Finished Reading: On Lying and Politics by Hannah Arendt 📚

I have only ever dabbled in my reading of Hannah Arendt, but she has maintained a voice in my head for years. Not, in my experience, an easily accessible writer/thinker. Whoever put these chapters of hers together in this short book deserves credit for undoing this fact. Very essential questions that need to be asked by current and future generations are quite accessible in these pages. In fact, I don’t think there is one page or paragraph that doesn’t point to some question you should ask when you read tomorrow’s news.

The more people’s standpoints I have present in my mind while I am pondering a given issue, and the better I can imagine how I would feel and think if I were in their place, the stronger will be my capacity for representative thinking and the more valid my conclusions, my opinion. . . . Of course, I can refuse to do this and form an opinion that takes only my own interests, or the interests of the group to which I belong, into account; nothing, indeed, is more common, even among highly sophisticated people, than the blind obstinacy that becomes manifest in lack of imagination and failure to judge.