Make small talk daily

Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny borrows liberally from the self-help genre to offer an urgent caution. Drawing from Hannah Arendt’s work, he reminds us that totalitarianism regimes are thinkable in any place: They only require that the private ceases to be private and all becomes public. Habits of thinking matter. They enable us to resist even small concessions to tyranny. As self-help authors coach us to join a social group or get a pet to assuage our loneliness, Snyder asks us to choose an institution to protect our democracy, or to make eye contact with so-called outsiders to broaden our compassion for the human experience. His last of twenty lessons: “Be as courageous as you can.”