Further to my blog on the 23rd October ,
here is an interesting article in Aeon online magazine
about Hannah Arendt's views on the condition or state.
However, her argument that totalitarianism and loneliness
exist in a vicious cycle, the one leading to the other,
applies even more to Consumer Capitalism, because
the USSR's type of totalitarianism (at least)
created a variety of secret communities
which were lumped together in the category dissident.
In viciously-capitalist societies, dissidence tends to be solitary.
Big Capitalism, whose transnational companies
more or less control our lives, dislikes democracy.
Big Capitalists like dictators - they can be bought more easily
than elected leaders who keep changing.
Capitalism, having encouraged democratic ideals at the beginning,
is now destroying them, not through power-grab
but through induced anomie and loneliness, the breakdown
of traditional systems of co-operation,
and the monetisation, commodification of everything.
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