From Personalization to Parrhesia: A Multimodal Analysis of Autobiographical Recalls in Barack Obama’s Political Speech - Conflict and Multimodal Communication: Social Research and Machine Intelligence - page 340

The theory proposed by Arendt ( 1978 ) on the difference between a self-conscious
pariah and a parvenu was inspired by the concept of pariah . This word refers to the
rigid division of classic Indian society into social groups or castes that are expected
not to merge or to have reciprocal contacts. This rigid attitude may be explained by
the religious belief that being born into a particular caste is due, not to chance, but
rather to acts committed by the newborn during previous lives. Therefore, people
of low or no caste are judged to be unworthy of social opportunities since they
are expected to atone in this current existence for the improper acts committed
earlier. Referring to this old social model, the word pariah arrivedintimetobe
used as a way to analogically represent any social outcast. Taking inspiration from
these classic remarks, Arendt ( 1978 ) explored how the word pariah could be used to
address the social danger linked to a person's stigmatized social origins. To better
understand this point, she examined (Arendt 1997 ) the diaries and letters of Rahel
Varnaghen, a German-Jewish writer who hosted one of the most prominent salons
in Europe during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In Varnaghen's
salon, the greatest scientists and artists of the time debated the most pressing topics
of their culture, which made Varnaghen a big social success. However, studying
Varnaghen's letters and diaries, Arendt identified a growing psychological hardship
that drove this successful woman to eventually abandon this way of life and to
change dramatically her interactions with her social circle. The crucial point of
Varnaghen's inner and social changes, which shocked friends and relatives, was
the unhappiness she felt surrounding her ethnic and cultural background, which
caused her to hide her shameful birth, take her husband's name, and remain silent
on her Jewishness. In the last part of her life, Rahel made the bold decision to
proclaim, in a very public manner, her birth into a Jew family, going so far as
to study Hebrew so that she could write her last letters in that language. In that
decision of Varnaghen, Arendt sees the end of a struggle, both psychological and
social, between the attitude of becoming a parvenu, perhaps successful but always
threatened with being destroyed if the truth were to become widely known, and the
attitude of the self-conscious pariah , fearlessly exposing the facts of her birth to
social judgment. This second attitude is, in Arendt's opinion, the most efficient one,
both psychologically and socially. From the point of view of the individual life, in
fact, to be aware of the conditions of one own's birth and to accept them gratefully
are the main roots of personal well-being because such an awareness signals that the
individual is free from the fear of social refusal and aims to defend the originality
of her personal life. In addition, from a social point of view, the choice of attitude
of the self-aware pariah is the most efficient one because it signals a lack of selfish
goals, always implied when a lie is devised to manipulate others' knowledge about
social connections (Arendt 1978 ).
By this last consideration Arendt implicitly encouraged her Jewish friends,
sharing with her the social status of refugee from the Nazis, to openly declare
their pariah origins, which caused them to be grouped among the socially despised
and outcast. In that attitude, the philosopher recognized the best example of her
theoretical point, which seized the natality of each newborn as the key feature that