In order to achieve its genocidal ambitions, totalitarianism constantly strives to strip us of our humanity. Yet, it is easy to lose our compassion, worn down by repeated harassment: I might even wish that the next blows would fall on someone else rather than me. Augustine urges us to do the same: above all, we must not become desensitized. Christ lived through his trials with his full sensitivity.

Reading note on Psychopathologie du totalitarisme, Psychopathology of totalitarianism in the journal Éléments by Rémi Soulié. If Plato and Aristotle, according to Pascal, "wrote about politics, it was as if to regulate a madhouse". Pascal did not believe he was right, for want of having known totalitarianism, whose canonical distinction with so-called liberal and representative democracy seems increasingly difficult to maintain for Ariane Bilheran...