Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times | Are.na

The history of the world may, from one perspective, be seen as the recurrent capture and institutionalization of transcendent authority. Historically, however, it has reappeared as the source of renewal though sometimes accompanied by devastating violence when its agents are convinced of the absolute truth of the transcendent vision. The task of th

almost all the inviolable, incontrovertible-seeming assumptions of our society can be understood not as inevitable facts of life, but as stories.

The cost is in well-trod stories that now make less sense. It’s not that the new stories are worse, it’s just that we haven’t had time to settle on any good ones, and so now, many of us are adrift. And these moments in history when things stop making sense, they don’t tend to be stable times. We need strong stories, but we still must be very wary o

In the past half century, the state of the world has declined dramatically, measured by material terms and by the brutality of wars and ecological onslaughts. But we have also added a huge number of intangibles, of rights, ideas, concepts, words to describe and to realize what was once invisible or unimaginable, and these constitute both a breathin