Epstein

The fundamental problem is complicity

Hannah Arendt wrote that if the fundamental problem of postwar intellectual life after 1918 was death, then after 1945 it was evil. Today, the fundamental problem is complicity: reckoning with our acquiescence to a political system that suddenly appears criminal. These shocks all expose something rotten beneath the surface of liberal respectability: how elites participate in atrocity while maintaining prestige; how…