Hannah Arendt's Little Revolution: Thinking Makes Us Human

"Evil grows out of control and spreads when we give up exercising our ability to think, to oppose ourselves," says Hannah Arendt. Thinking is the safeguard of our humanity, which prevents us from being mere cogs in a blind machine. Therefore, the antidote to evil is that people do not delegate their moral responsibility or renounce their ability to think, however tempting it may be to hide in tribal ideologies and slogans.

The "nobody's empire" that is generated with any impersonal bureaucracy is a dangerous weapon because nobody takes responsibility, nobody takes charge, but people give up their ability to think and oppose. Claims are ignored, those responsible do not appear ...

To prevent people from thinking, "The preferred subject of totalitarian regimes is not Nazis or convinced Communists, but people who no longer distinguish between fact and fiction, between true and false. The historian and professor Timothy Snyder wrote in his magnificent book On Tyranny: «If we do not know what is true, if we no longer trust each other, there is mistrust.

Without trust, there is no legality, and without legality there is no democracy. Ideological thought needs to exist on the fringes of reality, ”Arendt reminds us.

THINKING AND BEING FULLY ALIVE IS THE SAME

"Couples are much more likely to succeed when they experience a balance of positive and negative interactions from 5 to 1, whereas if the balance approaches 1 to 1, they are more likely to separate."
John Gottman