Hannah Arendt Explains Why Democracies Need to Safeguard the Free Press & Truth … to Defend Themselves Against Dictators and Their Lies

Image by Bernd Schwabe, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Two of the most tren­chant and endur­ing crit­ics of author­i­tar­i­an­ism, Han­nah Arendt and Theodor Adorno, were also both Ger­man Jews who emi­grat­ed to the U.S. to escape the Nazis. The Marx­ist Adorno saw fas­cist ten­den­cies every­where in his new coun­try. Decades before Noam Chom­sky coined the con­cept, he argued that all mass media under advanced cap­i­tal­ism served one par­tic­u­lar pur­pose: man­u­fac­tur­ing con­sent.

Arendt land­ed on a dif­fer­ent part of the polit­i­cal spec­trum, draw­ing her phi­los­o­phy from Aris­to­tle and St. Augus­tine. Clas­si­cal demo­c­ra­t­ic ideals and an ethics of moral respon­si­bil­i­ty informed her belief in the cen­tral impor­tance of shared real­i­ty in a func­tion­ing civ­il society—of a press that is free not only to pub­lish what it wish­es, but to take respon­si­bil­i­ty for telling the truth, with­out which democ­ra­cy becomes impos­si­ble.

A press that dis­sem­i­nates half-truths and pro­pa­gan­da, Arendt argued, is not a fea­ture of lib­er­al­ism but a sign of author­i­tar­i­an rule. “Total­i­tar­i­an rulers orga­nize… mass sen­ti­ment,” she told French writer Roger Errera in 1974, “and by orga­niz­ing it artic­u­late it, and by artic­u­lat­ing it make the peo­ple some­how love it. They were told before, thou should not kill; and they didn’t kill. Now they are told, thou shalt kill; and although they think it’s very dif­fi­cult to kill, they do it because it’s now part of the code of behav­ior.”

This break­down of moral norms, Arendt argued, can occur “the moment we no longer have a free press.” The prob­lem, how­ev­er, is more com­pli­cat­ed than mass media that spreads lies. Echo­ing ideas devel­oped in her 1951 study The Ori­gins of Total­i­tar­i­an­ism, Arendt explained that “lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying gov­ern­ment has con­stant­ly to rewrite its own his­to­ry. On the receiv­ing end you get not only one lie—a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days—but you get a great num­ber of lies, depend­ing on how the polit­i­cal wind blows.”

Bom­bard­ed with con­tra­dic­to­ry and often incred­i­ble claims, peo­ple become cyn­i­cal and give up try­ing to under­stand any­thing. “And a peo­ple that no longer can believe any­thing can­not make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capac­i­ty to act but also of its capac­i­ty to think and to judge. And with such a peo­ple you can then do what you please.” The state­ment was any­thing but the­o­ret­i­cal. It’s an empir­i­cal obser­va­tion from much recent 20th cen­tu­ry his­to­ry.

Arendt’s thought devel­oped in rela­tion to total­i­tar­i­an regimes that active­ly cen­sored, con­trolled, and micro­man­aged the press to achieve spe­cif­ic ends. She does not address the cur­rent sit­u­a­tion in which we find ourselves—though Adorno cer­tain­ly did: a press con­trolled not direct­ly by the gov­ern­ment but by an increas­ing­ly few, and increas­ing­ly mono­lith­ic and pow­er­ful, num­ber of cor­po­ra­tions, all with vest­ed inter­ests in pol­i­cy direc­tion that pre­serves and expands their influ­ence.

The exam­ples of undue influ­ence mul­ti­ply. One might con­sid­er the recent­ly approved Gan­nett-Gate­house merg­er, which brought togeth­er two of the biggest news pub­lish­ers in the coun­try and may “speed the demise of local news,” as Michael Pos­ner writes at Forbes, there­by fur­ther open­ing the doors for rumor, spec­u­la­tion, and tar­get­ed dis­in­for­ma­tion. But in such a con­di­tion, we are not pow­er­less as indi­vid­u­als, Arendt argued, even if the pre­con­di­tions for a demo­c­ra­t­ic soci­ety are under­mined.

Though the facts may be con­fused or obscured, we retain the capac­i­ty for moral judg­ment, for assess­ing deep­er truths about the char­ac­ter of those in pow­er. “In act­ing and speak­ing,” she wrote in 1975’s The Human Con­di­tion, “men show who they are, reveal active­ly their unique per­son­al iden­ti­ties…. This dis­clo­sure of ‘who’ in con­tradis­tinc­tion to ‘what’ some­body is—his qual­i­ties, gifts, tal­ents, and short­com­ings, which he may dis­play or hide—is implic­it in every­thing some­body says and does.”

Even if demo­c­ra­t­ic insti­tu­tions let the free press fail, Arendt argued, we each bear a per­son­al respon­si­bil­i­ty under author­i­tar­i­an rule to judge and to act—or to refuse—in an ethics pred­i­cat­ed on what she called, after Socrates, the “silent dia­logue between me and myself.”

Read Arendt’s full pas­sage on the free press and truth below:

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 peo­ple are not informed; how can you have an opin­ion if you are not informed? If every­body always lies to you, the con­se­quence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes any­thing any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying gov­ern­ment has con­stant­ly to rewrite its own his­to­ry. On the receiv­ing end you get not only one lie—a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days—but you get a great num­ber of lies, depend­ing on how the polit­i­cal wind blows. And a peo­ple that no longer can believe any­thing can­not make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capac­i­ty to act but also of its capac­i­ty to think and to judge. And with such a peo­ple you can then do what you please.

via Michio Kaku­tani

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Han­nah Arendt on “Per­son­al Respon­si­bil­i­ty Under Dic­ta­tor­ship:” Bet­ter to Suf­fer Than Col­lab­o­rate

Han­nah Arendt Explains How Pro­pa­gan­da Uses Lies to Erode All Truth & Moral­i­ty: Insights from The Ori­gins of Total­i­tar­i­an­ism

Enter the Han­nah Arendt Archives & Dis­cov­er Rare Audio Lec­tures, Man­u­scripts, Mar­gin­a­lia, Let­ters, Post­cards & More

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness