In a 1967 piece for The New Yorker magazine, title “Truth and Politics,” Hannah Arendt foretold something happening today as the alt-right attempts to whitewash away the reality of racial, ethnic, and sexual diversity and obliterate our historical knowledge of past failings, all an attempt to create an illusion of a nation whose identity is safe and stable and whose conscience is clear, free of any guilt or need to change a thing. Arendt didn’t have a crystal ball that would tell her about Trump and Elon and DOGE and the current wrecking ball we are experiencing,  but she knew well the contours of these kinds of phenomena, how such sorts of people, “deliberate liars,” who, to counter their enemies, spin a web of lies, seeking to create an alternate reality.

“No doubt, the originators of the lying image who ‘inspire’ the hidden persuaders still know that they want to deceive an enemy on the social or the national level, but the result is that a whole group of people, and even whole nations, may take their bearings from a web of deceptions to which their leaders wished to subject their opponents. What then happens follows almost automatically. The main effort of both the deceived group and the deceivers themselves is likely to be directed toward keeping the propaganda image intact, and this image is threatened less by the enemy and by real hostile interests than by those inside the group itself who have managed to escape its spell and insist on talking about facts or events that do not fit the image.” (Published subsequently in Between Past and Future.)

Arendt was appalled by many of the propaganda moves of the twentieth century, from Hitler’s and Stalin’s totalitarian regimes to the complicity of regular citizens when faced by appalling circumstances. The latter was the occasion for the essay I’m quoting, when the Jewish community in New York and beyond attacked her when she relayed a fact in her reporting on the Eichmann trial: members of the Jewish councils in Europe during WWII identified and sent other Jews to their death. A fact like that was quite difficult to bear, and all kinds of defensive disavowals rose up against it and the truthteller Arendt. For a while in New York she was persona non grata, Grad students were warned away from working with her (as her then teaching assistant Elizabeth Minnich has told me).. It didn’t matter that she was just stating facts. These were facts that many needed at some unconscious level to completely disavow.

This brings me to the main point I want to make: today we are encountering a “web of deceptions” unlike anything we’ve seen since the totalitarian regimes of the mid-twentieth century, likely not yet on par with Hitler’s Germany but already more ominous than the McCarthy era. Where normally facts will stop people in their tracks with the reality of the situation and in those situations the occasional lie will be found out for what it is, when “deliberate liars” set out to create an entirely alternate reality, the very bearings that normally hold us together splinter. We don’t know where we are, who we are, what is real, or where we should go. The center no longer holds. This is especially true whenever people try to accommodate the alternate reality in small ways just to cover their ass, like Florida State University has recently done in precapitulating to anti-DEI directives.

Look at this list of terms that Florida State University has opted to expunge from its website – and thing about what kind of reality it is attempting to realize, all to help realize the wishes of their commanders:

• Advocacy 
• Antiracist 
• Biases 
• Cultural relevance 
• Diverse backgrounds 
• Diversity 
• Diversified 
• Ethnicity 
• Exclusion 
• Inclusion 
• Inclusive 
• Inequities 
• Marginalized 
• Oppression 
• Polarization 
• Racially 
• Segregation 
• Systemic 
• Woman 
• Women 

To me it is obvious that it would be a world in which none of these require our attention, where none of these matters obtain.

In passage I quoted above, Arendt suggests that the deceivers themselves know better, that they manage to escape the spell of the alternate reality they have created. But in the present moment I am thinking otherwise. From a psychoanalytic perspective, which Arendt shunned, it seems to me that those today feverishly intent on creating an alternative reality unconsciously need this alternative to be actually real. Every directive, every executive order, every “dear colleague” letter speaks to that unconscious exigency. Rather than reading these documents as glib and cynical political maneuvers, let’s read them as signs of their authors’ madness. Their psychical reality cannot bear a world that is otherwise than their delusions.