The Banality of Evil
“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”
Last year I read a lot about the Second World War, the Third Reich, and The Soviet Union but the above lines by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in his seminal work The Gulag Archipelago stuck with me. “The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human”. In this case, how do we define evil?
Close your eyes and think about evil. What does it look like? Naturally, we will imagine evil in a human form because of our biology and first-hand experiences, but generally, when we think of evil, we think of it as something ostentatious and exuberant. Just as if the nefariousness of evil has a captivating aura to it. Sure, you need an aura for evil to spread. Hitler had an aura to himself that’s why he was able to lead his nation astray.
But I don’t think evil exists on a shiny surface and stands on a podium to give passionate speeches. Evil is banal. It exists in the banality of the day-to-day stuff which people ignore. And it is because of the banality of evil that is spreading like a wildfire. It is fueled neither by passion nor vigor, but by its simplicity. Ervin Staub sums it up brilliantly -
Evil arises out of ordinary thinking and is committed by ordinary people is the norm, not the exception.
Considering the WW2 example, I can think of two persons who were presumably more evil than Hitler because Hitler was a psychopath and as such wasn’t aware of the human side of his acts. But these two men were conscious of their sins the whole time.
The first person is Paul Joseph Goebbels, the Minister of Propaganda in Nazi Germany. While reading William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Goebbels to me seemed like a sinister evil spirit who was controlling everything through Hitler. Goebbels never made many public appearances which are expected of a minister and unlike Hermann Göring, he did not have an outgoing personality. He was a highly educated and well-read person and therefore was able to formulate propaganda against the West and particularly against the Jews. I believe a psychopath cannot create propaganda because propaganda is designed to connect to the masses, which are sane. Only psychopaths will be able to connect to the propaganda designed by another psychopath. You need human elements for propaganda - emotions, senses, story. And only a person who is conscious of his acts can do so.
The second person is Otto Adolf Eichmann. There is an entire interesting story about Mossad and his execution, which was made famous by the movie Operation Finale, but in his day job as the “Architect of the Final Solution”, Eichmann’s role was bounded to paper only. In her book Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt puts it perfectly - he joined the Nazi party, not because of its ideological setting but to find direction in his life and he knew what work he was doing but he still did it to find purpose. He was tasked to design methods to terminate the lives of Jews and he did it successfully. He was aware of the lives his methods were taking. He was conscious of how horrendous the conditions of Jews were and how were they tortured. But he still did it.
I know that simplifying a complex history such as WW2 in two paragraphs will not do justice to it. In fact, many Germans seemed to “enjoy” doing sins. You can also say that there was pressure on Germans to do such horrific deeds. Sure there was and yes, the actions of your peers impact your psychology a lot. But the repercussions are important to my point. You see if you are conscious of any sin you have done, can you sleep? Can you party at Auschwitz Camp after you have obliterated thousands of Jews in the gas chambers? Probably not. This is because you are sane.
I remember reading a line in Christopher Browing’s Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. It went something like this -
…both kinds of atrocities occur in the brutualizating context of war, but the men who carry out atrocity by policy are in a different state of mind. They act not out of frenzy, bitterness and frustration but with calculation.
These conscious policymakers and those who act behind the scenes are the real evil. The rest are sheep. Browing later writes -
An evolutionary bias favors the survival of people who can adapt to hierarchical situations and organized social activities. Socialization through school, family and military service as well as a whole army of rewards and punishments within society generally, reinforces and internalizes a tendency toward obedience. A seemingly voluntary entry into an authority system creates a strong sense of obligation. Those within the hierarchy adopt the authority’s perspective of the definition of the situation. The notions of loyalty, duty, and discipline requiring competent performance in the eyes of authority become moral imperatives overriding any identification with the victim. Normal individuals enter an agentic state in which they are the instrument of another’s will. In such a state they no longer feel personally responsible for the content of their actions but only for how well they perform.
What would I have done if I were a youth in Nazi Germany? Would I have been brainwashed by the propaganda? Would I have picked up the arms for the Third Reich? Browing has the answer -
the rare individual is the one who has the capacity to resist authority and assert moral autonomy but who is seldom aware of this hidden strength until put to test.