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unhinged
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'....for (stefan) zweig, the rise of the industrial age and the industrial man and woman is a terrifying metamorphosis in the relationship of human beings to the world. as specialists and bureaucrats, human beings become tools, able to make systems of exploitation and even terror function efficiently without the slightest sense of personal responsibility or understanding. they retreat into the arcane language of all specialists to mask what they are doing and give to their work a sanitized, clinical veneer.
this is hannah arendt's central point of 'eichmann in jerusalem'. technocratic human beings are spiritually dead. they are capable of anything, no matter how heinous, because they do not reflect upon or question the goal. 'the longer one listened to him,' arendt writes of eichmann on trial, 'the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with this inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else. no communication was possible with him, not because he lied but because he was surrounded by the most reliable of all safeguards against the words and presence of others, and hence against reality as such.' ' - chris hedges
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171207
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