“I have often run across men (and rarely, but not never, women) who have become so powerful that there is no one around to tell them when they are cruel, wrong, foolish, absurd, repugnant. In the end there is no one else in their world, because when you are not willing to hear how others feel, what others need, when you do not care, you are not willing to acknowledge others’ existence. That’s how it’s lonely at the top. It is as if these petty tyrants live in a world without honest mirrors, without others, without gravity, and they are buffered from the consequences of their failures.”
* * * * *
“And what [Hannah Arendt] called ‘the banality of evil’ was the inability to hear another voice, the inability to have a dialogue either with oneself or the imagination to have a dialogue with the world, the moral world.
“Some use their power to silence that dialogue and live in the void of their own increasingly deteriorating, off-course sense of self and meaning. It’s like going made on a desert island, only with sycophants and room service. It’s like having a compliant compass that agrees north is wherever you want it to be. The tyrant of a family, the tyrant of a little business or a huge enterprise, the tyrant of a nation – power corrupts, and absolute power often corrupts the awareness of those who possess it. Or reduces it: narcissists, sociopaths, and egomaniacs are people for whom others don’t exist.
“We gain awareness of ourselves and others from setbacks and difficulties; we get used to a world that is not always about us; and those who do not have to cope with that are brittle, weak, unable to endure contradiction, convinced of the necessity of always having one’s own way.”
* * * * *
“… I pair privilege with obliviousness; obliviousness is privilege’s form of deprivation. When you don’t hear others, they become unreal, and you are left in the wasteland of a world with only yourself in it. That surely makes you starving, though you know not for what, if you have ceased to imagine that others exist in any true, deep way.”
Taken from Call Them by Their True Names: American Crises (and Essays) by Rebecca Solnit, “The Loneliness of Donald Trump.”
This book looks awesome. Can my blood pressure take it? Well, I have steady normal BP so it’s worth a chance. Thanks for letting me know. I think she’s one of Jenna Blum’s colleagues/friends.