File:Hannah Arendt quoted.png: Difference between revisions

In her final (and unfinished) 1977 book "The Life of the Mind", Arendt writes:

"The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil"

Hannah Arendt, meme by Robert Scott Horton

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On how seemingly ordinary citizens, those who 'go along to get along' and those who 'want to get ahead and do what is required of them to 'get ahead', have a capacity to do grave harm and evil...

Via PhilosophyBreak.com

In her report for The New Yorker, and later published in her 1963 book "Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil", Arendt expressed how disturbed she was by Eichmann — but for reasons that might not be expected.

Far from the monster she thought he’d be, Eichmann was instead a rather bland, “terrifyingly normal” bureaucrat. He carried out his murderous role with calm efficiency not due to an abhorrent, warped mindset, but because of “a curious, quite authentic inability to think.”

His evil actions, Arendt noted, could not be traced to any particularity of wickedness, pathology or ideological conviction in the doer, whose only personal distinction was a perhaps extraordinary shallowness.

Eichmann absorbed the principles of the Nazi regime so unquestioningly — never considering their consequences from anyone’s perspective but his own — that his focus was simply to further his career within the regime and climb its ladders of power.

For Arendt, Eichmann embodied the dilemma between the unspeakable horror of the deeds and the undeniable ludicrousness of the man who perpetrated them.

His actions were defined not so much by thought, but by the absence of thought — convincing Arendt of the “banality of evil.”

The “banality of evil” is the idea that evil does not have the Satan-like, villainous appearance we might typically associate it with.

Rather, evil is perpetuated when immoral principles become normalized over time by people who do not think about things from the standpoint of others.

Evil becomes commonplace; it becomes the everyday. Ordinary people — going about their everyday lives — become complicit actors in systems that perpetuate evil.

Arendt’s 1963 book "Eichmann in Jerusalem" remains a relevant and disturbing read.

While at the time many criticized Arendt for seemingly letting Eichmann off the hook and placing the blame on society at large, Arendt argued this was a misreading of her position.

Eichmann as an individual was fully responsible for his monstrous actions, Arendt thought: she repeatedly declared him a war criminal and supported his death sentence. What she was startled by and alerting us to was the nature of his monstrosity. He was not a Demon from Hell; he was a shallow, unthinking person in human society.

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