Nine months ago I wrote a piece about how hypocrisy works. I analyze the concept and offer some tools for sifting through a political discourse that is increasingly replete with hypocrisy accusations. Some further thought has led me to a disturbing point: The futility of pointing out the blatant hypocrisy from the Trump GOP is… Continue reading From Hypocrisy to Fascism
A version of this article first appeared on Quartz. In her 1951 book The Origins of Totalitarianism, in the section on propaganda, Hannah Arendt discusses a concept she calls “infallible prediction”: The chief qualification of a mass leader has become unending infallibility; he can never admit an error. The assumption of infallibility, moreover, is based… Continue reading Do We Want Our Predictions to Fail?
