Imperial rule rests on a vital lie distinguishing it from Nazism’s colossal lies.

Evidence

Might imperial dispositions indeed have at their core such a “vital lie”? This is not the colossal lie that Arendt describes for Eichmann and the political engineers of Nazi Germany. Rather it is a “lie for life,” not about religious gods but secular ones, about political myths, empire’s “noble” projects, as Valck called them, and the do-good deeds of those who carried them out. Like conscience, it “tells us to whom we shall and shall not do what.” The latter is how Claudia Koonz defines Nazi conscience, that which sets the parameters of one’s community of shared moral obligation. For Koonz conscience is derived from knowledge (“con” and “science”), joined to the institutional and conceptual structures of propaganda that prepare people to accept those categories. Her analysis stops far short of accounting for the twisted lived psychic spaces of an ambiguous embrace like those of a Valck. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1419

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Distinguishes ‘vital lie’ (self-deception as quotidian imperial practice) from totalitarian doublethink — a subtle ethical-psychic taxonomy of how empire sustains itself without monstrous ideology.
• QUESTION: Simmel’s vital lie vs Todorov’s doublethink vs Koonz’s conscience — the author notes conscious vs self-performed distinctions but does not fully resolve how to tell them apart empirically.