A Resonant Quote

I’ve been reading a lot of history lately. It helps me make sense of the world and reassures me that, despite overwhelming chaos, things can turn out for the better.

I just finished A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. I’ve always been a fan of Mrs. Roosevelt, and this book outlines her work with the United Nations shortly after FDR’s death. I found this quote in the last few pages of the book. It comes from a second book, Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism. It was chillingly resonant of the current situation:

“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.”