Daniel Matamoros

“Rather than promising genuine belonging through a collective cause or consciousness, totalitarian politics represents the most refined form of the peculiar loneliness of the current age, pressing individuals into an indistinguishable mass whose sole purpose is to accelerate the necessary movements of nature and history. Her analysis thus issues an urgent call, not to dismiss these movements as aberrations but to confront the breeding ground that loneliness creates for them to enter the mainstream.”
― Jennifer Gaffney, Political Loneliness: Modern Liberal Subjects in Hiding

“Arendt’s analysis offers an important critical perspective on this heightened togetherness, clarifying that in order for totalitarianism to have such wide and undifferentiated appeal, the masses must have already been atomized and isolated to the point of loneliness. Rather than promising genuine belonging through a collective cause or consciousness, totalitarian politics represents the most refined form of the peculiar loneliness of the current age, pressing individuals into an indistinguishable mass whose sole purpose is to accelerate the necessary movements of nature and history. Her analysis thus issues an urgent call, not to dismiss these movements as aberrations but to confront the breeding ground that loneliness creates for them to enter the mainstream.”
― Jennifer Gaffney, Political Loneliness: Modern Liberal Subjects in Hiding