On Fake Hannah Arendt Quotations
Roger Berkowitz
08-04-2024 A quotation attributed to Hannah Arendt has been floating around various social media sites. The apparently altered quotation is:
"This constant lying is not aimed at making the people believe a lie, but at ensuring that no one believes anything anymore. A people that can no longer distinguish between truth and lies cannot distinguish between right and wrong. And such a people, deprived of the power to think and judge, is, without knowing and willing it, completely subjected to the rule of lies. With such a people, you can do whatever you want." -Hannah Arendt
To answer this question, it is important to first look at the quotations that likely serve as the source for the fake aphorism.
The closest in spirit and content, and also the most easily available, is from an interview with Roger Errera in 1974, what turned out to be Hannah Arendt’s last public interview. Arendt spoke about the importance of a free press in an era of mass manipulation of truth and public lying: She said:
"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."
The key point in Arendt’s statement is that as lies multiply, the result is not that the lie is believed but that people lose faith in the truth and are increasingly susceptible to believe anything. When cynicism about truth reigns, lies operate not because they replace reality but because they make reality wobble–a phrase Arendt employs in her essay Truth and Politics. In that essay, Arendt argued that mass lying undermines our sense of reality by which we find our bearings in the real world: The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world—and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end—is being destroyed.
The Arendtian point is that constant lying by a propaganda machine does not lead to the lie being believed but leads, instead, to cynicism. This is an argument that Arendt made, already, in her first published book The Origins of Totalitarianism. In that book, Arendt writes:
"Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. 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 that 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 that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness."
So why, given the surfeit of similar quotations, does the anonymous influencer responsible for the viral Arendt quotation change the quotation? On one level, who can know? But there is something to be said for the simplicity of language and clarity of purpose in the fabricated quotation. Arendt herself is profoundly quotable, but her sentences tend to be long and at times follow a meandering course. The impulse to clarify, simplify, and “market” Arendt to a public trained on easy social media quotations is real.
Which raises a second question: does the alteration matter? And here, the answer is yes. And it turns out that this is hardly the first time that Hannah Arendt’s words have been altered and simplified to ease their public consumption. One of the most notorious cases is in the Documentary about ARendt Vita Activa by Ada Ushpiz. Ushpiz uses over 30 block quotations that she projects on the screen in her documentary. Shockingly, nearly every one of these quotations is altered. Some of Ushpiz’s changes were major and deeply deceptive. But many were simply stylistic, as in the fake quotation floating around social media today. In writing about this documentary, I explained why such seemingly innocuous changes matter:
Why does Ushpiz reorder Arendt’s sentences without alerting us to the change? Why does she change “fortuitousness” to “random nature”? And why does she change Arendt’s phrase “totalitarian movements conjure up a lying world of consistency” — one of the most iconic and felicitous of Arendt’s many quotable aphorisms — to read “totalitarian movements conjure up a false ideological and consistent world”?
Ushpiz had an editor go over Arendt’s text to make it read better, to simplify it, to make it more accessible to a film audience. Doing so would be understandable in a fictional film, but it is dishonest in a documentary. Still, we might wish to excuse these changes as minor. Do they change the meaning of what Arendt says? Not materially. And, yet, we should worry about these changes for two reasons.
First, the ease and deceptiveness with which Ushpiz has chosen to alter the factual reality of Arendt’s words is a direct refutation of Arendt’s insistence on the need to deal with a complicated and messy reality, whatever it may be. Thinking, for Arendt, is in part the practice of resisting simplification. Ushpiz’s understandable desire to clean up Arendt’s words — the factual reality of what she wrote — violates the very sprit of Hannah Arendt’s work that the film’s subtitle — “The Spirit of Hannah Arendt” — promises to uphold….Arendt’s intense popularity today means that everyone has an interest in claiming an image of Arendt for their cause. Arendt is loved by liberals and equally claimed by conservatives. She is embraced as a democrat but also inspires anarchists. Theorists of identity turn to Arendt’s writings on the dehumanizing dangers of assimilation. Revolutionaries invoke her claim that revolutions are the one path to the foundation of freedom in the modern world. And after decades of being excommunicated from Jewish debates, Arendt is now lauded by Jewish thinkers trying to imagine another path towards peace in the Middle East. That so many opposed interlocutors embrace Arendt is not a mark of her inconsistency, but rather her independence. She is one of the rare free thinkers in the tradition of political thought. She does not think from out of a system, but begins with events like totalitarianism or the rise of the social sciences or the success of the American Revolution, and asks how we are to think about the implications and meanings of these events. Her insights follow from foundational ideas, but they are anything but doctrinaire….
With popularity, however, comes the danger of popularization. Writing about the danger of adapting classic texts for mass culture, Arendt argues it is not a problem to print cheap editions of Shakespeare or Goethe because the words remain the same; the popular editions do “not affect the nature of the objects in question.” But the situation is different when “these objects themselves are changed — rewritten, condensed, digested, reduced to kitsch in reproduction, or in preparation for the movies. This does not mean that culture spreads to the masses, but that culture is being destroyed in order to yield entertainment.” The danger of rewriting cultural texts is that the very texts we hope to disseminate and support are thereby dissipated and destroyed in the process of being consumed. Cultural texts are part of our world; they lend permanence and immortality to our common intellectual tradition. These texts can survive obscurity and even mass dissemination. But when those texts are rewritten for popular consumption, they lose their worldly permanence.
Vita Activa is not kitsch. It is hardly consumerist. On the contrary, it is a challenging and thoughtful movie. For most viewers, unaware of the changes and manipulations it brings to Arendt’s words, the movie will likely whet interest in Hannah Arendt and, one hopes, spur them to open some of her books. There is no doubt that the movie does capture much of Hannah Arendt’s passionate love for thinking deeply and provocatively about hard questions. There is much in the movie worth seeing and being moved by.
And yet, the easy and at times thoughtless inattention to the factual reality of Arendt’s words risks stripping them of their materiality, their permanence, and their worldliness. Whether it is in the name of public accessibility, or to fit Arendt’s words to one particular understanding, Arendt’s words are simplified and replaced; and new sentences are simply invented. What emerges is not Arendt’s words, but an image of Arendt; it is a serious and well-argued image, but an image nonetheless.
It is, of course, inevitable that any essay, fictional film, or documentary offer an image. And there is no one true interpretation of Hannah Arendt. But a documentary — as Vita Activa calls itself — promises that its interpretation is at least based on facts. When a thinker’s words are silently reordered, cut, summarized, or simply made up, it is easy, too easy, to think that the words themselves are optional, that what matters is not the words and sentences Arendt wrote but the personal interpretation of the critic. The result is not that Arendt will necessarily be misunderstood, although she may, but that we come to accept the dangerous fact that misunderstandings are excused, that there is no true understanding and no truly Arendtian version of her texts.
The danger in the manipulation of facts is that it blurs the clear boundary separating fact from lie. As Arendt writes, “the result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that lies will now be accepted as truth, and the truth be defamed as lies, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world — and the category of truth vs. falsehood is among the mental means to this end — is being destroyed.” The danger, in other words, is that all truth claims become contested and the result is cynicism, a refusal to believe that there is in truth a stable factual world. And it is cynicism that, by undermining all claims to stable and factual truths, makes possible the coherent fantasies that undergird totalitarian government.
First, the ease and deceptiveness with which Ushpiz has chosen to alter the factual reality of Arendt’s words is a direct refutation of Arendt’s insistence on the need to deal with a complicated and messy reality, whatever it may be. Thinking, for Arendt, is in part the practice of resisting simplification. Ushpiz’s understandable desire to clean up Arendt’s words — the factual reality of what she wrote — violates the very sprit of Hannah Arendt’s work that the film’s subtitle — “The Spirit of Hannah Arendt” — promises to uphold….Arendt’s intense popularity today means that everyone has an interest in claiming an image of Arendt for their cause. Arendt is loved by liberals and equally claimed by conservatives. She is embraced as a democrat but also inspires anarchists. Theorists of identity turn to Arendt’s writings on the dehumanizing dangers of assimilation. Revolutionaries invoke her claim that revolutions are the one path to the foundation of freedom in the modern world. And after decades of being excommunicated from Jewish debates, Arendt is now lauded by Jewish thinkers trying to imagine another path towards peace in the Middle East. That so many opposed interlocutors embrace Arendt is not a mark of her inconsistency, but rather her independence. She is one of the rare free thinkers in the tradition of political thought. She does not think from out of a system, but begins with events like totalitarianism or the rise of the social sciences or the success of the American Revolution, and asks how we are to think about the implications and meanings of these events. Her insights follow from foundational ideas, but they are anything but doctrinaire….
With popularity, however, comes the danger of popularization. Writing about the danger of adapting classic texts for mass culture, Arendt argues it is not a problem to print cheap editions of Shakespeare or Goethe because the words remain the same; the popular editions do “not affect the nature of the objects in question.” But the situation is different when “these objects themselves are changed — rewritten, condensed, digested, reduced to kitsch in reproduction, or in preparation for the movies. This does not mean that culture spreads to the masses, but that culture is being destroyed in order to yield entertainment.” The danger of rewriting cultural texts is that the very texts we hope to disseminate and support are thereby dissipated and destroyed in the process of being consumed. Cultural texts are part of our world; they lend permanence and immortality to our common intellectual tradition. These texts can survive obscurity and even mass dissemination. But when those texts are rewritten for popular consumption, they lose their worldly permanence.
Vita Activa is not kitsch. It is hardly consumerist. On the contrary, it is a challenging and thoughtful movie. For most viewers, unaware of the changes and manipulations it brings to Arendt’s words, the movie will likely whet interest in Hannah Arendt and, one hopes, spur them to open some of her books. There is no doubt that the movie does capture much of Hannah Arendt’s passionate love for thinking deeply and provocatively about hard questions. There is much in the movie worth seeing and being moved by.
And yet, the easy and at times thoughtless inattention to the factual reality of Arendt’s words risks stripping them of their materiality, their permanence, and their worldliness. Whether it is in the name of public accessibility, or to fit Arendt’s words to one particular understanding, Arendt’s words are simplified and replaced; and new sentences are simply invented. What emerges is not Arendt’s words, but an image of Arendt; it is a serious and well-argued image, but an image nonetheless.
It is, of course, inevitable that any essay, fictional film, or documentary offer an image. And there is no one true interpretation of Hannah Arendt. But a documentary — as Vita Activa calls itself — promises that its interpretation is at least based on facts. When a thinker’s words are silently reordered, cut, summarized, or simply made up, it is easy, too easy, to think that the words themselves are optional, that what matters is not the words and sentences Arendt wrote but the personal interpretation of the critic. The result is not that Arendt will necessarily be misunderstood, although she may, but that we come to accept the dangerous fact that misunderstandings are excused, that there is no true understanding and no truly Arendtian version of her texts.
The danger in the manipulation of facts is that it blurs the clear boundary separating fact from lie. As Arendt writes, “the result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that lies will now be accepted as truth, and the truth be defamed as lies, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world — and the category of truth vs. falsehood is among the mental means to this end — is being destroyed.” The danger, in other words, is that all truth claims become contested and the result is cynicism, a refusal to believe that there is in truth a stable factual world. And it is cynicism that, by undermining all claims to stable and factual truths, makes possible the coherent fantasies that undergird totalitarian government.