Hannah Arendt, especially in works like The Human Condition, Between Past and Future, and The Life of the Mind, reflected deeply on the conditions of thinking, judging, and the public realm. She didn’t frame it exactly as our inability to share ideas, but she was profoundly concerned with how modern society undermines our capacity to think together—to deliberate, to judge, and to appear before one another as equals.

Here are a few key strands of her thought that speak to your question:

---

1. The Eclipse of the Public Realm and Common Sense

Arendt believed that genuine political life depends on a shared world—a space where people can speak, act, and appear before one another. In modernity, this shared world is increasingly eclipsed:

• "Common sense" (in Arendt's usage) is not just practical reason but a sense of reality in common, a shared orientation that allows people to communicate meaningfully about the world. As this erodes under the pressures of mass society, ideology, and consumerism, people no longer see or experience the same world, and thus cannot adjudicate between competing claims.

• The result is not disagreement but disorientation: the collapse of public deliberation, not because people debate fiercely, but because there’s no shared frame in which debate can even occur.

---

2. Substitution of Ideology and Automatism for Thinking

In The Life of the Mind, Arendt explores how thoughtlessness, not malevolence, explains much of the world’s worst violence. She famously describes Adolf Eichmann not as a monstrous sadist, but as someone who refused to think—to stop and examine his actions from the standpoint of another.

Instead of sharing and judging ideas, people fall into patterns, acting according to scripts, roles, and slogans. This is what she called the "banality of evil": evil not born from demonic intent, but from a refusal to think deeply or engage with others' perspectives.

---

3. The Rise of Social Conformity and the Decline of Political Speech

In The Human Condition, Arendt writes about the rise of the "social" as distinct from both the private and political realms:

• The private realm is about necessity and intimacy.

• The political realm is about freedom and plurality—where speech and action take place among equals.

• The social realm, however, flattens difference. It substitutes behavior for action, statistical norms for judgment, and administration for politics.

In place of adjudicating ideas, society encourages non-verbal groupthink—patterns of behavior, mood regulation, and aestheticized ideology. People are trained to act in ways that reproduce stability or normativity rather than interrogate or share meaning.

---

4. The Loss of Judgment as a Political Faculty

Arendt believed that judgment—our ability to weigh perspectives and consider what is right or fitting in a plural world—was being lost. In Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, she links judgment to the enlarged mentality, the capacity to “think from the standpoint of someone else.”

When society becomes too atomized, or too managed, or too ideologically possessed, this faculty atrophies. What replaces it is not genuine conviction, but either cynicism or fanatical belief.

---

So what do we focus on instead of sharing and adjudicating ideas?

• Identity performance and self-display, shaped by social media and consumer culture

• Affective atmospheres (shared moods) that create in-groups without deliberation

• Moral certainty without reflection (virtue signaling, ideology, "total explanations")

• Behavioral conformity shaped by norms and institutions

• Risk avoidance and utility maximization, especially in bureaucratic or neoliberal contexts.