The iron band

Posted by Marc Hodak on November 15, 2008 under Collectivist instinct | Be the First to Comment

Hillary is apparently a top contender for Secretary of State. It’s hard for me to think about what would make this lady, the master of the politics of brute force, so worthy of being the top diplomat. Here is how someone close to her puts it:

“She could weld this world together,” said Susie Tompkins Buell, a Clinton donor and friend. “I think it would be amazing.”

At first I thought that this was just the kind of mindless blather that some of her supporters spout when they’re between thoughts about something they know anything about.

At the same time, it seemed hauntingly evocative of something said by Hannah Arendt:

It substitutes for the boundaries and channels of communication between individual men a band of iron which holds them so tightly together that it is as though their plurality had disappeared into One Man of gigantic dimensions.

Maybe the connection between “weld” and “iron” was too strong in my mind, given my background in materials science.

The “It” Arendt referred to was a condition she would name as “totalitarianism.” Here is perhaps the conclusion that cemented, if you will, her reputation as one of the foremost philosophers of the 20th Century:

By pressing men against each other, total terror destroys the space between them; compared to the condition within its iron band, even the desert of tyranny, insofar as it is still some kind of space, appears like a guarantee of freedom.

Totalitarian government does not just curtail liberties or abolish essential freedoms; nor does it, at least to our limited knowledge, succeed in eradicating the love for freedom from the hearts of man. It destroys the one essential prerequisite of all freedom which is simply the capacity of motion which cannot exist without space.

While it’s dangerous to summarize a thinker as complex as Arendt, she is, in essense, arguing that terror is a the ultimate tool by which the designs of individuals can be completely erased, to be substituted by the designs of a ruler working to implement some kind of ideology.

It’s almost impossible to discuss any politician’s fetish with “binding the people together” in the context of Arendt without risking someone invoking “Godwin’s rule” to end the discussion. But there is no mistaking the context of quotes like this:

We must stop thinking of the individual and start thinking about what is best for society. – 1993

We just can’t trust the American people to make those types of choices…. Government has to make those choices for people – 1993

We’re going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good. – 2004

Not to focus on Hillary, though, we’ve heard collectivist calls to action from our president elect, as well:

Our individual salvation depends on collective salvation. – 2008

And not to pick on Democrats, Obama’s Republican challenger weighed in with:

I can lead this nation and motivate all Americans to serve a cause greater than their self-interest. – 2008

But people seem to fall for it over and over.