semitic, he wasn't like a crazy Nazi, no I did it.

He seems like he really embraces any of the ideals or ideology or something about the Nazi Party. He was just a guy doing his job. He turned out to be very good at logistics and was a kind of cipher, this intellectually empty cipher. a bureaucrat who was instrumental in the murder of six million people and that's why she's going to look, let's not pass him off as this super Nazi we wanted, we want him to be this raging anti-Semite who had, you know, Hitler tattooed on his his chest and you know, he marched in all the flag-waving ceremonies, but he wasn't that guy at all, he was just someone who was very good at organizing logistics, he was transferred to the Death Camp Department and boom, there you go, look , look how efficiently I can do it. to kill six million people and it's really much harder to deal with and that's what she wanted to address, she wanted to go in there and say this is a big, dangerous, scary problem.

How many sociopaths do you know there are in the world? It turns out there are more than we would like, but probably a fairly finite number. In fact, one of the reasons I had to come up with the extermination camps is that we had regular soldiers who started exterminating people with guns and that hurt the soldiers. Which is that I think, as you would expect, most of the soldiers couldn't do it, they just liked shooting innocent people and it bothered them a lot, so what they need to do is start selecting soldiers who can do it and they had than finding a different, more efficient way and therefore the number of pure sociopaths in the world who will simply murder innocent people under orders turns out to be, fortunately, not zero as one would expect, but not many.

Ah, it's problematic that there are a lot of people who like Eichmann. That's what's terrifying about evil. Evil isn't the delusional sociopath. It's not the mass murderer. It's the person who is submitting the request for mass murder. It's the person who makes the schedules. trains is the person who makes everything possible and then says well, I was just doing my job well. Well, Hana Arendt was trying to get at that and she said that was reframing the banality of evil. What are you doing with someone? How do you address someone who thinks this way and lives this way? way and she makes this brilliant idea about him if I can find the quote here my papers mixed up here we go quote this is from Eichmann in Jerusalem mm-hmm he was really incapable of uttering a single sentence that wasn't a cliché despite Eichmann his quite With a bad memory, he repeated word for word the same clichés and cliches invented by himself.

The more one listened to him, the more evident it became that his inability to talk about himself was closely related to an inability to think, that is, to think from another person's point of view. It was not possible to communicate with him, not because he lied because he did, but because he was surrounded by the most reliable of all safeguards against the words and presence of others and therefore against reality as such, and note the emphasis on thinking, she thought she thought she was independent. Her thought was so important that what she thought was most deplorable and Eichmann was that he simply couldn't do it;

He had been so brainwashed by propaganda and he was so intellectually empty, so intellectually disinterested in the world, that you know, he didn't seem to be there. There was some problem, it was just okay, you know, he didn't because, again, there was no mental conflict for him because he was incapable of having a mental conflict and this is what drove her crazy, so when everyone says, oh yeah, desegregation is great. "I have to do it, this is the best way because that's how it is, she's like no, no, no, no, hey, let's take a breath and think about it maybe, but should we all agree on everything all the time ?

I don't think so and this comes up repeatedly in his works as people's inability or unwillingness to explore ideas, think for themselves, think independently and also notice that the passage about language, the way he speaks in clichés and this is important because as someone who teaches writing I tell my students when you write a cliché what you are not thinking you are not writing you are putting someone else's thoughts on the page and that is why you do not know what you are saying because you have not created the thought what you are doing is you are not thinking you are writing without thinking which is which is amazing and dangerous but if you want to express yourself and explore your ideas you have to start searching for yourself for the type of language you want to use, the words particulars that you are trying to highlight and that focus on your inability, in this case, Eichmann's inability to express himself clearly and individually, that he would ever say something that you said.

That it sounded like it was coming from the top of a newspaper headline was surprising to her and she saw this as a particular threat from the media which he wasn't a big fan of because that falling into cliche thinking suddenly you know that you're again stop thinking you just put a cliche for every moment oh you know this is good this is bad that's right this is wrong you know long live the right thousand you're right we're doing this for good and it's like what does the Reich of the thousand years, who is a thousand years Reich, just to give you an example, it's only today because the markets are going crazy.

I said to someone, do you know what the right markets are if everyone is talking about it? markets, what do we really mean when we say that? It turns out that it's very hard to track down, so I was mulling it over, but then I started because, of course, I had been reading for this lecture. I started looking at how many times people use the word markets, which is a lot because of course they're going crazy and using it 50 different ways and it's often just thrown out as a way of trying to make a point about the the way the economy works without even articulating that and because no one is articulating that it just becomes this big empty cliché oh the markets for this the markets are that the markets this did that I mean who were they are the artists that an actor is an answer, yes, anyway, that kind of constant, insipid use of the thought cliché she thought leads to someone like Eichmann who can use those thought clichés to isolate himself from ever reflecting on you said he didn't experience psychic dissonance because it cannot.

It just wasn't there and to her that was evil, so when she wrote this and the other aspects of the book, she really upset people because they said: What are you talking about? No, no, you know he is a bad, evil man. he does these terrible things he is, you know, he is him, don't stop trying to vilify him, stop trying to make it seem like he's not the guy who lived next door to you because to her that was much scarier, it's much scarier To think that the guy is friendly and maybe he comes to get ammo on your lawn, we're not home on a weekend or something goes to work and then he schedules the trains to the gas chamber, that's a totally different kind of horror. and again the specificity of the problems and it. the ability to think clearly and deeply about him bothered a lot of people, I mean who's bad, who's making this argument, it basically doesn't make anyone but her happy and that was enough and her friends, I should mention because of the way she that she was very close to her friend, she always had a tight circle of very intimate friends and that was basically her true audience.

I mean, she and her husband shared ideas, she exchanged ideas with him much like the Spurs did with his wife. Lauren also did it with her husband. I definitely know the interlocutor --zz about his ideas, work and reflection, yes, the Spurs had the same relationship with his wife, she helped him immensely in articulating his ideas, talking about them, reading them, you know, criticizing them, opening them up like this of things. they're his ideas, but he explored them with his friends and developed them that way, but basically beyond his own sense of intellectual honesty and clarity, you know to hell with the audience, you know if people didn't like it, you know that she's doing the best she can and not also because of the way she never says she's completely right, she just says she thinks she's right for now until she thinks of something else.

Another example here is his concern for clarity of thought and freedom of thought used to talk about the free press. so here is a quote from an article he wrote in Free Press and he says that 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 the people is not informed how you can have an opinion if you are not informed if everyone always lies to you the consequence is not that you believe the lies but that no one believes anything anymore look that is a great idea it is not that you are believing the lies you are not believing some lies and simply believing other lies is that no one believes anything and people who have known for a long time can believe anything cannot make up their minds are they deprived not only of their ability to act but also of their ability to think and judge and it was a town like that? so what you can do is and whatever you want basically, so what do you do if you can't think of anything because you think it's all lies?

That you have to basically appeal to emotions, raw animal instincts, these kinds of things and she was terrified of In that way, you know good obvious reasons that come out of World War II and you know that if people don't believe in anything and thinks everything is a lie, how are you supposed to respond to a world you can't think in? It's because it's all fake, so you just have to feel your way through it, just you, we'll just look for emotion all the time and exploit that and of course then everyone will spend all their time exploiting people's emotions. emotions and then you know danger, danger, right, this is clearly a sign that people are being manipulated and not thinking, so the problem with propaganda and not trusting anything you are receiving is not that you believe something that you don't It is true, but you have learned. not believing anything and therefore there is no way to articulate or ponder or reflect on the world and then simply believing everything that comes from one place is one type of error not believing anything that comes from anywhere is another type of error and this It's an idea she pursued in the book that somehowway she made her reputation, if you know her, you probably know the origins of totalitarianism, which is a remarkable work and it's kind of unique because she's not a historian, she's not a political scientist, she's not really a philosopher. she's just a thinker and it's the exploration of someone who really thinks a lot about the question of where totalitarianism comes from, particularly in the forms of fascist Germany and Soviet Russia.

Stalinist Russia. How does this work? How did it develop? That has to do with? the Jews why the Jews in particular and you know you can pick it up and read almost any page and you will find some idea that will catch your attention and again there are parts of this that she was very criticized for and parts that she has been very praised for, but it is this central and important work to try to understand and reflect on the nature of totalitarianism and following the quote above from his reflections on a free press, here is a quoteSince the origins of totalitarianism, a mixture of credulity and cynicism has been a characteristic outstanding of the mass mentality, since it became an everyday phenomenon of the masses in an incomprehensible world in constant change; the masses had reached the point where they believed everything at the same time. and nothing thinks that everything is possible and that nothing was true the mixture in itself was quite remarkable because it meant the end of the illusion that credulity was a weakness of unsuspecting primitive souls and the divisive cynicism of superior and refined minds propaganda mass discovers that his audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd and denied it is to reject the deception because he considered every statement to be a lie anyway the mass totalitarian leader based his propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that under such conditions one could make people believe the worst fantastic statements one day and they hoped that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood they would take refuge in their cynicism rather than abandon the leaders who lied to them they would protest that they had known. from the beginning that the statement was a lie and they admired the leaders for their superior tactical intelligence, I mean, think about this, it's amazing that you can create a situation where people respond to lies by thinking it's great that you lied , so you know what people talked about.

This with Hitler and Stalin it was clear that they kept making statements that just weren't true and yet it didn't seem to bother people, people seem to agree with that and that's something that because we think that propaganda is something that deceives. and it makes everyone believe something and accept something and then, uh-oh, the truth will come out, the daring reporters will get the story and they'll reveal the secret and then the secret will come out and then everyone will do it. Wow, my goodness, I can't believe we've been fooled, we're going to turn on our leaders and get a good feel for a new world, that's lovely to believe, but it turns out that exploration is very different in its model.

That's what she explores, but I think the second quote could have been from Eichmann in Jerusalem, but she also explores this idea and the origins of totalitarianism, the concept is much more insidious, it's like, what do you do with a population that thinks lies? are they funny or do they actually give you points for lying who really thinks that oh the successful lie the entertaining lie the lie that achieved whatever the leader was trying to achieve is great even if the lie is at my expense look you can't expose it what do you do how do you know even if the press reports oh well that's not true this is objectively inaccurate it doesn't have an impact we shouldn't expect it to have an impact according to Arendt she says look, you know, when you get to this place there is so much psychic confusion and stress on people who will then stop judging things under this category of truth and lies and then they will start judging under other categories which of course are much more emotional, much more elusive and then what will cause the breakup has It has to be something that is an emotional break, something that is a psychological blow, not something that has any basis in fact or reality or truth, because those things are long behind us and that's just that you know an incredibly different world in terms of As far as she is concerned, the counterexample, by the way, would be Roman bread and circuses.

I mean, that's the classic maxim of the room, right, you keep people fed, you keep people entertained and basically, life sees, people who you know will put up with a lot of other problems, ah, but in Rome this was true when something happened with the supply of bread or the cost of bread or circuses could not be set up later in the Empire. period, they got restless, I mean, they are worse, they had problems right in their insurrection, this was not just it was not just a maxim because they are like, oh, this concrete palpable physical good, I know it and I'm going to continue with that when you You've moved into the modern world, boy, it's a lot more complicated because we deal a lot with abstractions, we deal a lot more often with ideas and concepts rather than that kind of basic mm-level experience, so it's a lot harder to form accurate judgments. and evaluations of the world around us, which of course makes us much more open to being manipulated by various forces that want us not to think, hence his emphasis on thinking and, therefore, when he goes to the origins of totalitarianism, he tries figure out how you get to the place where you have enough people who think like that that they can just take over a country or in this case a couple of countries and their conclusions are all over the place and they make all kinds of observations, but that's it.

It basically revolves around this core notion of this impulse that leads to a lot of behavior that is not only irrational but rationality is not, it's like super rational. I mean, I'm sure how to conceptualize. I couldn't find a good word in it. text, but the idea is that rationalism is no longer a metric, so if you are irrational that means you oppose rationalism in which you are not rational, but this is not rationalism because it just disappeared, it's like there isn't even a place to be seen and And she, you know, like with Eichmann, she was terrified by this.

The masses who are not thinking about other aspects, by the way, about the origins of totalitarianism, are quite upset, and once again accused it of racism. Ungh this because she talked about imperialism and the people. she talks about the Dark Continent, it's not a phrase we like to use anymore, she went back to talking about primitive Africans, you know, in a derogatory phrase, but if you actually read the sections on imperialism, she was very clear, she was not favor of imperialism, it was quite clear that, in general terms, this was an exploitative relationship. You know, Hughes, the French, just trying to use their colonies as cannon fodder to protect the French homeland, and you know there are some unfortunate phrases, but if you look at her thinking, which ones? she is actually saying in the structure of her argument that she is not saying that Oh, imperialism was bringing great Western culture to Africa, she was saying that no, Western culture had deluded itself into thinking that it would be able to carry out this imperialist project and in fact he went there. and she simply brutalized and destroyed the colonies that she was occupying, as well as causing serious damage to the Republic in the interior and, because she was very pro-democracy, she was trying to work in that direction and trying to maintain the traditions of the Republic. of participation in democratic processes, the rule of law, he thought all this was crucial, he discovered that imperialism is bad both for the occupied countries, of course, and for the occupying countries, which was simply bad in every way , again, much more subtle, much more. complicated reflection on this and also in some ways much more brutal, I mean, I think she just looks at what was really happening and some of the passages are quite clear where she just says look, the Boers, for example, were just slave-holding parasites, since she uses a word parasite, they just enslaved the local population, they stopped doing anything and became parasites, they couldn't do anything, they were no longer productive at all and she just thought that this was this horrible poisonous relationship that poisoned the people.

Boers and of course the natives who were there when they arrived, I mean the Ince loved the population, this was bad for everyone and she has no sympathy for them, she just says this is the notion of, you know, bringing culture there, it's nonsense, it doesn't fly, it was self-deception and she wants to explore why those delusions existed, um, another aspect of this again, so many aspects to explore are Jewish issues because of course she was Jewish, you She has worked for Zionist causes, she was helping to get people out of Germany, she was helping to get people in.

Israel and yet she tended to have this angry relationship because she didn't follow any particular Jewish line. I mean, she just wasn't going to be like a values ​​Zionist, she wasn't going to be a values ​​pro-Israel, she wasn't going to be anything. so she was going to be her own person and one of the things at the origin of totalitarianism and then was the settlement of Israel, but at the origin of totalitarianism she's like, look, anti-Semitism was not incidental to this, it was part of it. and then she goes over this curious history of the Jews in Europe in which she says: you know that this special relationship that the Jews had for a time made them good and happy in Europe, that the notion that the Jews were always hated and always had the same position and that all the Jews in Europe withdrew apparently Jesus is just a historical fact and then what you have to do is look at the historical specificity at times when they were persecuted at times when they were not persecuted at times when some Jews were persecuted in other The Jews are not persecuted sometimes and had a lot of power.

Know? In those times, when you know, certain Jews had a lot of power and most of them just lived in shtetl Zoran or agrarian farms or in special ghettos. you know this whole panoply needs to be explored much more richly in its kind of specificity over time because she says that if you just say, well, Jews have always been hated in Europe, well, that kind of gives everyone a exit and makes the Jews leave. great we're always the victim we can move on it seems like that's just not true or at least completely incomplete and if you're going right Europeans have always hated Jews because Christianity well then people who shrug their shoulders and says Well, okay, great, we're going to keep doing that, but you can't really blame us because that's how it's always been, it's like no, it's just that it's changed, it was different at different times, it's got completely different dimensions and we try to explore that specificity.

Of course, once again it gets us into trouble because people on both sides don't want to hear that that's more complex and subtle and difficult and finally, kind of a parting thought here is that a lot of people have said you know how to pin it down. . How do you give the core of your idea? I don't think there's anything she can read that contains any kind of core ideas here about rents. Her mind was that two were fabulously rich for it to be contained like that and she didn't. she wanted to contain that way she didn't want to have a system, but I will recommend it to you if you go out, you know, recommend a book.

I did the penguin selection, a portable rendus is really good, it has a lot of good selections in there. of material from his letters, I think you would enjoy it, but what he gives you, I think if you just flip through, read ten pages here, five pages there, an excerpt there, a letter to you, swear, beautiful letter D, to Spurs, there, what you want. What I will get is this constant level of concise thinking that leads to ideas. If there is a core to her work, I would say it is that her mind was so rich, varied, interested, unique and free that this really becomes the core of the philosophy. free mind, your thinking is particular, be specific, look at the details, don't fall into clichés of thinking and, you know, it's so refreshing, so liberating in an exhilarating way.

I would say it could be like cold water, you know, in a hot water. day to read their mind at work, since that's what you'll get and that's why I can highly recommend that you go out and get one or two of the jobs that appeal to you, you won't agree with everything, there will be passages that will probably piss you off. from time to time, but you will see a top-notch mind, a great genius at work, page by page, so thank you very much. I hope you enjoyed it and I'll try to post more content as time goes on. go ahead and, but I will absolutely make sure that I get the last two lectures in this series on time and thank you for listening and everyone be well.