Thanks to the alumni to watch the exhibited films at the Shanghai International Film Festival and learn about Hannah Arendt and this history about her, which inspired some meaningless thinking.
Today, more than 40 years later, Arendt's view of "Mediocre Evil", which caused an uproar in the past, has become the mainstream view of countless Germans and others who have participated in Nazi Germany activities. The award-winning film "Reader" in the past two years tells such a story. But at that time, a Jew who had escaped from a Nazi concentration camp put forward the view that a specific Nazi military officer did not possess evil thoughts and behaviors on his own, but only assisted in the realization of evil by blindly executing orders. The Jewish community saw it as a betrayal.
In my opinion, this is a double irony for thinkers: the masses cannot understand the thoughts of the thinkers, and the emotional reaction of the masses to their thoughts is exactly what the thinkers are trying to point out: the people of Nazi Germany follow the crowd. Inertia and inexplicable prejudice against Jews acquiesced in the Nazi's extermination of Jews; while the post-war Jews held the mood of revenge from the crowd and the same inexplicable nationalist hatred of Arendt's view of "justifying the Nazis."
On top of the two historical trends driven by emotions, thinkers are expressing her views alone, and young students listened to them, because they have no past burdens, no personal historical experience, and they seem to understand it as a kind of thought; But all the others were swept away by emotions and couldn't listen at all.
Thinkers say that independent thinking (and judgment) is the basic condition for human beings-if this sounds beautiful, it is undoubtedly an idealized misleading. If we want to implement it to specific individuals, let's guess how much of the 6 billion people on the planet today can think, and how many can think independently.
Reason, this is the supreme goal and unremitting pursuit since the Enlightenment. It has led the Western world to create unprecedented human well-being in more than 300 years. However, the cruel World War I and World War II made this pursuit an unprecedented failure and caused it. The collapse of ideals. I personally believe that this is why all post-war art is so ugly, because (visual) art can most intuitively reflect the face of the contemporary mind.
If the pursuit of reason has been frustrated in the West, then we Chinese are too lucky, because we have never pursued that thing.
Among all the attributes of human beings, reason is very pure and noble, but it is also the most fragile. In the vast crowd of people, both ancient and modern, at home and abroad, how many people have devoted their lives to rational thinking like Arendt, and how many have made sacrifices for reason like her? In contrast, people are relentlessly pursuing other things and sacrificing their successors: money, rights, love, sex, patriotism, nationalism, religion-all of these, unfortunately, have nothing to do with reason, if not Opposing words.
In the previous MBA, what impressed me most was a sentence from a professor who taught Organization Behavior (he happened to be an American Jew): Never assume that people are rational (whether in the stock market, at the negotiating table or in the conference room). In recent years, a hot research topic in the financial field is the influence of mental state and emotion on investment behavior.
All in all, if Arendt's thinking has any flaws, it is that she has overestimated the degree of human rationality and the enthusiasm for rational pursuit. In my opinion, this human being is still half a world away from the glorious temple of reason.
View more about Hannah Arendt reviews
