Institutionalized Obedience

Another essay from the Imaginative Conservative. This one is by Habi Zhang, a smart Chinese-American cookie.

Institutionalized Obedience: Americans & the Lockdowns

Hannah Arendt

The name 'Hannah Arendt' sounded vaguely familiar, but I couldn't quite place it. That's okay, Wikipedia, my modern miracle memory aid is just few key clicks away.

Hannah Arendt (/ˈɛərənt, ˈɑːr-/,[11][12][13] also US: /əˈrɛnt/,[14] German: [ˈaːʁənt];[15] 14 October 1906 – 4 December 1975) was a German-born American political theorist. Her many books and articles have had a lasting influence on political theory and philosophy. Arendt is widely considered one of the most important political thinkers of the 20th century.

. . .

In 1933, the year Adolf Hitler came to power, Arendt was arrested and briefly imprisoned by the Gestapo for performing illegal research into antisemitism in Nazi Germany. On release, she fled Germany, living in Czechoslovakia and Switzerland before settling in Paris. There she worked for Youth Aliyah, assisting young Jews to emigrate to the British Mandate of Palestine (now Israel). Divorcing Stern in 1937, she married Heinrich Blücher in 1940, but when Germany invaded France in 1940 she was detained by the French as an alien, despite having been stripped of her German citizenship in 1937. She escaped and made her way to the United States in 1941 via Portugal.

Bonus word of the day: conglutination

Noun. conglutination (countable and uncountable, plural conglutinations) An adhesion, or gluing together. The agglutination of an antigen, antibody and complement by the addition of a serum agent.

This one's meaning is fairly easy to discern just from its spelling. The prefix con- is used in many words like complex and compound. The next three letters look an awful lot like 'glue' and the parts of the compound suffix (which is all the rest of this moderately long word) are familiar enough to suggest that the word means 'a bunch of stuff stuck together'. Well, I guess my phrase is a few letters longer. Sheesh.