Hannah Arendt believed that one of the greatest dangers of the modern age was not violence or poverty alone, but something more subtle and insidious: the loss of reality. In her analysis, modernity is marked by a growing detachment from the world — a process in which shared truths erode, appearances are manipulated, and the human capacity to judge and act meaningfully is undermined.
In both her political theory and cultural analysis, Arendt diagnosed modern society as suffering from a kind of worldlessness — a state where people live in systems, institutions, and ideologies that no longer reflect their experience or give them a place to appear as human beings among others.
Modern bureaucratic societies, she argued, tend to hollow out this shared world. In their obsession with functionality, efficiency, and predictability, they replace action with behavior, speech with slogans, and responsibility with systems. People are reduced to roles or data points, and the political realm — where human uniqueness and unpredictability should thrive — becomes sterile.
This is not just about propaganda. It’s about a deeper phenomenon: the replacement of real experience with secondhand representations. When citizens no longer trust what they see or hear, or no longer feel they belong to a common world, politics turns into theater, and judgment becomes impossible.
For Arendt, resisting this condition requires more than fact-checking. It demands rebuilding the world — that is, reestablishing spaces where people can speak, act, and appear as equals. Truth, for her, is not only factual accuracy; it is world-binding. It’s what holds us together in the plural and unpredictable reality we share.
To be political, then, is not only to demand justice or power. It is to care for the integrity of the world itself — to protect the fragile space in which truth, freedom, and human dignity can appear. Without that world, we do not just lose politics. We lose reality.
