The Lies of Totalitarianism

Review by Bill Doughty–

"To be sure, totalitarian dictators do not consciously embark upon the road to insanity."

So writes Hannah Arendt, gifted thinker and historian in "The Origins of Totalitarianism" (Schoken Books, Random House, 1948, 1957; renewed 1976). Her work is vital to anyone interested in understanding the Holocaust or the rise of Fascism.

Leo Hymas speaks about his personal experiences to a group of Soldiers about World War II and the Holocaust at French Theater on Joint Base Lewis-McChord, WA., April 29, 2014 to educate the JBLM community of the history and significance of the Holocaust. (Photo by Sgt. Jasmine Higgins/Released)

Totalitarian leaders use fear, existential threats, and targeting of "the other" – people perceived to have no rights. Most of all, dictators or would-be dictators tell lies.

Hitler and Stalin

Profiling the Nazis under Adolf Hitler and Bolsheviks under Josef Stalin, Arendt examines the characteristics, effects and results of dictatorship. She also helps answer how and why people were willing to believe their supreme leaders' lies.

"Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness."

Emaciated prisoners at the Ebensee camp.

Regarding the belief in unbelievable lies and falsehoods, Arendt writes, "Totalitarian propaganda can outrageously insult common sense only where common sense has lost its validity." People had to believe lies and dehumanize in order justify murdering millions of other people during the Holocaust.

Arendt explains how narcissistic autocrats are drawn to rituals and symbols. Marches, military parades and self-adulating shows of idolatry reinforce the propaganda.

She compares Nazi and Bolshevik mass propaganda. Both heavily depended on conspiracy theories, either age-old themes (such as "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" forgery and anti-semitism) or invented fears (countless sinister imperialist or internal conspiracies).

"The effectiveness of this kind of propaganda demonstrates one of the chief characteristics of modern masses. They do not believe in anything visible, in the reality of their own experience; they do not trust their eyes and ears but only their imaginations, which may be caught by anything that is at once universal and consistent in itself. What convinces masses are not facts, and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably part. Repetition, somewhat overrated in importance because of the common belief in the masses' inferior capacity to grasp and remember, is important only because it convinces them of consistency in time."

Bergen-Belsen camp, liberated April 15, 1945.

"Repetition ... is important" in propaganda and mind control. Arendt, of course, writes in a time before the internet, social media and smart phones. In 2020, distorted truths and outright lies can be repeated and shared in ways unthinkable in the 1940s and 50s.

The Leader establishes a "spell of infallibility" and thrives in chaos. "The totalitarian ruler must, at any price, prevent normalization from reaching the point where a new way of life could develop," Arendt writes. Followers must have contempt for the nonbelievers and outsiders. 

"The result of this system is that the gullibility of sympathizers makes lies credible to the outside world, while at the same time the graduated cynicism of membership and elite formations eliminates the danger that the Leader will ever be forced by the weight of his own propaganda to make good his own statements and feigned respectability. It has been one of the chief handicaps of the outside world in dealing with totalitarian systems that it ignored this system and therefore trusted that, on one hand, the very enormity of totalitarian lies would be their undoing and that, on the other, it would be possible to take the Leader at his word and force him, regardless of his original intentions, to make it good. The totalitarian system, unfortunately, is foolproof against such normal consequences; its ingeniousness rests precisely on the elimination of that reality which either unmasks the liar or forces him to live up to his pretense."

Arendt in 1924

"Totalitarianism in power," Arendt writes, "uses the state as its outward façade, to represent the country in the nontotalitarian world." Ignoring or appeasing dictators may not work. They often will find ways to manipulate the system to remain in power.

Imperialism and Role of Racism

"Origins" is presented in three parts: Anti-Semitism, Imperialism and Totalitarianism. Part II, Imperialism, is the longest section and examines the "brutality and megalomania" of the ideology that brought about the World Wars. In words that resonate today in light of Putin's revanchism toward Crimea and Ukraine, we read: "The initiative for continental expansion in close geographic continuity no longer comes from Central and Eastern Europe [i.e. Nazi Germany] but is exclusively located in Russia."

Imperialism, Arendt shows, was supported by the right and the left, often encouraged by the workers who saw economic benefits. "In Germany, the liberals (and not the Conservative Party) were the actual promoters of that famous naval policy which contributed so heavily to the outbreak of the first World War." The Socialist Party also "repeatedly voted" to obligate funds to build the German navy after 1906.

The British trawler Rudyard Kipling, launched in 1920, was sunk by a German U-boat in 1939.

She calls author Rudyard Kipling "the author of imperialist legend" for the British Empire, establishing a "foundation legend" based on the sea, quoting him from "The First Sailor" (Humorous Tales, 1871). Arendt writes:

"The foundation legend, as Kipling tells it, starts from the fundamental reality of the people of the British Isles. Surrounded by the sea, they need and win the help of the three elements of Water, Wind, and Sun through the invention of the Ship. The ship made the always dangerous alliance with the elements possible and made the Englishman master of the world. 'You'll win the world without anyone knowing how you did it: and you'll carry the world on your backs without anyone seeing how you did it. But neither you nor your sons will get anything out of that little job except Four gifts – one for the Sea, one for the Wind, one for the Sun and one for the Ship that carries you ... For, winning the world, and keeping the world, and carrying the world on their backs – on land, or on the sea, or in the air – your sons will always have the Four Gifts. Long-headed and slow-spoken and heavy – damned heavy – in the hand, will they be; and always a little bit to windward of every enemy – that they may be a safeguard to all who pass on the seas on their lawful occasions.'"

This passage sums up, as Arendt recognizes, the so-called "white man's burden" – as well as, it could be argued, "manifest destiny" exceptionalism and white supremacist racism.

Early European colonists in Africa captured slaves, often pitting tribes against each other.

Africa was exploited by colonialists and imperialists in the centuries leading up to the 19th century. Seafaring nations, especially Britain, established "maritime and trade stations" to promote commercial exchange. Commerce included African slaves. Arendt presents an eye-opening discussion about South Africa's Boers, who were descended from Dutch settlers, and how they acted out of fear, exterminated tribes and then accepted another banality of evil: apartheid.

What fuels imperialism? "Racism is the main ideological weapon of imperialistic politics," Arendt contends, Russians who consider themselves Slavs, Germans who think they are superior Aryans.

Diversity in a nation is shown as a bulwark and strength. "Racism may indeed carry out the doom of the Western world and, for that matter, of the whole of human civilization."

Power Lessons for 2020

From its 600 pages, packed with history and philosophy, it would be impossible to summarize all of Arendt's points in this blog. But her points seem as fresh and relevant in 2020 as they did 70 years ago, even as she admits, "No matter how much we may be unable of learning from the past, it will not enable us to know the future."

Hobbes's "Leviathan"

Through Arendt we discover lessons from history that can can apply to current events: Corruption in the Soviet Union but supposedly not in Communist China, the Dreyfus Affair, "Secret Judah" and "Secret Rome," and the roles of some Catholics (Pius XII and "The Deputy") and Protestants (Martin Niemöller) in dealing with the Nazis.

Arendt gives an extended interpretation of mid-17th-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes and his treatise on social contracts in a civil society, "Leviathan." She writes, "Power, according to Hobbes, is the accumulated control that permits the individual to fix prices and regulate supply and demand in such a way that they contribute to his own advantage." A "never-ending accumulation of power necessary for a never-ending accumulation of capital ... foreshadowed the rise of imperialism."

"Origin" lays out how imperialism grew out of colonialism. Arendt explains Soviet goals and seems to predict Russian aggression in Georgia, Crimea and Ukraine, from a perspective more than half a century ago. "The initiative for continental expansion in close geographic continuity no longer comes from Central and Eastern Europe but is exclusively Russian," She writes. "No one justifies expansion any longer by 'the white man's burden ...; instead we hear of 'commitments' to client states, of the responsibilities of power, and of solidarity with revolutionary national liberation movements.'"

A hopeful sign comes in a chapter called "A Classless Society": "Nothing is more characteristic of the totalitarian movements in general and of the quality of fame of their leaders in particular than the startling swiftness with which they are forgotten and the startling ease with which they can be replaced."

Laced throughout this indispensable history of totalitarianism is an unspoken warning, though. Beware the lies, especially the big lies. Demand clear, consistent, trusted messaging and honesty from leaders. Most of all, recognize the insanity.

U.S. Navy Sailors assigned to the guided-missile destroyer USS Jason Dunham (DDG 109) tour the Haifa Holocaust Museum as part of a community relations event during a scheduled port visit to Haifa, Israel, June 22, 2018. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Jonathan Clay/Released)

‘Origins of Totalitarianism’ in Context

Review by Bill Doughty

Seventy-five years ago, in her preface to the first edition of “The Origins of Totalitarianism,”  Hannah Arendt warned of the rise of authoritarianism. She decried the complacency of people in accepting and even supporting antisemitism, imperialism and totalitarianism.

Her preface to her first edition, written in 1950, describes dark clouds of pessimism just five years after World War II and in the heart of the Cold War with the Soviet Union. The dark clouds in these excerpts (from the preface) sound familiar today:

“Never has our future been more unpredictable, never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and self-interest - forces that look like sheer insanity…”

“Desperate hope and desperate fear often seem closer to the center … than balanced judgment and measured insight.”

“To yield to the mere process of disintegration has become an irresistible temptation…”

“The totalitarian attempt at global conquest and total domination has been the destructive way out of all impasses. Its victory may coincide with the destruction of humanity; wherever it has ruled, it has begun to destroy the essence of man.”

“And if it is true that in the final stages of totalitarianism an absolute evil appears (absolute because it can no longer be deduced from humanly comprehensible motives)…”

We have reviewed Hannah Arendt’s remarkable book several times over the years. In this review, we are focusing on Arendt’s preface to the first edition as well as a compelling introduction by historian Anne Applebaum in the recently reprinted Mariner Classics HarperCollins paperback (2024). 

Applebaum puts Arendt’s warnings against autocracy and authoritarians in context, including those who lie, grift, and threaten to invade neighboring nations as well as promote inequality in society.

The world has experienced an increase in inequality, xenophobia and extremism in recent years. That combination has led to a rise in autocracies, kleptocracies, and oligarchies over free-thinking, people-powered, and liberal democracies. 

According to Applebaum, the rule of power and force wants to overtake public order and rule of law. Even the antisemitism and imperialism Arendt writes about, along with totalitarianism, is on the rise. Unfortunately, complacency, submission, and blind obedience have allowed those anti-freedom (what Arendt calls “evil”) forces to take hold. Applebaum writes:

“And yet the questions Arendt asks remain absolutely relevant today. She was fascinated by the passivity of so many people in the face of dictatorship, by the widespread willingness, even eagerness, to believe lies and propaganda— just consider the majority of Russian people today, unaware that there is even a war going on next door and prevented by law from calling it such. In the totalitarian world, trust has dissolved. The masses ‘believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. To explain this phenomenon, Arendt zeroes in on human psychology, especially the intersection between terror and loneliness. By destroying civic institutions, whether sports clubs or small businesses, totalitarian regimes kept people away from one another and prevented them from sharing creative or productive projects. By blanketing the public sphere with propaganda, they made people afraid to speak with one another. And when each person felt himself isolated from the rest, resistance became impossible. Politics in the broadest sense became impossible too: ‘Terror can rule absolutely only over men who are isolated against each other.. Isolation may be the beginning of terror; it certainly is its most fertile ground; it always is its result.’ 

Reading that account now, it is impossible not to wonder whether the nature of modern work and information, the shift from ‘real life’ to virtual life and the domination of public debate by algorithms that increase emotion, anger, and division, hasn't created some of the same results. In a world where everyone is supposedly ‘connected,’ loneliness and isolation once again are smothering activism, optimism, and the desire to participate in public life. In a world where ‘globalization' has supposedly made us all similar, a narcissistic dictator can still launch an unprovoked war on his neighbors. The twentieth. century totalitarian model has not been banished; it can be brought back, at any place and at any time.”

Military leaders have long studied the wisdom of Hannah Arendt and other thinkers. Arendt’s “The Origins of Totalitarianism” is on the DOD Overdrive Professional Reading List. It was listed on the U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings site as a recommended book in 2008. In 2013, retired U.S. Army General, Stanley McChrystal, discussed his book, "My Share of the Task: A Memoir,” at the Hannah Arendt Center.

Beware Government by Fear, Decree

Review by Bill Doughty–

Soldiers of the U.S. Army's 9th Armored Division reach Remagen Bridge in early March 1945.

There is a reason books about fascism, imperialism and authoritarianism refer to historian Hannah Arendt.

Her "The Origins of Totalitarianism" (Schoken Books, Random House, 1948, 1957; renewed 1976) is the motherlode of warnings about the growth and acceptance of such movements and leaders. The book is a call for vigilance and action and a rejection of apathy.

Arendt shows how dictators can rise from catastrophes and destruction. She explains how an "open disregard for law and legal institutions and ideological justification of lawlessness" allow totalitarianism to flourish. And she warns about the autocratic tendency to destroy norms, spread lies, and rule by decree.

Government of, by and for the people is the opposite of government by dictate or bureaucracy under the ultimate control of an all-powerful "Leader" (using Arendt's capital L). The megalomaniacal autocrat ignores controls within the government and creates a "secret society in broad daylight."

Hitler's 1939 Action T4 justified killing disabled children and adults. 

"Legally, government by bureaucracy is government by decree, and this means that power, which in constitutional government only enforces the law, becomes the direct source of all legislation," according to Arendt. 

The bureaucrat, who by merely administering decrees has the illusion of constant action, feels tremendously superior to these 'impractical' people who are forever entangled in 'legal niceties' and therefore stay outside the sphere of power which to him is the source of everything."

"Arbitrary power, unrestricted by law, wielded in the interest of the ruler and hostile to the interests of the governed, on one hand, fear as the principle of action, namely fear of the people by the ruler and fear of the ruler by the people, on the other – these have been the hallmarks of tyranny..."

The dictator/leader through his appointed chief law enforcement officer (a.k.a. attorney general) becomes the ultimate administrator of the law:

"The administrator considers the law to be powerless because it is by definition separated from its application. The decree, on the other hand, does not exist at all except if and when it is applied; it needs no justification except applicability. It is true that decrees are used by all governments in times of emergency, but then the emergency itself is a clear justification and automatic limitation. In governments by bureaucracy decrees appear in their naked purity as though they were no longer issued by powerful men, but were the incarnation of power itself and the administrator only its accidental agent. There are no general principles which simple reason can understand behind the decree, but ever-changing circumstances which only an expert can know in detail. People ruled by decree never know what rules them because of the impossibility of understanding decrees in themselves and the carefully organized ignorance of specific circumstances and their practical significance in which all administrators keep their subjects."

"The Leader's absolute monopoly of power and authority is most conspicuous in the relationship between him and his chief of police (Himmler in Nazi Germany), who in totalitarian country occupies the most powerful public position," Arendt writes. Even if the chief law enforcement officer does not have absolute executive power, "this does not prevent (him) from organizing his enormous apparatus in accordance with totalitarian power principles."

Then the good people in government are forced to choose: either stay and try to be an influence for what is right or leave and escape the fear and terror. But a narcissistic autocrat often does not give them a choice. Paranoid and deranged, he purges those who are opposed to the rule of law. He never accepts blame or responsibility for failure: "If he wants to correct his own errors, he must liquidate those who carried them out," Arendt writes.

"The humiliation implicit in owing a job to the unjust elimination of one's predecessor has the same demoralizing effect that the elimination of the Jews had upon the German professions: it makes every jobholder a conscious accomplice in the crimes of the government, their beneficiary whether he likes it or not, with the result that the more sensitive the humiliated individual happens to be, the more ardently he will defend the regime. In other words, this system is the logical outgrowth of the Leader principle in its full implications and the best possible guarantee for loyalty, in that it makes every new generation depend for its livelihood on the current political line of the Leader which started the job-creating purge."

Nazis – "living corpses" – at Christmas, date unknown.

As members of the leader's inner circle carry out the Leader's decrees their identity and morality are killed off and they become "living corpses," she says. "The first essential step on the road to total domination is to kill the judicial person in man." The autocrat rules with a vulgar and demoralizing destruction of norms.

Vulgarity replaces "generally accepted intellectual, cultural and moral standards" in the republic. "Vulgarity with its cynical dismissal of respected standards and accepted theories carried with it a frank admission of the worst and a disregard for all pretenses which were easily mistaken for courage and a new style of life," Arendt writes.

Corruption becomes the modus operandi. It was a problem in anti-Semitic France  in the late 1800s, when the bureaucracy "gained control of public funds and how the Budget Commission was governed entirely by public interests." And, "Corruption, the curse of the Russian administration from the beginning, was also present during the last years of the Nazi regime..."

Weaponizing their corruption, dictators target media, intellectuals and free-thinking artists and creators.

"Wherever totalitarian movements seized power, this whole group of sympathizers was shaken off even before the regimes proceeded toward their greatest crimes. Intellectual, spiritual, and artistic initiative is as dangerous to totalitarianism as the gangster initiative of the mob, and both are more dangerous than mere political opposition. The consistent persecution of every higher form of intellectual activity by the new mass leaders springs from more than their natural resentment against everything they cannot understand. Total domination does not allow for free initiative in any field of life, for any activity that is not entirely predictable. Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty."

After the Leader eliminates nonbelievers, naysayers, whistleblowers and independent voices in his inner circle, he is then surrounded by sycophants who can reinforce his belief in his own lies. The authoritarian autocrat believes in his own omnipotence. Hitler said he was "irreplaceable" and that "the destiny of the Reich depends on me alone."



The goal is to remove all independence of thought, courage of conscience, and creativity of the individual. The same elimination of free thought and action happened purposefully in the camps as well.

In Germany, concentration and extermination camps were "meant not only to exterminate people and degrade human beings, but also serve the ghastly experiment of eliminating, under scientifically controlled conditions, spontaneity itself as an expression of human behavior and of transforming the human personality into a mere thing," according to Arendt. "Terror enforces oblivion."

Cries and resignation in Nazi Germany.

Hitler initiated a campaign of fear and warlike terror in the name of Germany. His initiative was a means to stabilize and feed the economy – "'guns and butter' actually meant 'butter through guns.'" Arendt notes, "One may even surmise that one of Hitler's reasons for provoking this war was that it enabled him to accelerate the development in a manner that would have been unthinkable in peacetime."

Authoritarian leaders collude and corrupt to investigate and denounce political opponents. They get rid of possible successors or anyone who dares question their decrees, directives and lawless orders.

"Deadly danger to any civilization is no longer likely to come from without," Arendt warns. The emergence of totalitarian governments is a phenomenon within, not outside, our civilization. The danger is that a global, universally interrelated civilization may produce barbarians from its own midst by forcing millions of people into conditions which, despite all appearances, are conditions of savages."

This is one of at least two Navy Reads reviews of the Arendt's monumental work on the forensics of totalitarianism, a highly recommended book for anyone involved in defending democracy and the Constitution.

This is also a good selection for Women's History Month in March. Hannah Arendt, who immigrated to the United States and became an American citizen in 1950, is widely considered one of the great philosophers and political thinkers of the 20th century.

One hundred years ago: Arendt in 1920

In this edition of "Origins," Samantha Power provides the book's introduction. "In contemporary debates over ethnic conflict, genocide, international rights, sovereignty and terrorism, (Arendt's) writings have retained a profound pertinence that augurs well for her permanent place among the masters," Power writes. "She understood that barbarous regimes could not come into being overnight."

Power writes of militant Islam including the attacks of 9/11, genocide in in Rwanda, Mao's so-called "Great Leap Forward," Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge terror in Cambodia, and ethnic cleansing for a "Greater Serbia" in the Balkans. She highlights "Arendt's prophetic skepticism about the enforceability of international human rights," and says hope rests with individual activists, organizers and journalists, though that may be a challenge.

"In some countries state control is so fierce that independent voices are muzzled and marginalized, power and wealth are concentrated among elites, and injustice rules. In others, war or occupation have brought such ruin and humiliation that civil society cannot flower and no amount of organizing can restore living standards or human dignity. It is from some of these countries that contemporary terrorist threats hail, and it is here that 'Origins' offers further wisdom for today's dark times – wisdom that we ignore at our peril."

Samantha Power is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, political thinker and diplomat who served as the 28th United States Ambassador to the United Nations from 2013 to 2017. Hers is a call for collaboration, cooperation and action instead of fear and apathy.

Navy Veteran and former Secretary of State John Kerry with then United States Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power, Oct. 2, 2015.

Found Haiku in 'Believer'

Review by Bill Doughty––

Did the pilot encounter a UFO before losing contact with air traffic control? What do people, including his fiancé, believe happened to Frederick Valentich on Saturday, October 21, 1978, over Bass Strait, Australia? And what did Valentich report he saw and experienced just before his transmission cut off, the pilot never to be heard from alive again?

It’s one of the true stories explored by master writer Sarah Krasnostein in “The Believer: Encounters with the Beginning, the End, and Our Place in the Middle” (Tin House, 2022).

In “The Believer” we meet UFOlogists, an abuse survivor who hired a hitman, members of a Mennonite choir who perform in a New York subway, a “death doula” who helps individuals and families, ghost hunters who search for evidence in haunted places, a geologist who wants to believe the earth is 6,000 years old, and others following and sharing their beliefs. Throughout, Krasnostein presents characters in ways that make us care about them. The sometimes floating, sometimes strobe-like stories are often deeply painful but always thought-provoking, poetic and profound.

Her writing unfolds the biggest of issues: life, death, hope, reality, existentialism.

“From the absurdity of our deepest paranoias to the radical coherency of our highest art, we are compulsive converters of fact into meaning.”

UAP screen shot by a naval aviator (U.S. Navy)

She visits the Creation Museum in California, discusses the cantina scene in Star Wars, shares the beauty of Wynton Marsalis’s “Canon for Three Trumpets and Strings,” and considers the science of oneness and shared atoms with religious fundamentalists, noting, “…they believe I am going to Hell, and I believe they may already be living in one…”

This is a book of fascinating encounters and deeply personal contemplation.

As if taking a book from a library shelf, Krasnostein quotes works by great minds such as Hanna Arendt and her “warning against mistaking knowledge for thought, and truth for meaning;” Haruki Murakami who contemplates “existential reality of nonexistence;” and Martin Rees’s observation that “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence” (now pertinent to discussion of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, including recent revelations by U.S. military pilots and former naval aviators).

She spotlights Alvin Toffler, author of “Future Shock,” who in 1970 identified “the dizzying disorientation brought on by the premature arrival of the future.”Midway in the last century telephones were just for calling people. Computers were the size of large rooms. TVs had three channels –– all black-and-white, mostly white. 

Krasnostein writes about some of the people in their early sixties and late fifties who experienced Toffler's future shock: “Over the span of their lives to date, LP records disappeared and then cassettes. Reel-to-reel, Beta, VHS. Carbon copies, typewriter ribbons. The black tongue of film inside a camera, every frame precious.”

Ahhh, an unexpected “found haiku” –– a five-seven-five-syllable stanza of words. Poignant. Exquisite. Unintentionally a poem:

…ribbons. The black tongue

of film inside a camera,

every frame precious

Other found haiku emerge as we read Krasnostein’s investigation of religion, alien abductions, and other beliefs.

She investigates UFO sightings, events, and conspiracies in Australia, including the Westall event of 1966. She visits with a sect of fundamentalist Christians in their homes and at their services, including in the dead of winter. She befriends a dying woman and her family, who allow her to share in the process of saying goodbye. And she follows the life of a convicted repentant murderer who helps homeless people stay alive.

Some found haiku in "The Believer":

Green-white flash moving

extremely quickly across

the sky. Metallic…

Over long winters

of short days when nothing thawed

or melted away

The railing is iced

with a thin line of fresh snow

as I climb the stairs

Through which a chill wind

blew: grief frustration closer

to strangulation

Inside, I add my

wet Nikes to the dozens

of similar pairs

On the sofa where

they lean towards each other like

a pair of old boots

Air is cold through the

clean pane as he looks up at 

the blackness he knows

Of the clock face laid

bare as each hour came once, and

vanished forever

Salting of stars so

thick it reminded me we

are floating in space

How close the remote

past is: we live inside it

the light is the same

Self … rumination

carving neurological

tracks deep as canyons

Krasnostein examines the choices we make in our noble but vain attempt to find answers to every question. She sees how some believers accept certain inevitabilities. Reaching for more books, she cites other authors and thinkers, including Elizabeth Kübler Ross, Stephen J. Gould, George Orwell, Charles Darwin, James Baldwin, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Jorge Luis Borges. Borges imagined Paradise “as a kind of library,” one that Krasnostein contemplates visiting.

“...I always imagined that library as an Eden where all the operating instructions are filed. Not only all the books ever written, but also each of our stories: the past meeting the future, everything indexed and logically related, a return to when the world was as seamless and whole as an apple. I suppose this reflected a belief in the world as a certain kind of text; a faith that, if I could only ask the right questions, I could finally understand.

“To believe in the world as this type of text is to believe that all lives –– regardless of whether they resolve happily –– make sense. To have faith in context and causation. To insist that people for the most part are intelligibly coherent in the sense of being predictably inconsistent and that they are capable, within reasonable bounds, of incredible insight and meaningful growth as they learn, painfully, to bend themselves around reality instead of expecting reality to miraculously bend itself around them.”

To have such an exquisite belief about people, she says, is just wrong. But adds, “what other choice do we have?”

Hannah Arendt is a touchstone in "Believer." Especially Arendt's "The Life of the Mind" "in which she explored the powers and limitations of our cognitive function. Arendt believed that every civilization is founded on the capacity to ask unanswerable questions. Krasnostein says, "In other words, our social survival –– even our physical survival –– is bound up with our spiritual survival and it might rely, as a matter of first principles, more on the aspirations underlying our questions and our ability to tolerate uncertainty than on our proficiency at defending solutions just for the sake of having them."

Could it be that commonality in our very atoms and shared place in space and time here "in the middle" is more profound than superficial differences –– despite indoctrination, amygdala influence, and ego issues?

I couldn’t help but notice that the subtitle of this wonderful book is, itself, a found haiku:

Encounters with the

beginning, the end, and our

place in the middle

(We have featured Navy Reads posts with other found haiku over the years, including from President Abraham Lincoln and Senator John S. McCain.)