UPDATED from October 25,2024
Court Painter offers an honorable portrait of Hannah Arendt.
Also five portraits of current influential technology billionaires who should be viewed as subjects of caution in the context of her analysis contained in The Human Condition.(1958)
Hannah Arendt (born October 14, 1906, Hannover, Germany—died December 4, 1975,New York, New York, U.S.) was a German-born American political scientist and philosopher known for her critical writing on Jewish affairs and her study of totalitarianism.
What You Can Learn from Just Seven Pages by Hannah Arendt
She wrote this book in the 1950s, but it’s frighteningly relevant right now
OCT 25, 2024
Today I turn my attention to an extraordinary analysis from Hannah Arendt’s book The Human Condition (1958). It’s so accurate, it’s almost scary.
Arendt is a constant source of inspiration for me. In this book, she warns us about technologists who are dangerous because they are so completely out-of-touch with their humanity. She wrote this book in the mid-1950s, but you might think she was living in Silicon Valley today.
Here’s what she says about these dangerous individuals in the opening pages of her 1958 book:
- On page one she says that people who are disconnected with the human condition are obsessed with outer space and want to “escape man’s imprisonment to the earth.”
- On page two, she says that these people are “directed towards making life artificial”—sort of like virtual reality.
- On page three, she claims that they will eventually want to create “artificial machines to do our thinking and speaking….we would become the helpless slaves…at the mercy of every gadget which is technically possible, no matter how murderous it is.”
- On page four, she warns us that scientists have already shown (with the development of the atomic bomb) that they create dangerous things but are “the last to be consulted about their use.” So any prediction a scientist makes about the use of new tech is totally worthless—politicians and tyrants will decide how it is used.
- On page five, she explains that in this kind of society, freedom becomes almost worthless, because people are deprived of the “higher and more meaningful activities for the sake of which this freedom would deserve to be won.”
- On page six, she says that the people pursuing this escape from the human condition are thus creating “modern world alienation.”
- On page seven, she says that they inhabit “an ‘artificial’ world of things distinctly different from all natural surroundings”—so that their tech innovations will lead to an inevitable degradation of the environment, and a detachment from the real world.
Court Painter with portait of Peter Thiel
Court Painter with portrait of Jeff Zuckerberg
Court Painter with portrait of Elon Musk
Court Painter with portrait of Jeff Bezos
Court Painter with portrait of Sam Altman
