41 Hannah Arendt: The Banality of Evil

The Banality of Evil

Hannah Arendt coined the term: “The banality of evil”, to talk about people who makes bad things because, basically, it is their job.

When we watch a Nazi’s movie, we always see the soldiers being bad to their prisoners, and how they exterminated gay people, disabled people, Jews, Romanis, and any other category of people they thought was against their ideal of a pure race. But we normally don’t consider all the people who was not in the front line, all the bureaucrat, train drivers, people who sold food to the soldiers, etc.

How much responsibility they had in the crimes?

In Jerusalem, there was a trial against Joseph Eichmann, a bureaucrat who was responsible for the implementation of the final solution. Eichmann treated this subject in the same way as you would treat any organizational problem. And Arendt was really worried about why do people participate in this crimes.

She thought in certain totalitarian regimes, evil becomes something normal, and when people just “do their jobs”, they contribute to that evil because they are not able to thing beyond their own interest. She thought if people were able to be more thoughtful, they wouldn’t do it.

Check this video on The Banality of Evil. and this article to know more about her ideas.

Read this article on Standing Up to the Banality of Evil to consider some solutions to this problem.