> Macro vs micro. Are these really opposites? Hannah Arendt famously tied those together in her work "Eichmann in Jerusalem". She pointed out that Eichmann, c

> Macro vs micro. Are these really opposites? Hannah Arendt famously tied those together in her work "Eichmann in Jerusalem". She pointed out that Eichmann, convicted architect of the Holocaust, wasn't necessarily a sociopath, but instead an extremely average and mundane person who relied on clichéd defenses rather than thinking for himself, was motivated by professional promotion rather than ideology, and believed in success which he considered the chief standard of "good society". Banality, in this sense, does not mean that Eichmann's actions were in any way ordinary, or even that there is a potential Eichmann in all of us, but that his actions were motivated by a sort of complacency which was wholly unexceptional https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eichmann_in_Jerusalem#The_banality_of_evil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eichmann_in_Jerusalem#The_bana... The question that gets skirted when discussing "systemic racism" is this: what does this actually mean? How does it manifest itself? make it concrete? The notion "systemic racism" covers a vast territory of human interactions and feelings. Mostly the uncomfortable one's that aren't easily discussed: indifference, complacency, egoism, irrational fear, insecurity, mistrust and so on. Right now, there's another post on HN's frontpage about toxic workplaces. A toxic workplace is the result of emergent behavior of many individuals in that workplace. Both leadership that acts complacent rather then address human issues, and workers who don't feel engaged, incentivized or motivated and put their own interests, frustrations, irritations, fears,... up front. In that regard, formal public policies - social, economic, political,... - are also a representation of emerging behavior, the fluctuating emotional state of a large group of individuals, a community, and the norms and values which grow prevalent and come to dominate collective thinking as time marches on. Eichmann himself didn't pop up overnight, after all. He ended up becoming because both personal circumstances and factors, as well as the larger societal and environmental circumstances pushed him in that direction. That doesn't excuse what he did, but it does explain why it happened. And it's a relevant lesson to keep in mind when discussing inequities in modern day terms.