What people have to understand is that any other functionality can be loaded onto that platform with no problem at all.

When faced with a double threatening to engulf you and your world (or an army of them), distance offers no protection. Far better to radically upend the table and become, in some sense, their impersonator, their shadow. That, at least, is how I rationalized listening to so much Steve Bannon.

What do we do when important ideas and concepts are being distorted in this way, when absurdity seems to take over, making serious discussion impossible?

But she was far more ambivalent about the impulse to attach identity signifiers to our beings, to brand ourselves as a this, or a that. In her landmark 1984 book, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, hooks cautioned readers to “avoid using the phrase ‘I am a feminist’” and opt instead for “I advocate feminism,” explaining that unlike the “I am”

“white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.”

are absent.” In that state of literal thoughtlessness (i.e., an absence of thoughts of one’s own), totalitarianism takes hold. Put differently, we should not fear having voices in our heads—we should fear their absence.

“Truth and Politics,” “making present to my mind the standpoints of those who

Moreover, for Arendt, it is when everyday people lose their capacity for internal dialogue and deliberation, and find themselves only able to regurgitate slogans and contradictory platitudes, that great evil occurs.

gain. Singular Personality Disorder At one point in class, a student expressed the belief that if every human is supposed to define and defend themselves as a fixed, rigid brand, then humanity itself was “being made less human”—less