In my first column for Frontline, I had argued that we are witness today to a collapse of morality, especially in public life—a collapse so comprehensive that it can no longer be explained as the failure of particular individuals or governments. More than the invasion of wickedness and malice in our social and political world, the very conditions under which moral life becomes possible—the conditions under which we can recognise a wrong as wrong, feel its weight, and be moved to resist it—have been systematically eroded.

Behind this collapse lies, I believe, another implosion: of the capacity for self-reflection. By this I mean not mere introspection—the cataloguing of one’s impressions or feelings—or the therapeutic self-examination that contemporary culture encourages as personal maintenance. I mean something more demanding, perhaps more dangerous: the capacity to step back from one’s immediate responses, inherited assumptions, and certainties and ask, with the willingness to be disturbed by the answer, whether what one believes or does is actually right. Self-reflection in this sense is never comfortable. It makes us, if only momentarily, a stranger to ourselves so that we can see what habit, interest, and group membership have been made invisible.

However, there is another sense of self-reflection, more foundational than critical self- examination: the soundless dialogue with oneself that Hannah Arendt disarmingly calls thinking. Human beings are usually immersed in living, acting, knowing, but they can also remove themselves from all of these and begin a conversation with another self within themselves, exploring and reflecting upon whatever comes to pass, regardless of content, outcome, or purpose. This (pure) thinking is totally distinct from knowing and doing. It is a universal human capacity—different from what knowledge-seekers and problem-solvers deploy—and one potentially capable of immunising us from dogma and certitude, for it can always unsettle the fixed.

But this capacity can lapse, fall into disuse. And this inability to think is not the “prerogative” of the many who lack the opportunity to enhance their brain power but the ever present possibility in everybody—scientists, scholars, bureaucrats, and other highly educated specialists not excluded—to shun that communication with themself, the possibility and importance of which was first properly discovered by the Buddha and Socrates. This presents a big danger to humankind and is linked to another hazard.

For Arendt, thinking, which happens when we are liberated from knowing and doing, also frees us to make moral judgments: this is worthy, that is bad; this is right, that is wrong; this is fair, that is unjust. An unceasing, routinised immersion in knowing and doing, by contrast, renders us incapable of judgment. Observing Adolf Eichmann at his Jerusalem trial, Arendt found not a monster but a man distinguished by what she famously called the “banality of evil”: catastrophic wrongdoing arising not from wickedness but “from a curious, quite authentic inability to think”. The evil of the 20th century, she argued, was less the product of demonic will than of the pervasive absence of thinking, the refusal to turn inwards and begin a dialogue with oneself. Hence, the mindless application of received rules, the substitution of stock phrases for genuine judgment, and the condition of being swept by what a leader commands or what is believed or done by everybody.

Closely related to moral judgment is conscience, which for Arendt is not a permanent inner voice issuing positive prescriptions but one that is aroused by an encounter with one’s unexamined opinions, or by the anticipation of having to face oneself after an act. One’s conscience can be benumbed by the persistent absence of soundless dialogue, a deadening triggered not by a monstrous vice but by the ever-present temptation of thoughtlessness.

We all appear to be living now in this condition of Eichmann-like unthinking. How so? First, because we are incessantly tossed by uncontrollable currents. The demands made upon us by these technological, social, and political storms leave us no time to question the real worth of what we do and know. We are condemned to a perpetual shallowness.

Second, our society is inhabited not by a single morality but by multiple ways of construing what is meant by living well, doing wrong to another, incurring obligation, or redeeming oneself. When such moralities coexist, they do not sit indifferently with each other. They generate friction and place individuals at crossroads at which people freeze. They are paralysed into a state of moral confusion, procrastination, and indecision. Breaking this deadlock requires individualised moral reflection. True, our morals are embedded in acts, habits, and feelings, but in periods of turbulence and social change, these are no longer reliable guides. Interiority-mediated moral thinking is now indispensable.

Recovering our capacities for self-reflection

But, today, strong forces powerfully undermine this capacity for critical self-examination and dialogue with oneself. What are these forces?

First, the hardening of group identity into an impenetrable circle and the outsourcing of individual judgments to this closed group. In such groups, what is experienced as inner conviction is in fact conformity, and the same action is condemned when performed by the outgroup and celebrated when performed by the ingroup.

The second force is political. In shallow, closed, dogma-prone societies, self-reflection is seen as dangerous. The politician who says “I was wrong” is finished. The citizen who expresses doubt is suspected of treachery. The intellectual who revises a previously held position is accused of weakness or spineless opportunism. In this environment, the performance of certainty becomes the condition of survival, and self-examination retreats or disappears altogether.

The third force is the short span of attention that digital platforms have created. Attention is most reliably captured here not by complexity but by manufactured intensity, by an emotion that fires the fastest and burns the hottest, namely: outrage. Such platforms perpetually stimulate instant reflexes and pre-empt reflection. By the time a considered response is formed, the event in question has been replaced by another equally enraging event demanding immediate reaction. Can one ever examine something that one cannot hold still?

But perhaps the most important force is the systematic devaluation of the inner life by a culture of endless consumption, exuberant performativity, and an insatiable desire for public visibility. The characteristic features of self-reflection—silence, solitude, the willingness to live with uncertainty—are precisely those that contemporary culture cannot monetise and therefore value. The contemplative traditions—Upanishadic, Buddhist and Socratic teachings, Sufism, Christian mysticism—understood that an examined life requires practice: not an occasional musing but the disciplined, repeated, institutionally supported cultivation of stillness. Our societies have largely dismantled those institutions while retaining, in debased form, the language of spirituality as lifestyle.

What is sorely needed then is the recovery of the conditions under which self-reflection and thinking become possible: public cultures that reward dissent from group certainties, that value acknowledged complexity rather than spread disdain for it, and the revival of contemplative and dialogical practices capable of sustaining calm interiority against anarchic cacophony. These cultures can also help us view morality as not a set of rules but as a practice of seeing, a practice that requires, as its precondition, the willingness to look inwards. We increasingly live in a world that has installed every possible arrangement to prevent us from doing so. The question is whether enough of us will rediscover stillness and converse with that other self within each of us.

Rajeev Bhargava, a political theorist, is honorary professor at CSDS, Delhi, and director of the centre’s Parekh Institute of Indian Thought.

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