'Contempt for Facts': How Hannah Arendt Foresaw Fake News and Authoritarianism

Arendt's name, on her 46th death anniversary, can be proudly added to the list of prophet-philosophers.

One of Hannah Arendt's most famous works is The Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951. 

(Photo: Aroop Mishra/The Quint)

In the Jewish religious tradition there is a recurring trope of the prophets, who foretell the fall of great empires still many years in the making.

In this tradition, the prophet appears from among the tyrannised subjects, and speaks to the masters of their violation of their covenant with God and the fatal consequences to follow from it.

Since the passing of religious myths into cultural obscurity, many philosophers have come close to this role in society, chief amongst them being Friedrich Nietzsche.

Forty-six years after her death on this day, Hannah Arendt’s name can also be added as a proud entry in the line of prophet-philosophers.

Although the triumph of truth and reason which her work foretells at the fall of totalitarian regimes remains to be fully borne out yet, her exposition of the global war on facts and its inevitable connection to totalitarian politics serve as a chilling description of our times penned more than five decades ago.

Attack on Facts

Hannah Arendt’s personal life lends further credence to the analogy with prophets. She was a Jew born in Germany in 1906, and had to flee her fatherland to the United States (US) to avoid the Holocaust.

Once there, she wrote numerous groundbreaking texts, including The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) where she analysed the roots of both the Nazi and Soviet totalitarian states as well as their hold on the citizens’ minds, only for her work to be steadily ignored by the powers that be like the warnings of the prophets.

However, that doesn’t mean the prophecies have gone sterile.

Consider, for example, these lines from the opening paragraph of her essay 'Truth and Politics' published in the New Yorker in 1967 where Arendt states how there has never been a time in history when “factual truths are attacked with such zeal and efficiency whenever they oppose the advantage or ambition of one of the countless interests groups.”

If this sounds prescient in the 'post-truth' world we are said to be inhabiting today, it fits right in with contemporary denial of “unwelcome facts” like the existence of detention camps by India’s prime minister, and the description of a mob “unable to come to terms with things about which nothing can be said than they are as they are, in a bare facticity which cannot be shaken by argument or persuasion.”

Throughout the world, the rise of authoritarianism and fake news hand in hand has substantiated Arendt’s claim in this essay that “what’s at stake here is factual reality itself, and this indeed is a political issue of the first order.”

The rest of the essay works to explicate how this war on reality is perpetuated by the “image-making” proficiency of modern propaganda machines, and the demagogue’s use of “deliberate and consistent lying” as an antidote to the unwelcome “facts” which cannot be willed away by them and their followers’ wishful thinking.

To be clear, Arendt separates “facts” – contingent statements such as “Hitler Invaded Poland” which could have been, in principle, otherwise – from “truths” of the form 2 +2 equals 4.

Similarly, she separates error and falsehoods from deliberate lying, where the latter, as an attempt to alter existence, constitutes a deliberate action which destabilises the facts of the past and present as well.

For a lie to appear as a “fact” in the present, first its context in the past has to be created, for example, in history books, political speeches, and other forms of propaganda.

Similarly, when a lie is to be replaced by a new one, the same must be done again.

'Facts' and 'Image-Making'

Thus, to Arendt “facts” are a vulnerable thing to power, since all other possibilities expressible as lies or opinions are, prima facie, indistinguishable from facts.

In totalitarian governments, this lie is joined in by civic institutions coerced by the State, so that the media, law, and the frenzy of the mob itself can all be mobilised against a destruction of the facts in favour of a favourable story.

Conversely, established facts such as demonetisation’s impact on the Indian economy or the US election results are reduced to mere opinion, and hence dismissed as mere subjective points used in a differing story.

The purpose of this lying is to service “image-making” over and above the facts, and Arendt writes that in modern totalitarian nation-states “the 'image' of political propaganda isn’t supposed to flatter the original like a portrait (which she says was the job of traditional statecraft and political propaganda), but to replace it.”

Therefore, “before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.”

In the long run, the public catches up with the ever-changing nature of the demagogue’s lies, but that doesn’t change their interest in the preservation of their stories. Instead Arendt writes in one of the most famous and prophetic paragraphs in The Origins of Totalitarianism:

“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (ie, the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (ie, the standards of thought) no longer exist.”

This condition is created by starving the people of genuine information, and pumping the information ecosystem with fakes. “If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer.”

The disorientation, no doubt, is largely created by deliberate lying and mass propaganda, but that is not to say that Arendt lets the populace themselves off the hook.

On Mob Mentality

Behind the mentality of what she termed “the mob”, Arendt identifies the prophecies of another philosopher who greatly influenced her, Friedrich Nietzsche, and his doctrine of ressentiment of the “Other.”

Thus, deceitful propaganda about Jews as the political “Others” in Nazi Germany, or Muslims as the “Others” now, bore fruit from this kernel of resentment with minority groups perceived to be in one’s way of progress and holding on to undue powers and privileges.

Building on this basis in real majoritarian resentment, whether of Jews in Nazi Germany, capitalist kulaks in the communist Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) or the Muslims in present-day India, “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 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 the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”

However, in the final analysis Arendt describes the very possibilities of lies that undermine genuine facts to undermine other lies as well.

Power, and the deliberate deceptions it perpetuates, can destroy the truth but it cannot replace it since the truth – a collection of facts that actually occurred – like the past, lies beyond the realm of change by human efforts.

Therefore, attempts to hide the truth put not just the present but the past’s events also into a flux which lies alone cannot stabilise as the ground upon which we orient ourselves in order to act towards a future.

In the global connectivity of our times, any particular propaganda machinery would have to contend with incorporating all the “facts” of the globe into its deception story, and Arendt for one thinks it an impossible task.

Contemporarily, China’s struggles despite its best efforts to contain the COVID-19 propaganda fallout precisely highlight her point.

Thus, the part of Arendt’s writings that has yet to bear fruit bears resemblance to the 'Satyamev Jayate' (Truth alone triumphs) dictum from the Mandukya Upanishad, though not for the same reasons.

While the Upanishad cites moral and spiritual reasons for truth’s triumph over deceptions, Arendt believes truth, defined as "that which human effort can't change," is merely the most stable ground upon which to orient ourselves.

(Binit Priyaranjan is a freelance author, journalist, and poet. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)