Activism’s ‘you are what you do’ answer enables escape from imposed social roles

Evidence

Activism, moreover, seemed to provide new answers to the old and troublesome question, “Who am I?” which always appears with redoubled persistence in times of crisis. If society insisted, “You are what you appear to be,” postwar activism replied: “You are what you have done”—for instance, the man who for the first time had crossed the Atlantic in an airplane (as in Brecht’s Der Flug der Lindberghs)—an answer which after the second World War was repeated and slightly varied by Sartre’s “You are your life” (in Huis Clos). The pertinence of these answers lies less in their validity as redefinitions of personal identity than in their usefulness for an eventual escape from social identification, from the multiplicity of interchangeable roles and functions which society had imposed. The point was to do something, heroic or criminal, which was unpredictable and undetermined by anybody else. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 787

Categorization

• DEFINE: Arendt defines activism’s identity claim (‘You are what you have done’) against society’s (‘You are what you appear to be’) — a useful mechanism for how totalitarian movements recruit via identity redefinition.