There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous. — Hannah Arendt
“And one of the things they showed us was how to really focus on making it swift and usable. We made a two-minute surgery checklist; it had just 19 items. Some of them were just make sure you don’t forget dumb stuff: make sure you gave antibiotics, make sure you have blood ready for a high-blood-loss case. And then there were other interesting parts: make sure everybody in the room has been introduced by name and role; make sure the surgeon actually explained to the team what their goals for the operation are; make sure the anesthesiologist and nurses had a chance to explain their plans for the operation. We put that checklist in eight hospitals around the world, ranging from rural Tanzania to Toronto and Seattle, and every single hospital we put it in had a double-digit reduction in complications. The average reduction in death was 46 percent. That made me realize there was something much deeper and more important going on here about this set of problems we’re grappling with in the modern world.”
You see, his main ideas are Slow Ideas. Complex ideas: hard to take hold in the general public zeitgeist.
She is definitely Enlightened, oh well, the rest of the world is still wandering, wandering, wandering towards Enlightenment.
Yes, she is enlightened. But still most people in the world are comfortable in the previous centuries: hopefully most looking forward, however, there are plenty of people, few in the seventh century, but the rest that dwell in the twentieth century and looking backwards. Even in some in the most “seemly advanced” universities in the world, such as Brandeis University, have enough individuals with loud voices who are comfortable in previous centuries. I am sure Justice Brandeis would be turning in his grave.
The remarkable thing is understanding never stays put. It is important always to get a new understanding … … … understanding can be improved Saunders MacLane
She was misunderstood by many people: for she discarded the traditional political philosophy’s conceptual schema.
Hannah Arendt employed the famous phrase about “banality of evil” in her book about the trial of Adolf Eichmann. Now almost a cliché, it is easy to forget the storm it once generated. As a former victim of Nazi persecution in Germany who had later worked for the Zionist cause in Palestine, many Jewish writers had expected Arendt’s book on the trial to reinforce their own conviction that Nazism represented a radically new type of evil. To her own surprise, Arendt was unable to oblige.
Conventionally Eichmann was viewed as a “evil monster”. However, after Arendt studied Eichmann during the trial and after, she did not see a demonic force but a mediocre personality, that she concluded, who inhabited a thought world of platitudes. A banal obsession with process and following orders, not some special, radical type of evil, had enabled him to commit crimes on a massive scale. Arendt’s critics had misunderstood her if they ever thought that her Zionist past meant she was going to play the part of the “good Jew” in approaching Eichmann’s crimes.
Nothing is more obstinate than a fashionable consensus. — Margaret Thatcher
Some of her critics did not read much or any of her writings. Some of them probably based their criticisms of Arendt on what their own cohort had said.
Based on their personal experiences with totalitarian regimes in their youth, Hannah Arendt and Ayn Rand were two individuals who pointed out the hypocrisy of the established Western World intellectuals. They spoke truth to power, and were criticized, ignored, or ostracized because of it.
Unfortunately my blog about Hannah and Ayn had a flaw it it.
Watch what they say and do, if you can — don’t rely on second and third sources.
I knew a great deal about Ayn Rand, having read about and following her for decades, and reading a couple of her books since I was a kid. I had studied Arendt to a degree, but not enough. I made a mistake. NO, my mistake was not on what their ideas were: Hannah and Ayn were very articulate, and had well formulated their prose. Those who don’t have their political, economic, and cultural religion blinding them can easily understand their point of view and their message.
My mistake was of a differing kind. I was mistaken in what Hannah Arendt’s personality type was. I had hypothesized that Hannah Arendt was a Mastermind Rational, same as Ayn, [Contending Rational (INTJ)], but Hannah Arendt not a Mastermind (as I later discovered, after my blog was published), rather, based on listening to an extended interview (in German, with subtitles) was it was clear to me that she was Architect Rational [Accomodating Rational (INTP)].
Architect Rationals need not be thought of as only interested in drawing blueprints for buildings or roads or bridges. They are the master designers of all kinds of theoretical systems, including school curricula, corporate strategies, and new technologies. For Architects, the world exists primarily to be analyzed, understood, explained – and re-designed. External reality in itself is unimportant, little more than raw material to be organized into structural models. What is important for Architects is that they grasp fundamental principles and natural laws, and that their designs are elegant, that is, efficient and coherent. [Please Understand Me II]
Mastermind Rationals do not feel bound by established rules and procedures, and traditional authority does not impress them, nor do slogans or catchwords. Only ideas that make sense to them are adopted; those that don’t, aren’t, no matter who thought of them. Remember, their aim is always maximum efficiency. Problem-solving is highly stimulating to Masterminds, who love responding to tangled systems that require careful sorting out. Ordinarily, they verbalize the positive and avoid comments of a negative nature; they are more interested in moving an organization forward than dwelling on mistakes of the past. [Please Understand Me II]
Most Rationals are reasonable human beings as long as they don’t have to suffer fools. This attitude made them appear as both an arrogant human and a humble human at the same time. Masterminds are not concerned with ideas, for their own sake, as much as the Architects, but rather are interested in ideas for their use and utility in reality. Generally, the Masterminds are looking for interesting answers and Architects are looking for interesting questions. Architects must understand their field of study, use of those ideas by others and reality is secondary.
Hannah Arendt’s prime directive to herself was to “understand.”
Wir mussen wissen, wir werden wissen. (We must know, we will know)
— David Hilbert
“Never accept an idea as long as you yourself are not satisfied with its consistency and the logical structure on which the concepts are based. Study the masters. These are the people who have made significant contributions to the subject. Lesser authorities cleverly bypass the difficult points.” Satyendranth Bose
There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous. — Hannah Arendt
“I hate housework! You make the beds, you do the dishes and six months later you have to start all over again.”
“People say that money is not the key to happiness, but I always figured if you have enough money, you can have a key made.”
“I’ve had so much plastic surgery, when I die they will donate my body to Tupperware.”
And her friend Barbara Walters accused her of “Frankly, she did almost anything for a laugh” — but Joan would definitely disagree, for she said of herself “I will do Anything for a laugh.”
In Memoriam
Joan Rivers
[June 8, 1933 – September 4, 2014]
“He was such a wonderful human being. He was gentle, not a Hitler-esque cruel director. I never saw him get angry; he wasn’t a tortured human being in any way. Because he’d been an actor himself, he made a gardener director. He knew exactly what the plants were, how much sun and how much earth and water they needed. He let them grow and blossom in their own time. I loved him and I shall miss him like anything.” –Saeed Jaffrey
“Dickie, a one-man entertainment empire, was at least as significant as those humanitarian titans he brought to life on screen. He was also the quintessence of kindness and modesty, and it was a privilege to have known and worked with him.” — Michael York
It took twenty years. He told everybody that he would do it.
It took him twenty years of Championing to get the funding and to make it.
Richard Attenborough was able to make Gandhi (1982), which had a fine performance by Ben Kingsley in the title role. The film is dedicated to Lord Mountbatten, Pandit Nehru and an unknown Indian called Motilal Kothari, who suggested the subject to Attenborough in the first place in 1962.
Nehru’s advice to Attenborough was that it would be wrong to deify Gandhi: “He was too great a man for that.” The film won eight Oscars – best picture, best actor, best director, best original screenplay, best cinematography, best art direction, best editing, best costume design – the biggest haul ever for a British movie. In his acceptance speech, Attenborough said: “Gandhi believed if we could but agree, simplistic though it be, that if we do not resort to violence then the route to solving problems would be much different than the one we take.”
