These are the words of Jean Tarrou, a character in #Camus’ The Plague, quoted in a book I am currently reading. They remind me not to stand by and watch fascism take hold.
‘The good man is “the man who has the fewest lapses od attention.” What this comes down to Tarrou concludes is seeing and speaking clearly: “All of our troubles spring from our failure to use plain, clear-cut language.” It is as if RIeux [a priest, character in the same story] and Farrou are channeling [Simone] Weil’s own insistence on the ethics of getting words right: “To clarify thought, discredit intrinsically meaningless words, and to define the use of others by precise analysis — to do this, strange though it may appear, might be a way of saving human lives.” It is only by getting the words right — describing the world as it is — that one can act rightly and resist on behalf of others and oneself. Totalitarianism — for which the Plague stands as the allegorical representation — gets words wrong. It uses them to describe a world that isn’t, and thus creates a world that should never be. It comes to power through the harrowing of terror and maintains itself through the hallowing of language.’
(Source: pp93-4 of Robert Zaretsky’s The Subversive Simone Weil: A Life In Five Ideas, Universtity of Chicago, 2021 )
That quotes from Camus’ works appear in a book about #SimoneWeil shouldn’t surprise given that Camus considered Weil a friend and that their #philosophical underpinnings are very similar.
Why am I tooting this? Oh.. because #trumpism , #fascism , #Journalism , especially our contemporary crop of Journos around the world and the corporate #mastheads they work for. Because #history is repeating itself. Because we all should heed what we say but resolutely say it, especially now. Because to wait for others to do it is absolutely the wrong thing to do if human lives matter at all.
#Fascists don’t care. They strip humanity of its dignity and act upon it as a if a collection of objects all the while forgetting how to think.
#Philosophy #StandingUp #ToLiveIsToAct
![.. night monochrome shot of open doorway [so "door" is an "absent presence"]. Through the "door" there's an artificially lit staircase of the type ya find in multi-platform carparks [which is what this is] .. take it as it resonates ❗️🙏](https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/114/391/710/889/744/934/original/11e044a27d97b825.jpg)
