On Terrorizing Ourselves

what a truly fun time to be "paying attention"

Welcome to Healing is My Special Interest, the newsletter at the intersection of late diagnosed neurodivergence and healing from high control environments. This is a quick post I just wrote this morning and it's for paid subscribers only. If you are a member of the trans/non-binary community and feel like you would benefit from this community but can’t afford a membership, please email me at strongwilledproject at gmail . com and we will get you sorted. For everyone else, thank you so much for your support!

OK but this is a banger of a book cover, right?

I started re-reading Hannah Arendt over the past few weeks. I was mostly trying to figure out if she ever succinctly summarizes what a totalitarian framework is — or what a totalizing religious / political worldview. She is . . . not the kind of writer that gives snappy one-sentence descriptions, however. She is a historian/philosopher who was deeply concerned with figuring out how and why humans treat each other so badly, but she wasn’t exactly succinct. So, in my autistic way, I tried to read as much of her works I could get my hands on in a short amount of time in order to properly summarize her theories and use it to advance my own.

I was re-reading her works (and honestly, only understanding like 50% of the history stuff) because I was working on a chapter for STRONGWILLED. I was reading The Origins of Totalitarianism while also being a full-time caregiver, cleaning my house, cooking food every day, keeping up on the laundry, reaching out to friends, writing and podcasting and editing and — you know — not falling into a pit of despair every time I looked at my phone and caught a glimpse of the news.

In my brain I was circling around my own working definition of a totalizing worldview, recognizing that I was born and indoctrinated into one, comparing and contrasting the United States with both Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, and trying to figure out the EXACT RIGHT WAY to explain all of this to people so that they could make all of these connections too. Not only that, but I was also inwardly running myself ragged trying to make a plan for how to best resist my current political administration — while also feeling constantly like a miserable failure who wasn’t doing enough to STOP FASCISM.

At some point I recognized that what I was doing to myself felt more than a little bit like self-harm. Is now really the time to try and become an expert on totalitarianism? Probably not. It’s a bit like torture to know the ins and out of religious authoritarians these days (and to have grown up under them). And since totalitarians utilize terror to implement their worldview, I think it is worth stopping for a moment and asking myself — is learning about the inner workings of terrible people and the terrible governments they enact just another form of terrorizing myself?