What Hannah Arendt Can Teach Us About The Capitol Hill Insurrection
When the Banality of Evil Meets Social Media
Adolf Eichmann was an unremarkable man before he joined the Nazi party in 1932. He was mediocre in school and to make ends meet, he became a traveling oil salesman. After joining the SS, he coordinated the trains needed to carry out murder on an unimaginable scale. For his leading role, he was convicted of crimes against humanity and executed on June 1, 1962.
Hannah Arendt, a Jewish philosopher who fled Germany during the war, covered his trial. What struck Arendt was that Eichman needed no great evil intention to perform catastrophically evil deeds. In her now-classic Eichmann in Jerusalem she observes:
He was not stupid. It was sheer thoughtlessness — something by no means identical with stupidity — that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of that period. And if this is “banal” and even funny, if … [one] cannot extract any diabolical or demonic profundity from Eichmann, that is still far from calling [his actions] commonplace (323).
The difficulty that Arendt identified is a specific case of what psychologists now call proportionality bias, the misconception that for something to have tremendous consequences it must also have a proportionally tremendous cause.
