Power and organisation
Hannah Arendt
Not thinking
Hannah Arendt (1906–1975 · Germany to America) — Not thinking.
What actually happened?
The book cost her friendships she had held for thirty years. In 1963 Gershom Scholem wrote to her that she lacked love for the Jewish people. Her reply was flat: she had never in her life loved any people or any collective — she loved her friends. The attacks ran for years, in print and at dinner tables, and she neither withdrew the argument nor softened the phrase. Whatever else that shows, it is the same claim turned on herself: the judgement was hers to make, and she was not going to hand it over to the room.
Doing what the list says is itself a choice
Not asking why is not neutral. It hands judgement to whoever wrote the list, which is cheap because you then owe nothing to the outcome, and dangerous because you become the executing mechanism for any list at all. Every step compliant, and the sum a disaster.
The more times you say I was told to do it this way, the faster your own judgement shrinks.
Stock phrases are the symptom
She noticed the man had no language of his own. That is what a ready-made formula does: when there is a sentence available to say, nothing has to be thought. Someone speaking entirely in formulas has usually stopped thinking already.
Listen to how you describe your own job. If every phrase is off the shelf, that part has been asleep a while.
Everyone does it is not a reason
The excuse spreads responsibility across everybody so that each person is left holding a small share. But you did the thing, and your share does not get smaller because the crowd is large.
Everyone in the industry does it explains the market. It cannot decide for you whether you are going to do it.
What travels is method, not position
Arriving in New York her degrees, her circle and her standing were gone; what came with her was how she thought. Her first move was two months in a household learning English rather than looking for work, because language is the precondition for using anything else.
Before starting over, sort your assets: what disappears the moment you leave the seat, and what walks out with you.
How do I use it today?
Take one thing you do purely because it is on the list, and write two sentences on why it is set that way. If you cannot write them, that is the finding. Do it once a day for a week; the point is not to change the rule but to keep the part of you that can question it from going to sleep.
Deep read
Read alongside
Further
Lines to keep
Papers can be taken away. What is in your head cannot.