03 January 2011

This vague, pervasive hatred of everybody and everything

"Nothing perhaps illustrates the general disintegration of political life better than this vague, pervasive hatred of everybody and everything, without a focus for its passionate attention, with nobody to make responsible for the state of affairs – neither the government nor the bourgeoisie nor an outside power. It consequently turned in all directions, haphazardly and unpredictably, incapable of assuming an air of healthy indifference toward anything under the sun." (The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt, 1994; page 268). 
Hatred seeps in to the spiritual corpus of the people as the social order shifts into a process of disintegration. Unfocused hatred is what happens when lex talionis cannot find an institutional and orderly channel. 

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