Can one do evil without being evil? This was the puzzling question that the philosopher Hannah Arendt grappled with when she reported for The New Yorker in 1961 on the war crimes trial of Adolph Eichmann. Arendt found Eichmann an ordinary, rather bland, bureaucrat, who in her words was ‘neither perverted nor sadistic’, but ‘terrifying normal’. He acted without any motive other than to diligently advance his carrier in the NAZI bureaucracy. Arendt dubbed these collective characteristics of Eichmann ‘the banality of evil: he was not inherently evil, but mostly shallow and cluless, a ‘joiner’, in the words of one contemporary interpret er of Arendt’s thesis: he was a man who drifted into the Nazi Party, in search of purpose and direction, not out of deep ideological belief. Hannah Ardent called this thoughtlessness as the banality of evil .
Have you heard about the “Banality of evil”?
Banality means ordinary. And evil means morally wrong and bad. That means ordinary someone can do morally wrong without any evil intentions and don’t feel guilty of his or her doing.
Hannah Arendt described this expression when she saw Eichmann in the war criminal trial, because it’s so shocked to her that he looked so normal not a monster. And he had continuously claimed that he just followed direction of his organization, Nazi, so he insisted that he’s not guilty of his doing. He didn’t plan anything and he just did passively.. so he claimed that he’s not guilty of holocaust..
She thought ‘what is his crazy me?’. And, Arendt called his thoughtlessness action itself is a crime.
And I thought about the word “thougtlessness”…And then I was thinking about myself.
I posted memo of “Banality of Evil” at my computer monitor. And when I make a decision of some issues in my ordinary daily life, I read the sentence and try to be a thoughtful decision maker.
Because the act I do without thought can be harmful for other person.
