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This post is similar to the ideas of Hannah Arendt and her concept of "the banality of evil". In her own words: "I was struck by the manifest shallowness in th
by codingslave 7y ago
This post is similar to the ideas of Hannah Arendt and her concept of "the banality of evil". In her own words:
"I was struck by the manifest shallowness in the doer [ie Eichmann] which made it impossible to trace the uncontestable evil of his deeds to any deeper level of roots or motives. The deeds were monstrous, but the doer – at least the very effective one now on trial – was quite ordinary, commonplace, and neither demonic nor monstrous."
She set out to research the origins of how high ranking nazis became so evil, only to find that in many cases the roots were innocuous. Her thesis is that the great evils in history generally, and the Holocaust in particular, were not executed by fanatics or sociopaths, but by ordinary people who accepted the premises of their state and therefore participated with the view that their actions were normal.
Explaining this phenomenon, Edward S. Herman has emphasized the importance of "normalizing the unthinkable." According to him, "doing terrible things in an organized and systematic way rests on 'normalization.' This is the process whereby ugly, degrading, murderous, and unspeakable acts become routine and are accepted as 'the way things are done.'"
- aabeshou 7y agoI've been listening a lot to Slavoj Zizek recently and he discusses this often. His argument is that to make good people do horrible things, you need an ideology that basically says that you are an agent of "what must be done" and then the ends justify the means. He describes how Nazi soldiers, who were instinctively horrified by what they were doing, were instructed to try to dissociate from their bodies and their actions, and identify themselves completely and impersonally with the nationalist cause.
- fmajid 7y agoThe Nazis also dosed their soldiers with methamphetamine.
- brlewis 7y agoHannah Arendt’s book, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, is mentioned and summarized in the 4th paragraph of the article.
- fmajid 7y agoHannah Arendt was the mistress of Martin Heidegger, a firm Nazi, until his death. Philosophers are still debating about the levels of cognitive dissonance that took.