In 1961 Hannah Arendt wrote for The New Yorker.

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, the Nazi operative responsible for organising the transportation of millions of Jews and others to various concentration camps in support of the Nazi’s Final Solution.

Arendt found Eichmann an ordinary, rather bland, bureaucrat, who in her words, was ‘neither perverted nor sadistic’, but ‘terrifyingly normal’. He acted without any motive other than to diligently advance his career in the Nazi bureaucracy. Eichmann was not an amoral monster, she concluded in her study of the case, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963). Instead, he performed evil deeds without evil intentions, a fact connected to his ‘thoughtlessness’, a disengagement from the reality of his evil acts. Eichmann ‘never realised what he was doing’ due to an ‘inability… to think from the standpoint of somebody else’. Lacking this particular cognitive ability, he ‘commit[ted] crimes under circumstances that made it well-nigh impossible for him to know or to feel that he [was] doing wrong’.

Arendt dubbed these collective characteristics of Eichmann ‘the banality of evil’: he was not inherently evil, but merely shallow and clueless, a ‘joiner’, in the words of one contemporary interpreter 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. In Arendt’s telling, Eichmann reminds us of the protagonist in Albert Camus’s novel The Stranger (1942), who randomly and casually kills a man, but then afterwards feels no remorse. There was no particular intention or obvious evil motive: the deed just ‘happened’.

This wasn’t Arendt’s first, somewhat superficial impression of Eichmann. Even 10 years after his trial in Israel, she wrote in 1971:

“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.”

The banality-of-evil thesis was a flashpoint for controversy.

https://aeon.co/ideas/what-did-hannah-arendt-really-mean-by-the-banality-of-evil

Sound like any cops you’ve crossed paths with?

To quite grasp her thesis if not already familiar, you have to first grasp the essence of the concept of banality. It does not mean “boring.” There’s a word for that already.

Rather, it means “ordinary.” Mundane. Typical. Yawn.

Arendt touched a particular cord because what she was saying is that although there was plenty of Grand Plan in the Nazi regime you might characterize as evil, you can’t really pin it on Eichmann because he was basically just a functionary bureaucrat who was good at his job—like a cop with an impeccably pressed uniform.

…Like, say, cops all over the world in the last two years beating the shit out of regular folk for not wearing masks…or doing manifestly human things like socializing with other people. Yea, they suspended regular humanity…for your convenience and safety.

Same same. All of those cops would have loaded folks into boxcars, too. You’ve seen the videos. There is not a single exception on planet earth.

Are they evil people, or just banal? Totally ordinary. …Perhaps even suffering from feelings of inferiority…who love finley pressed uniforms that give them colors of authority?

…But if it’s just banality…an exercise in the ordinary, unremarkable, and typical, what does that say about society and our human condition? Was Arendt simply reminding us that what the Nazi’s and Eichmann did was pretty damn typical through the lens of the history of civilization?

I suspect so.

…I suspect so because of what I have observed over the last two years, globally. Lot’s of Eichmanns out there. Millions of little Eichmanns. The whole world has an infestation of them in every dark and sunlit corner.

…Earlier today, to insert a riff, my girl asked me how I’m doing. Flippantly, I replied with a link to a video, Lenny Kravitz.

But it’s my honest state of mind, where, I feel I have no place to go but back home to family and just regroup somewhat. I won’t comply with the banality of things like that virus hysteria that’s for the consumption of low-IQ, so I have to wait out the idiocy even longer—and Thailand has worn very thin on me. …Just yesterday, an “emergency meeting” about that primate pox, and they have a single identified case in a country of 70 million.

It’s all still up in the air, though. I’ll have to think this one through.

…And that will lead into part 2, the banality of good.

This will be tough to see or swallow for some, but what is “good,” anyway? Why is there such an enthusiasm? Is “good” merely a contrast by definition? The good is that which is not evil? Definition by negation? Or, is it the other way around? Or, is it simply that which is handed down then culturally and traditionally built upon? The do’s and don’ts taught to you as a child…without, and before you had a discerning brain yet?

You ask the average person, “are you good or bad?” and discounting for stylistic rebels and bad boys, what answer are you going to get, typically?

Not this.

Could it be that George Thorogood’s “badness to the bone” is actually “good” in terms of standout entertainment, not at all banal, and overshadows all those banal folk always signalling how “good” they are? Or, is it that there’s a demand for contrast since so many are so enamored of constantly signalling how “good” they are along with the virtues inherent in “good” in action—that there’s a market for simple counter-culture-virtue even though mostly the same banal, ordinary harmlessness where “good” and “bad” people are just playing and clapping at roles?

…Religious people perhaps mostly exemplify the banality of good. Is there anything more banal than piety? Consider the global Catholic church, the origin of the public signalling of virtue. The commandments and catechisms are downright ordinary and work for large part because they tend to mirror what humans would tend toward and aspire to anyway: have babies, teach them right—and some Golden Rule stuff.

You’re a human being. This is ordinary stuff. It’s like: no special award for doing your job. No merit badge.

But religion and now, the religion of leftism and wokism, have to frame their banality of “good” by means of trappings. For the Catholic church, it’s 2,000 years of edifice. Fancy buildings, fancy costumes, and fancy rituals and ceremonies. It lends an aura of impossibility, were it not for them. The left and woke have the trappings of social media and no end of flashy shit on CNN and elsewhere.

You don’t need any of it to do your job as a human. Oh, and sin. That’s just a device whereby you always feel as though you’ve failed as a human and if that’s not enough, you were guilty of Original failure. You never had a chance anyway.

Utter banality, in the highest traditions of traveling salesman.

Good and evil are simply two sides of the same coin of utter ordinary, banal, and unremarkable human experience where nothing is remarkable or surprising. Starve or kill millions of people? Evil. Enslave billions via all the machinations inherent in convenience and safety? Good.

I call bullshit on both.

It’s just all the same old easy, lazy shit.