TITLE:
Hannah Arendt’s Prognostication of Political Animus in America: Social Platforms, Asymmetric Conflict, and an Offset Strategy
AUTHORS:
Thomas J. Papadimos, Stanislaw P. Stawicki
KEYWORDS:
Philosophy, Politics, Social Media, Violence, Conflict
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Philosophy,
Vol.11 No.1,
February
2,
2021
ABSTRACT: In her book, On Violence,
Hannah Arendt addresses the events she was witness to in the 1960s. Arendt
presents theories on violence through a historical context and explores the
links between power, war, politics and violence. She informs the reader that power and violence are not the same;
where one is absolute, the other cannot exist. Our research aim was to
demonstrate how prescient her views were regarding the prognostication of the
political animus that has occurred in America, especially through the evolution
of technology. Our method in the the evaluation of this discourse was a line by line examination of the text of On Violence and assessing this
evaluation against how the increasing attacks utilizing social platforms and cyber capabilities by U.S.
competitors (foreign or domestic) are resulting in political vulnerability of
the U.S. and the generally defined Western world. The public health security of American democracy is
at risk through an inability, as individuals, to properly evaluate information,
propaganda, misinformation, and disinformation from bad actors at home and
abroad. Here we develop a perspective in which the political animus that
started in the late 1960s becomes the foundation for our competitors’
development of sophisticated methods of cyber subversion, and effective use of
asymmetric conflict through manipulation of our own social media platforms in order to divide
Americans and subvert effective government.