Sublime

Moreover, for Arendt, it is when everyday people lose their capacity for internal dialogue and deliberation, and find themselves only able to regurgitate slogans and contradictory platitudes, that great evil occurs. So, too, when people lose the ability to imagine the perspectives of others, or as she put it in her essay “Truth and Politics,” “maki

Macron is clearly tempted by the crown of the decaying empire: that is, by the ambition to become the next Angela Merkel. That way, it seems to me, lies perdition.

paranoia about the government has increasingly migrated from the Left—which blamed the military-industrial complex for Vietnam—to the Right, with alt-right trolls and Republican members of Congress now blaming the so-called deep state for plotting against the president.

In any case, World War II did not suddenly explode out of nowhere. It gathered strength, like an avalanche starting to heave with ever-larger tremors, until whoosh—all the world gave way. The early signs during the 1930s weren’t just the outright invasions, but the swelling wave of bloodless annexations, midnight coups, bribed newspapers, assassina

Russia still uses propaganda to achieve these very same ends: to distract and exhaust its own people (and increasingly, citizens of foreign countries), to wear them down through such a profusion of lies that they cease to resist and retreat back into their private lives.

Contrairement à la situation de la Guerre froide, c’est l’Occident qui se divise alors que les démocratures tendent à s’unir sous l’impulsion de la Chine pour présenter un front commun et construire un monde qui se revendique à la fois post-occidental et post-démocratique.

Reality television must become more dramatic with each episode. If we found a video of an American president performing Cossack dances while Vladimir Putin claps, we would probably just demand the same thing with him wearing a bear suit and holding rubles in his mouth.

There are two ways by which the spirit of a culture may be shriveled. In the first, the Orwellian culture becomes a prison. In the second, the Huxleyan culture becomes a burlesque.

What Huxley teaches is that in the age of advanced technology, spiritual devastation is more likely to come from an enemy with a smiling face than from one whose countena