So, what if you find that you cannot actually create any positive impact from within? What if your arguments are suppressed at every turn? What if there's so much intimidation that it leaves you both powerless and traumatized? What if you are pressured to do harm?
For that matter, what if your boss tells you to carry out a policy that's actually illegal? What if the administration, despite being elected through the machinery of democracy, goes on to hack away at democracy itself — the system you're committed to upholding?
Well, then, Hannah Arendt might have a thing or two to say to you.
Arendt, a German-Jewish philosopher known for her post-Holocaust theorizing on the banality of evil, published a short essay in 1964 called "Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship." Writing from first-hand experience (she lived in Germany during the rise of Nazism until fleeing in 1933), she notes that a lot of Germans who collaborated with the Nazis later said they'd "stayed on the job in order to prevent worse things from happening; only those who remained inside had a chance to mitigate things and to help at least some people … whereas those who did nothing shirked all responsibilities and thought only of themselves, of the salvation of their precious souls."
Arendt is not impressed by this argument. She cautions against people's tendency to convince themselves that, if they continue to serve power, they'll be doing more good on net — or choosing the lesser of two evils:
Politically, the weakness of the argument has always been that those who choose the lesser evil forget very quickly that they chose evil … Moreover, if we look at the techniques of totalitarian government, it is obvious that the argument of "the lesser evil" — far from being raised only from the outside by those who do not belong to the ruling elite — is one of the mechanisms built into the machinery of terror and criminality. Acceptance of lesser evils is consciously used in conditioning the government officials as well as the population at large to the acceptance of evil as such.
Arendt's point is that if you choose the "acceptance of lesser evils" route, you're playing a game in which the deck is stacked against you. You're incentivized to stay, because quitting can be socially, professionally, or financially ruinous, and bit by bit — like the frog in the boiling pot — you can become acclimated to worse and worse policies. "The extermination of Jews," Arendt writes, "was preceded by a very gradual sequence of anti-Jewish measures, each of which was accepted with the argument that refusal to cooperate would make things worse — until a stage was reached where nothing worse could possibly have happened."
So, if you're going to play this game, you need a way to make sure that you won't fall into the traps. You might think the best way to do this is to get very clear on your own personal rules — to establish in advance, ideally in writing, at what point you'll just say, "I'm out." There's some merit to that idea, because the mind has a way of shifting the goalposts as things progress, saying, "But that's not really so bad, right? I'll wait just a little bit more…"
The law can be a useful heuristic device here — you want to keep following it, even if people start pressuring you to do something illegal. Moral rules can also be a powerful heuristic device — think "thou shalt not kill," for starters.
But Arendt emphasizes that legality and morality can fall short in extreme political situations. That's because the illegal can become legalized overnight. The whole state machinery can start enforcing what were previously considered crimes, and moral norms can be changed along with them. The public can be swayed into accepting the new reality.
So how do you safeguard your integrity? Arendt observes that what was special about those who refused to collaborate with the Nazis wasn't that classic rules about right and wrong were firmly established in their conscience, but that their conscience didn't work by automatically applying any pre-learned rules. She writes:
Much more reliable will be the doubters and skeptics, not because skepticism is good or doubting wholesome, but because they are used to examine things and to make up their own minds.
In other words, it's about daring to think and judge for yourself at every turn. It's about continuing to ask yourself tough questions.
Arendt had a great hack for achieving this: She surrounded herself with people she disagreed with, both in the legendary cocktail-fueled salons she hosted and in her one-on-one friendships. She and her friends challenged and sharpened each other's thoughts through intellectual debate. Though it was sometimes painful, Arendt insisted that this type of friendship has a radical political power: It teaches you the all-important, even revolutionary skill of thinking.
So, over the coming weeks, keep your eyes trained on what the administration does. Each week, return to your lodestar and ask yourself anew: What would my challengers say to me now? Are there concrete indications that I'm succeeding in my overarching goal? Am I still doing good here?
—Sigal Samuel, senior reporter
