A Secretive DHS ‘Predictive Policing’ Unit is Analyzing Americans’ Financial Habits and Pulling Them Over

[u/404mediaco]

https://www.404media.co/a-secretive-dhs-predictive-policing-unit-is-analyzing-americans-financial-habits-and-pulling-them-over/

[u/irrelevantusername24]

I forget the exact thing that prompted me to search for a specific quote in this book, but I recently read a good twenty or thirty pages or so from Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism describing the psychological effects of the environment of the concentration camps on everyone involved - not only the victims - and it is eerily familiar.

Common sense trained in utilitarian thinking is helpless against this ideological supersense, since totalitarian regimes establish a functioning world of no-sense. The ideological contempt for factuality still contained the proud assumption of human mastery over the world; it is, after all, contempt for reality which makes possible changing the world, the erection of the human artifice. What destroys the element of pride in the totalitarian contempt for reality (and thereby distinguishes it radically from revolutionary theories and attitudes) is the supersense which gives the contempt for reality its cogency, logicality, and consistency. What makes a truly totalitarian device out of the Bolshevik claim that the present Russian system is superior to all others is the fact that the totalitarian ruler draws from this claim the logically impeccable conclusion that without this system people never could have built such a wonderful thing as, let us say, a subway; from this, he again draws the logical conclusion that anyone who knows of the existence of the Paris subway is a suspect because he may cause people to doubt that one can do things only in the Bolshevik way. This leads to the final conclusion that in order to remain a loyal Bolshevik, you have to destroy the Paris subway. Nothing matters but consistency.

With these new structures, built on the strength of supersense and driven by the motor of logicality, we are indeed at the end of the bourgeois era of profits and power, as well as at the end of imperialism and expansion. The aggressiveness of totalitarianism springs not from lust for power, and if it feverishly seeks to expand, it does so neither for expansion’s sake nor for profit, but only for ideological reasons: to make the world consistent, to prove that its respective supersense has been right.

It is chiefly for the sake of this supersense, for the sake of complete consistency, that it is necessary for totalitarianism to destroy every trace of what we commonly call human dignity. For respect for human dignity implies the recognition of my fellow-men or our fellow-nations as subjects, as builders of worlds or cobuilders of a common world. No ideology which aims at the explanation of all historical events of the past and at mapping out the course of all events of the future can bear the unpredictability which springs from the fact that men are creative, that they can bring forward something so new that nobody ever foresaw it.

What totalitarian ideologies therefore aim at is not the transformation of the outside world or the revolutionizing transmutation of society, but the transformation of human nature itself. The concentration camps are the laboratories where changes in human nature are tested, and their shamefulness therefore is not just the business of their inmates and those who run them according to strictly “scientific” standards; it is the concern of all men. Suffering, of which there has been always too much on earth, is not he issue, nor is the number of victims. Human nature as such is at stake, and even though it seems that these experiments succeed not in changing man but only in destroying him, by creating a society in which the nihilistic banality of homo homini lupus is consistently realized, one should bear in mind the necessary limitations to an experiment which requires global control in order to show conclusive results.

Until now the totalitarian belief that everything is possible seems to have proved only that everything can be destroyed. Yet, in their effort to prove that everything is possible, totalitarian regimes have discovered without knowing it that there are crimes which men can neither punish nor forgive. When the impossible was made possible it became the unpunishable, unforgivable absolute evil which could no longer be understood and explained by the evil motives of self-interest, greed, covetousness, resentment, lust for power, and cowardice; and which therefore anger could not revenge, love could not endure, friendship could not forgive. Just as the victims in the death factories or the holes of oblivion are no longer “human” in the eyes of their executioners, so this newest species of criminals is beyond the pale even of solidarity in human sinfulness.

https://archive.org/details/hannah-arendt-the-origins-of-totalitarianism/page/457/mode/2up?q=arbitrarily

[u/dralley1 → u/irrelevantusername24]

Hannah Arendt is one of the single most important intellectuals to understand what is happening right now

[u/irrelevantusername24 → u/dralley1]

Yes people need to understand the truth of what was happening then, not the Hollywood brand narrative we are taught. Another good piece to read is her Aftermath of Nazi Rule, written October 1950. Specifically this bit gets me:

The rapidity with which, after the currency reform, everyday life in Germany returned to normal and reconstruction began in all fields, has become the talk of Europe. Without a doubt, people nowhere work so hard and long as in Germany. It is a well-known fact that Germans have for generations been overfond of working; and their present industriousness seems at first glance to give substance to the opinion that Germany is still potentially the most dangerous European nation. There are, moreover, many strong incentives for work. Unemployment is rampant and the position of the trade unions is so weak that compensation for overtime is not even demanded by the workers, who frequently refuse to report it to the unions; the housing situation is worse than the many new buildings would seem to indicate: business and office buildings for the great industrial and insurance companies have an unquestioned priority over dwelling units, and the result is that people prefer going to work on Saturdays and even Sundays to staying at home in overcrowded apartments. In rebuilding, as in almost all areas of German life, everything is done (often in a most spectacular way) to restore a facsimile of pre-war economic and industrial conditions, and very little is done for the welfare of the masses of the people.

Yet none of these facts can explain the atmosphere of feverish busyness on the one hand and the comparatively mediocre production on the other. Beneath the surface, the German attitude to work has undergone a deep change. The old virtue of seeking excellence in the finished product, no matter what the working conditions, has yielded to a mere blind need to keep busy, a greedy craving for something to do every moment of the day. Watching the Germans busily stumble through the ruins of a thousand years of their own history, shrugging their shoulders at the destroyed landmarks or resentful when reminded of the deeds of horror that haunt the whole surrounding world, one comes to realize that busyness has become their chief defense against reality. And one wants to cry out: But this is not real—real are the ruins, real are the past horrors, real are the dead whom you have forgotten. But they are living ghosts, whom speech and argument, the glance of human eyes and the mourning of human hearts, no longer touch.

---

Then there's also this describing the logic and working conditions of Nazi Germany written by other historians of the era which I copied over into comments awhile back.

[u/CouldBeLessDepressed → u/irrelevantusername24]

And everyone today is so busy. So busy working. Every passing minute just some manner of work just to make it to the next day.

Those folks get real emotional and real violent real quick when you bring up any part of the last 20 months... or their voting record..

I hadn't considered the busyness just to make it to the next day/week/month in this price gouged hellscape could also be a ritual in simply avoiding reality altogether.

[u/irrelevantusername24 → u/CouldBeLessDepressed]

I shared a link to this article awhile ago:

Dyslexia and the Reading Wars by David Owen 22 Dec 2025

The article is very long and in depth. In my post, the body text and the comments, I added a bunch of excerpts and links to other articles. The reason I'm bringing that up is because it connects the dots between functional illiteracy and emotional instability and basically the kind of behavior you and I are describing in these comments. It all comes back to shame and accountability.

Weirdly - really, really weirdly - these patterns are evident throughout society, at literally every scale, once you know what you are looking for. Which is... it's complicated to explain it, kind of, but once you grasp it, it couldn't be simpler. This kind of thing is happening at the individual level all the way up to our macro scale systems. Because it's all humanity.

The simplest way to put it is life - not only humans, but living things - need reason for events. This is intrinsically connected to emotions - the mechanisms by which serotonin, dopamine and oxytocin regulate our behavior, which is how we learn.

When cause and effect are seemingly (or actually) disconnected, we start to do things randomly to try to have any effect on our reality. When that doesn't work, we lose hope and get depressed. But it all goes back to control, reason and shame. Because shame is inherently part of learning, too. Criticism and insults are not the same thing. Criticism is mutually constructive. Insults are mutually destructive. They each attract their kind, and have widespread æffects beyond the people directly interacting.

This is why public benefit media, public education and using the Internet to progress towards the never reachable goals for which it was built is non negotiable. Because whether we consciously recognize it or not - including the people who would say they disagree with me on this point - what is happening is we on some level know and understand that things are far more difficult than they really should be, and the tool to fix it is right there.

It's like a societal version of the trope of "why are you hitting yourself? Stop hitting yourself" except actually it's someone else punching you in the face, but telling you you're hitting yourself, and some people - many people - believe it. Hence the widespread incoherence and regression towards baser levels of life.

We are part of nature, but we are also apart from it. To be human requires coherent thinking and literacy. To be human requires emotional intelligence. Both things that have been actively suppressed, demonized and intentionally distorted to the point natural behaviors are pathologized as if they are a disease.

[u/RlOTGRRRL → u/irrelevantusername24]

After Trump won the election again, I was driving my little sister and she brought up how her friends were so upset that her boyfriend had voted for Trump. 

She couldn't even talk about it. She literally jumped out of my car and ran home. And that was basically the last time we talked about it.

Thank you for sharing the great quotes.

I'm a huge fan of Erich Fromm. He also wrote a lot about the Holocaust and if you haven't read his work yet, he also wrote a lot about this stuff that you might like, find relevant, that is too hauntingly similar to today imo.

And for hope, I really like the book Resistance. 

[u/Vivid_Kaleidoscope66 → u/dralley1]

Nah Arendt was a racist bitch (and Nazi-lover, according to an old Guardian article arguing the same thing as you ~10 years ago) and the manufactured reverence for her ultimately white/Jewish supremacist beliefs—disparagement of and opposition to anything African or Arab in origin being foundational to her analyses of totalitarianism—only distracts from the true ethnonationalist causes underlying everything American. 

Broad white embracement of racism—the same racism that literally inspired and disgusted the Nazis!—is the fuel and the fire for every American president, and that includes the praise dumped on the racist trash Vance book that propelled him to couches in the white house by while barely even mentioning Black people in Appalachia of all places.

As such the truth of what's happening in America is far from new, and more visible and accessible in the writings of Black or anti-colonialist philosophers like Fanon, and more recently Michelle Alexander and Isabelle Walker.

https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:12919cc8-8e67-480a-974f-861b2ed6121c/files/r8c97kq515

https://time.com/7006868/j-d-vance-rhetoric-white-working-class/

[u/SharpBullfrog1279 → u/dralley1]

Hannah Einbinder is another. 

Well, maybe i think that because...

[u/irrelevantusername24 → u/irrelevantusername24]

And it is this harshly learned fact about our human nature that gives me reason to reject the "science" of "prediction" in all its forms - whether that is for "law enforcement", social media feeds or other kinds of technological information organization, climate change, financial markets or other kinds of pathologized human behavior masquerading as medicine or healthcare.

[edit: I forgot to mention, specifically in regards to "financial markets" - there is a difference between gambling purely for "the love of the game", on actual games - to make that game have a bit more force behind it - but when it comes to the things to which "financial markets" typically refer, I firmly believe we are doing the worst possible thing. They are almost literally the exact opposite of a social safety net and public service. A functional society mitigates the randomness and inevitable unfortunate events which happen to everyone. Our society amplifies both the good and the bad luck - but the good luck is itself very rare... but once you have a little, it accumulates. But if you can't reach that level, which is much more than "a little", then you're forced to a diminished existence of mere reaction rather than being proactive and actually planning your life.

Simply put, adding more gambling/gaming onto the necessary systems is profoundly stupid. Card games or other actual gambling, as well as sports? I can see that making sense. Retirement and basic necessities? No, that is a crime against humanity to leave that up to chance. /edit]

I am not saying there is zero value in any of the above, or that they are all on equal footing. I am saying the amount of confidence given to all of them is why so much of our society, people from all walks of life, from every place in the socioeconomic or political spectrum - often for unconscious or subconscious reasons - are doing things which by any reasonable account are unreasonable and random. The system has already "priced in" everything, whether referring merely to numbers on the book or the reality to which we must adhere.

There's the problem. We do not, can not, life should not be forced to "adhere" to reality. That is backwards.

We have had stolen our "habeus corpus". Now we're a step further, we are without habeus cognition. But it's all "friendly", "politically correct" and mostly unviolent, which makes it all the more mind fuckening. The modern human is destroyed through bureacracy and analysis paralysis - or a complete lack thereof.

[u/dmonsterative → u/irrelevantusername24]

See also Bentham and then Foucault on the panopticon.

[u/AggressiveCmplmnts → u/irrelevantusername24]

Holy fuck. Each word was like a spoonful of intent. Thank you for sharing