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If violence is so rousing, it would seem to be in direct proportion to its power to suspend anything vaguely resembling thought, to release the rush of blood that gives you no time to pause. It allows no introspection, even though – or because – violence plunges so deeply into who we are. A law-breaker at the summit of politics is enticing. Arendt wrote of the danger to the social fabric posed by a world in which state authority and its laws have degenerated to the point where civil order and democracy, or even mere decency, come to be felt as treacherous: "Evil in the Third Reich had lost the quality by which most people recognise it – the quality of temptation." A lawless regime relies on the hidden guilt of human subjects, drawing them into the illicit, dissolute world to which everybody already at least partly belongs in the unconscious (no one is fully innocent in their dreams; forbidden thoughts are the property of everyone). Or, in the words of a southern Baptist woman, asked on BBC television how she could vote for Trump given his moral failings: "We are all sinners."
如果暴力是如此強烈，那么它似乎與它的力量成正比，能中止任何似是而非的思想，釋放出讓你沒有時間停下來的熱血。它不允許內省，即使——或者因為——暴力深深地影響了我們的本性。在政治高峰時期，一個犯法之人是極具魅力的。阿倫特寫出了在一個國家權威及其法律已經墮落到文明秩序和民主的地步的世界里社會結構所面臨的危險，甚至僅僅是正派，也會被認為是奸詐的：“第三帝國的邪惡已經失去了大多數人所認可的品質——誘惑。”一個無法無天的政權依賴于人類主體隱藏的罪行，將他們帶入非法的、放蕩的世界，每個人在無意識中至少都有一部分屬于這個世界（沒有誰在夢里是完全清白的；被禁的思想是每個人的財產）。或者用一位南方浸信會婦女的話來說，她在BBC電臺被問及考慮到特朗普的道德缺陷為何還將票投給他：“我們都是罪人。”
"Why", asked German columnist Hatice Akyün in the newspaper Der Tagesspiegel, after the murder in June 2019 of Walter Lübcke, a member of Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Union party (CDU), "are the people of my country not flooding to the streets in disgust?" Lübcke had been killed by a neo-Nazi as revenge for his sympathetic stance on migration. In October 2019, a video was released by a pro-Trump group with connections to the White House, which depicted Trump killing opponents and political journalists (in one sequence, the faces of all those shot, stabbed and punched were covered with the logo of CNN). When challenged, the organiser of the website insisted that the video was merely "satirical": "Hate-speech is a made-up word. You can't cause violence with words."
2019年6月，安格拉·默克爾領導的基督教民主聯盟黨成員沃爾特·盧布克被謀殺后，德國專欄作家哈蒂斯在《每日鏡報》上問道：“為什么我們國家的人民不滿懷厭惡地涌上街頭？”盧布克被一名新納粹分子殺害以報復他在移民問題上的同情立場。2019年10月，一個與白宮有聯系的親特朗普團體發布了一段視頻，視頻中描繪了特朗普殺害對手和政治記者的場景(所有被槍殺、被刺和被打的人的臉上都覆蓋著CNN的標志)。當被質疑時，該網站的組織者堅稱該視頻僅僅是“諷刺”：“Hate-speech(仇恨言論)是一個虛構的詞，你不能用言語引發暴力?！?/p>
There is a poison in the air, and it is spreading. This world of sanctioned violence, violence elevated to the level of licensed pleasure, is by no means exclusive to Trump and Johnson – even if, by general recognition, they similarly combine the qualities of self-serving autocrat and clown. The glow of attraction between them rivalled that of Reagan and Thatcher, whose belligerent neoliberalism in the 80s prepared the ground for so much of the destructive global order that has followed. But the rise of dictators across the world who boast of their prowess and nurse their distastes – in Hungary, Turkey, Poland, Brazil, India – suggests that we are living, or may be on the verge of living once more, what Arendt described as temptation gone awry.
空氣中有一種毒藥，它正在擴散。這個暴力橫行、暴力被許可并于快樂等同的世界，絕不是特朗普和約翰遜獨有的——即使人們普遍認為，他們同樣兼具了自私自利的獨裁者和小丑的特質。他們之間的吸引力堪比里根和撒切爾，上世紀80年代，他們好戰的新自由主義為隨后的許多破壞性的全球秩序奠定了基礎。但是，世界各地獨裁者的崛起——在匈牙利、土耳其、波蘭、巴西、印度——他們夸耀自己的實力，并掩飾自己的厭惡——表明，我們正在生活，或者可能即將再次生活，阿倫特稱之為“誘惑出了問題”。
