Opinion: In dark times, Arendt’s political theory reminds us freedom is practiced, not given

Tim Pit Hok Yau is a first-year PhD student in the Asian studies department. He completed his Bachelor of Journalism in Hong Kong, and his commentaries can be found in Hong Kong Animal Post, Hong Kong Free Press, Inmedia, Ming Pao and South China Morning Post.

I went to the campus and attended classes the day after the US election. It felt different; there was a shared sense of doom and powerlessness.

When Trump first came in power in 2016, Hannah Arendt’s The Origin of Totalitarianism, originally published in 1951, became one of the best bestsellers in the country. There are good reasons for the revival. [In that book, Arendt traces the constituents, the factors that crystallized the rise of Nazi and Stalin parties, arguing that ideology remains central to the regimes. Ideology, unlike thinking that aims at producing meaning, absorbs ways of understanding the word into an appealing “logic.” Arendt writes, “What distinguishes the totalitarian leaders and dictators is rather the simple-minded, single-minded purposefulness with which they choose those elements from existing ideologies which are best fitted to become the fundaments of another, entirely fictitious world.”

In Trump’s 2024 campaign, he began his platform with a committment to “seal the border and stop the migrant invasion.” From Trump’s perspective, it seems like migrants are (can be) the culprit of everything: drug abuse, economic downturn, job insecurity rape, to name just a few. Little did he mention the more complex problems haunting the United States: sexism, instability of the global economy, the disenfranchisement of marginalized communities, etc.

But Trump’s rhetoric against migrants is compelling and deductive since people prefer easy fixes to complex problems; it is easier to build a wall than to dismantle deeply entrenched gender inequalities. (To be fair, Kamala Harris did not offer much better by reinstating the American Dream of creating “an Opportunity Economy where everyone has a chance to compete and a chance to succeed” although we knew it was neoliberalism that had created much despair and inequality nowadays, as Lauren Berlant writes in their book Cruel Optimism.)

Consider another example from Trump’s platform: his proposal to “keep men out of women's sports” that restricts Transgender athletes from competing in women’s sports. What he fails to acknowledge is that sports today are already driven by technological competition between nations. If fairness, not transphobia, was truly the concern, why not fight for standardizing athletic equipment for each competitor and across countries rather than stoking the fires of gender divisions?

Arendt puts forward that, amid hardships and crises, people tend to fall back to ideologies that create fictitious worlds where things are clear-cut. That is, things are intuitive but might not be factual or comprehensive, especially in contrast to the messy complexities of real life. Today, social media isolates us while flooding our minds with fake and fragmented information, and neoliberalism reduces our relationships to mere competition. These conditions make us lonelier — and thus more susceptible to the allure of ideological refuge.

To resist the current of ideologies, Arendt shifted her focus later in life to the importance of thinking and urged us “to think what we are doing,” as she wrote in The Human Condition in 1958. Donna Haraway took her words of advice and argued we should “make kin, not babies.” The idea of reproduction and the continuation of human life is so deeply ingrained that it often short-circuits our thinking. We tend to short-circuit ourselves by inevitably being pro-life, because why not? What does life mean to the women to bear the children? But what does it mean to bring new lives into a world where the conditions for self-actualization are compromised? We must draw a line between pro-life and forcing life, even if this distinction goes against our habituated assumptions about the sanctity of life. Haraway told us: “Think we must, we must think.”

I first encountered Arendt’s writings in 2020, the year Beijing imposed its national security law on Hong Kong — a move widely seen as a crackdown on the city's freedoms. The atmosphere in Hong Kong back then echoed the same sense of dread I felt after Trump’s re-election. I indulged myself in reading Arendt, admiring her courage and insistence to understand and change the world despite being a stateless Jewish refugee for 18 years escaping Nazis and later critiqued by Zionists for antisemitism just because she disagreed with Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land. She decided to love this world by trying to understand and take action to initiate new beginnings, despite and in spite of “this none too beautiful world.”

Peter Baehr, a longtime Arendt scholar who used to teach in Hong Kong but left in 2021, drew inspiration from Arendt and proposed two guiding principles under dictatorship. They are “do no harm to others, and a responsibility to be honest with oneself” and “provide solace to those in close proximity who are embattled and humiliated by the regime.” These are important reminders for everyone today, especially how community-building is paramount to refrain from giving into ideologies, but I think Baehr has missed the fecundity of Arendt’s scholarship in understanding Hong Kong nowadays.

For Arendt, the essence of freedom lies not in being unshackled from restrictions, but in the ability to act and initiate something new. She equates political action as “for to be free and to act are the same.” Thus, rather than the common perception of freedom as the absence of constraints or the guarantee of rights (freedom from), freedom is the capacity to “begin something new,” a form of “freedom to,” freedom to create and intervene.

This is not to deny the importance of safeguarding rights; many forms of political action depend on foundational protections like freedom of speech that prevent persecution over dissents. At the time of writing, many pro-democracy fighters from Hong Kong are facing trials and coming under prison terms, and many have been living in fear and exile. However, regardless of all setbacks, I see many activists in Hong Kong who refuse to succumb to powerlessness and despair but are continuously fighting for environmental justice, land distribution, animal welfare, labor rights and gender rights. I see Queer activists challenging discriminatory marriage laws in court, and I see petitions against reclamation in ecologically important areas. I see labour unions urging for reform on working conditions and welfare, and I see food delivery riders initiating strikes for decent compensation that are well-deserved. What these actors taught me is that democracy is so much more than “freedom from” constraints but how “[t]he raison d'etre of politics is freedom, and its field of experience is action,” as Arendt says.

Through action, we experience freedom. Thus, freedom is practiced, not given. The crucial question we must ask ourselves is: How do we think and act despite the oppressive conditions we face? How can we initiate new beginnings, even now? These are the questions we would have had to confront if Kamala Harris had won, and they are even more urgent today. Voting for her would not have ensured the protection of refugees, nor would it have guaranteed support for the oppressed in Palestine, together with many others living in precarity.

To those of you who feel powerless, the deprivation of freedom takes place when we forget we have the ability to act.

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