What I'm reading: solitude and lies

Ned Resnikoff, You'll Never Think Alone Again:

What I’m really worried about is less an active plot than the terminal erosion of those habits of mind and cultural practices that sustain a mass democracy. We’ve arguably been in real trouble on that front since before Neil Postman wrote Amusing Ourselves to Death. We wouldn’t have gotten Donald Trump and the present crisis without televised infotainment’s anti-democratic properties and potentialities. But reality TV and cable news look primitive when compared to devices that promise to fully replace your internal dialogue.

John Plotz, Public Books, 'Lying in Politics': Hannah Arendt's Antidote to Anticipatory Despair

In the face of deliberate deception—engendering self-deception and leading to full-on defactualization—we can still offer appeals to shared human frailty, and a belief in the durability of truth. Arendt reminds us that even would-be authoritarian lies, with their utter disregard of reality, do not last. It is that disregard of truth, that phoniness, that makes them inherently unstable. By describing the ways in which America in the 1970s (as again in 2025) fell into a crisis, she reminds us that the strong fabric of laws and a palpable American commitment to human equality and diversity are still present, albeit muted and obscured beneath the blanket of lies.