In our age of complex bureaucracies, so much cruelty is simply the result of normal, everyday, “real” people doing what they think is most pragmatic. As the philosopher Bernard Williams said, “the modern world…has made evil, like other things, a collective enterprise.” Eichmann was not the personification of hatred. His motives were banal. Evil is often the result of small, procedural things. It is people doing their jobs and remaining loyal to their parties, regardless of evidence, arguments, or troubling historical parallels. [...]
Arendt finds thoughtlessness—which is different from stupidity—at the root of the banality of evil. It stems from a failure to think and empathize. “The longer one listened to [Eichmann], the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else,” she said. When we examine the basic principles or arguments from which evil comes, we find nothing there. Instead we find mediocrity, myopic pragmatic concerns, and understandable intentions. [...]
We must take stock of our core commitments and be open to changing them. Group membership is convenient because it allows us to skip genuine critical thought. As the group drifts, we drift with it—maybe into a truly dark place. And when we wonder how it happened, we look inside to find countless decent people repeating banalities. We are simply lucky that, until now, the dominant governing groups have not drifted into those truly dark places. When they do, plenty of us will follow.
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