This is Sepideh Rashno’s last Instagram post. It is an image of the life of a young woman born in Mehr 1373 in the village of Dast-be-Zanu, near Khorramabad, who became a poet, writer and editor—a young woman who one day in Tir boarded a bus that changed her life forever.

Several months before the bus incident, whose story all Iran knows, Sepideh had written on her Twitter account that she truly did not believe the hair on her head differed in any way from the hair on men’s heads. Sepideh’s clothing has always been simple, even on the day she appeared before the prosecutor’s office without compulsory hijab and was denied entry to court. Sepideh wrote again that being tried for having hair was as absurd as being tried for having hands or feet. The issue is that, however simple and understandable Sepideh’s statement is, a part of our society has lost the capacity to think.

Hannah Arendt is presented here as understanding the banality of evil as the human incapacity to think: a condition in which what has been learned overwhelms what has been thought to such a degree that thought itself becomes impossible. Evil is not something profound and monstrous here, but a banality that spreads like fungus across the surface of society. A person caught in evil becomes incapable of inner dialogue and of seeing their own cruelty and the pain they create in the world. They are not even a machine. They are a cog in a machine from which power has taken even the simplest possibility of thought.

If you want a true image of the future, it is the image of boots forever stamping upon the face of humanity. This frightening sentence, rendered here from George Orwell’s *1984*, reminds us that in a world where thought becomes impossible, a young and thoughtful woman such as Sepideh can be sentenced to four years in prison. Yet, as she herself wrote:

“Four years in prison for having hair is as absolutely absurd as imprisoning someone for having hands or feet. Do not be pleased either. Four years of black captivity cannot change the truth. You have lost to consciousness and to human wills.”

Do not doubt that these bitter days will pass and future generations will read about Sepideh in their schoolbooks, looking back with astonishment on a time when she was sentenced to four years in prison for allowing her hair to be visible.