Thought #426: Hannah Arendt, the Peter Principle, and the Window of Viability

I rarely use Facebook anymore – like today. There I got a friend request from Andrea Bieneck, whom I know from my childhood in Neuhausen in the Ore Mountains. On her profile I came across a quote from Hannah Arendt, who was born 120 years ago on 14 October in what is today Hannover-Linden (which immediately reminded me of my connection to Hanover, to Diana Osterhage and Wandelkraft): “There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous.”

The accompanying text said: “Hannah Arendt was considered an uncomfortable thinker who wanted to understand. For her, that meant thinking to the place where it hurts. In ‘The Origins of Totalitarianism’ she analysed how totalitarian systems work.” This motif describes, at its core, exactly what I am pursuing with THOUGHTS.

Arendt’s analysis is more relevant than ever 120 years after her birth – because totalitarian structures develop creepingly even in the middle of our so-called democracy. The term “democracy” is used dangerously inflationarily today. I spent the first 18 years of my life in a state that called itself the “German Democratic Republic”, and there is also a “Democratic Republic of the Congo”. Not everything labelled democracy actually contains democracy.

But where does the gradual transition into the totalitarian begin? It begins in the institutions we have built since the Industrial Revolution: in strictly hierarchical systems. At the core of these hierarchies the Peter Principle is at work, along with a structural blockade on thinking: a hierarchy only functions as long as people at every level carry out exactly the instructions that were decided at some point further up.

This is exactly where our modern bureaucracy touches what Hannah Arendt called the “banality of evil”: injustice and institutional arbitrariness often do not arise from fanatical monsters, but from perfectly ordinary cogs in the machine who stop thinking for themselves. When this authority-obeying arbitrariness meets the resignation of citizens who exhaustedly accept power imbalances, patriarchal structures and discrimination, a system slides creepingly into totalitarian patterns – at whose outermost end fascism lurks.

That our formal democracy is eroding today and old hierarchies are beginning to totter can also be explained with the systems-theory model of the Window of Viability: our institutions were trimmed one-sidedly, like machines, for maximum efficiency. A system optimised only for rigid efficiency loses its resilience. It can no longer respond flexibly to new, complex crises, leaves the Window of Viability and collapses under its own rigidity.