Hannah Arendt had many views that would see her cancelled today.
Agreed both with this and the observation that it's a tough read.
I find it useful for the discussion on loneliness and isolation plus other topics.
This said, there are several useful essays on Arendt that are helpful for discussing her ideas and a good MN thread.
www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3312516-Are-we-arguing-about-the-wrong-thing?reverse=1
I'm including this because there's a surprising look at a key essay by Kath Viner in addition to Arendt:
Arendt does not contrast the blank, unvarnished truth with fantastical, malicious lies . Rather, she identifies two distinct ways that people can fail to act truthfully . One, a “passive susceptibility to falling prey to error, illusion, the distortions of memory...” and, the other, the “active, aggressive capacity” to “deny in thought and word whatever happens to be the case.”
The upshot of this is that it allows Arendt to relate systematic untruth robustly to human action. “A characteristic of human action,” Arendt writes, “is that it always begins something new.... In order to make room for one's own action , something that was there before must be removed or destroyed, and things as they were before are changed.” But “such change would be impossible,” she tells us, “if we could not mentally remove ourselves from where we physically are located and imagine that things might as well be different from what they actually are.” “In other words,” Arendt claims, “the deliberate denial of factual truth – the ability to lie – and the capacity to change facts – the ability to act – are interconnected: they owe their existence to the same source: imagination.”
www.logically.ai/articles/the-facts-are-not-enough
Arendt on the impact of loneliness:
In 1953, Arendt wrote that “the ideal subject of a totalitarian state is not the convinced Nazi or Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (that is, the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (that is, the standards of thought) no longer exist.”
…What had made people susceptible to fake news in the 1930s, Arendt argued, was loneliness: “the experience of not belonging to the world at all, which is among the most radical and desperate experiences of man.”
www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/05/02/reading-arendt-is-not-enough/