20 July

Hannah Arendt saw loneliness as the root of all extreme thinking. Not the loneliness of not having friends - lonely people often have many friends - but the loneliness of not fitting in. The breakdown of social institutions leaves some feeling like they have no place, no recognition of their value by others, no shared life project. In this dangerous form of solitude, most importantly a person’s internal dialogue, the one that weighs up the good and bad of actions, is destroyed and replaced by big single ideas, that are supposed to explain everything. As Jabeelah Jaffer says, “It happens when someone begins to see the world through the lens of a single story.” These lonely extremists do still have a sort of internal dialogue between two positions, but the two positions are now a caricature - a simple binary. Good versus Evil. East versus West. Left versus Right. Objective vs Subjective, Religion vs Science, Government vs Individuals, etc. Binary thinking has its roots in this unhealthy sort of loneliness, of a world stripped of institutions and increasingly full of individuals without an exterior or interior social dialogue.