GPT

1. Colonization and the Lifeworld's Erosion

Jürgen Habermas’ concept of the colonization of the lifeworld (from The Theory of Communicative Action) is useful here. He argues that systemic forces—bureaucracy, markets, and instrumental rationality—intrude upon the organic, self-sustaining structures of everyday life, severing communities from their own means of meaning-making and self-reproduction. Colonization is not just the occupation of land but also the forced reorientation of social existence toward impersonal, extractive, market-driven and state imperatives.

Robert Putnam’s work (Bowling Alone) documents how civic, associational, and political networks have frayed under modernity’s pressures, leaving individuals isolated and unable to engage in collective meaning-making. Hannah Arendt, too, warns that the destruction of these networks produces an atomized society where people no longer recognize their shared stake in the world. This results in deserts, her term for the barren, depoliticized landscapes where masses are formed—not as a true public, but as an amorphous, manipulable entity.

2. Terror as the Absence of a Common World

Arendt links totalitarianism to the dissolution of the shared world, arguing in The Origins of Totalitarianism that terror arises when people are stripped of their ability to act together in public. When a society’s structures of belonging disintegrate, individuals become superfluous—not just politically but ontologically. They exist in a state of radical exposure, where the only remaining form of social relation is domination.

Ellie Anderson’s observation that masses may have common interests but fail to recognize them resonates with this. Terror, in its modern form, is often a felt but unspeakable condition. We experience it not only in overt political violence but also in the slow violence of alienation, precarization, and exclusion. The masses do not lack shared grievances; they lack the means to articulate them together.

3. The Phantom Public and Sacrificial Logic

Walter Lippmann’s The Phantom Public (1925) is prescient here: he describes a populace that has been transformed into a passive, reactive entity, manipulated by elites through media and propaganda. Lippmann’s critique of mass democracy anticipates how public opinion is manufactured rather than emerging from genuine communication.

This manufactured opinion then becomes a phantom subject, a spectral force that demands sacrifices. Argumentum ad populum—appeals to what "the people" supposedly want—becomes the justification for policies that harm actual people. This logic undergirds both overt political violence (genocides, wars, crackdowns) and slower, more insidious forms of violence (austerity, deinstitutionalization, forced displacement).

The phantom public, in this sense, is akin to what Jacques Derrida calls the autoimmune process of democracy: democracy, in its modern form, often destroys itself by invoking its own principles against itself.

4. From Colonial Domination to Contemporary Governance

The destruction of the lifeworld is not a relic of past colonialism; it is a recurring feature of contemporary governance. The transition from empire to neoliberalism did not abolish the logic of mass atomization; it simply shifted its mechanisms.

• Deinstitutionalization can be seen as part of this lineage. The removal of psychiatric institutions, framed as a liberation, left many without support, pushing them into prisons, homelessness, or precarious living conditions. The communal aspects of the lifeworld were replaced with a desert of market logic and carcerality.
• Austerity politics follows a similar pattern: the dismantling of welfare structures fragments communities and increases precarity, making people more vulnerable to populist manipulation and demagogic movements.
• Algorithmic governance and surveillance capitalism further colonize the lifeworld by shaping behavior in unseen ways, deepening the isolation and unawareness of shared conditions.

5. Implications: Can the Lifeworld Reassert Itself?

The ultimate question is whether the lifeworld, once colonized, can reassert itself. Arendt and Habermas suggest that genuine communicative action—dialogue and collective meaning-making—could serve as a counterforce to mass alienation. But what would that look like in an era where publics are largely mediated by technological and economic forces beyond their control?

Perhaps the key is to expose the phantom public for what it is: a construct rather than a true expression of collective will. By making the unspoken conditions of terror explicit—by recognizing and articulating shared vulnerabilities—there may be a way to disrupt the sacrificial logic that demands individuals be subsumed into the desert of mass politics.