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On Gaslighting
The term “gaslighting” is one of those words that comes out of nowhere and now seems to pop-up regularly. It was Merriam Webster’s “word of the year” in 2022. In its pop-psychology usage, gaslighting refers to “Confident, high-achieving women” who are “caught in demoralizing, destructive, and bewildering relationships” that caused the woman “to question her own sense of reality.”All Categories
What Is Auditing
Elaine Godfrey writes about Rob Sand, the State Auditor of Iowa. The Iowa legislature recently passed a bill limiting the auditor’s access to information. If you want to know why, listen to Sand’s answer to an elementary school student who asked him what an auditor does. It will remind us, also, of one way to respond to the relentless attacks on truth that confound our efforts to govern ourselves.The Caretakers
Roger Berkowitz
The primary need totalitarianism satisfies is the need for meaning. While fantasies of national belonging are part of the populist playbook, so too is the basic desire for a strongman to take care of us. There is a deep human need to be taken care of, and liberal democratic governments are failing in that task. Francisco Toro argues that the model populist strongman today is Nayib Bukele in El Salvador. Toro looks to Bukele’s incredible popularity to help understand the underlying factors driving the populist revolution.
The Great Acceleration
Roger BerkowitzAll around us are warnings about the consequences of generative AI for our jobs, our democracy, and our humanity. And all around us is excitement for the possibilities that generative AI will make us richer, more informed, safer, and better. The transformation of human society will be intense, swift, and powerful. And we all need guides to help us through. Walter Russell Mead does an excellent job of sketching out the challenges we face, contextualizing it in history, and posing questions for the present.
A Small Boat Across the Mediterranean
Roger BerkowitzI came across this interview by Jeevika Verma with Marilyn Hacker, one of my favorite poets who for some reason I haven’t read in a long while. Verma asks Hacker about her use of form, how “discipline and intimacy work together in a way that might feel contradictory at first but provides a clear path toward open communication.” And then she and Hacker talk about the power of form to convey volatile movements and emotions.
Can We Stop Ourselves
Geoffrey Hinton, one of the pioneers of AI research, has recently quit his job at Google to spread the word of his fears that AI will be used in ways that will do fantastic harm. “It is hard to see,” he says, “how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things.”Our Crisis of Worldly Courage
The biggest obstacle to political action today, Arendt saw, is that we increasingly don’t have ideals for which we are willing to fight. We no longer know What We Are Fighting For. Maurits de Jongh argues that the war in Ukraine has laid bare our uncertainty about those common values that might inspire us to collective action. And he worries that as the world hurdles towards confrontations amongst nuclear powers, the courage needed to act politically may be lacking.Our Spiritual Crisis
Roger BerkowitzFrancis X. Maier interviews N.S. Lyons, and asks “What are the main factors—political, cultural, technological, spiritual—in our historical moment that cause you the greatest concern?”
A Climate Constitutionalism
Roger BerkowitzEsmeralda Colombo turns to Hannah Arendt’s work on law, constitutionalism, and participatory democracy to argue for ways to limit state sovereignty and increase citizen participation in government through work on cli
Self-Government
Roger BerkowitzArendt Center members might recall Matthew Crawford, author of Shopclass as Soulcraft, from his talk at our 2013 Conference Failing Fast: The Educated Citizen in Crisis. Crawford is a philosopher and has also been a motorcycle repairman in addition to a bestselling author. N.S. Lyons recently interviewed Crawford and asked him about “self-governance,” the lost art of being able to lead our lives freely. Very much in the spirit of Max Horkeimer and Theodore Adorno, Crawford is concerned with the ways modern society promises us freedom and enlightenment but inserts us within social, economic, and political systems that make personal as well as political autonomy impossible.