The Banality of Chaos

Amid the anxiety of Trump winning the election I’ve felt a certain sense of discord. Each morning I wake up and go through my morning routine, I sip my coffee, then I work, and finally at the end of the day I sleep. Even if my sleep hasn’t been great, I’m still living the same life I have been living, but outside of my small world there is chaos; Trump’s awful cabinet picks, his god awful advisers, and beyond Trump there’s violence of all sorts around the world. It may be part of the human tendency to believe that our own times are the most interesting, the most everything, but it seems that it’s fair to say that we live in exceptionally chaotic times; Not the most chaotic, but still plenty chaotic. The discord between the banality of my own life, my own actions, my own anxieties and the chaos around me reminded me of the banality of evil Hannah Arendt shows in documenting the Eichmann trial. Obviously I don’t see myself as orchestrating the mass deportation, encampment, an eventual genocide of Jews, but I imagine my life as a white American man is similar to that of a German living in Germany during the rise of Hitler; that’s not the say Trump is necessarily Hitler, but my position of privilege is similar. I don’t have to worry in the same way that other people do, Trump isn’t going to make a registry of white men, he’s not going to do mass deportations of white men back to Europe, my worries emanate from my ability to empathize with those that have to legitimately worry about those things and a general fear of a Republican agenda as I’m not wealthy enough to not rely on government assistance to an extent. The banality of chaos is that feeling, that my life, like that German, remains quite banal in the face of a chaotic evil. My general goal is to document the discordant feeling, the chaos around me, and the banality of my own life with the hope that the three strands weave together to show how chaotic the world is and how people continue to live banal lives amid the chaos.