The Intentionality of Evil (2005)

"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."

She set out to research the origins of how high ranking nazis became so evil, only to find that in many cases the roots were innocuous. Her thesis is that the great evils in history generally, and the Holocaust in particular, were not executed by fanatics or sociopaths, but by ordinary people who accepted the premises of their state and therefore participated with the view that their actions were normal.

Explaining this phenomenon, Edward S. Herman has emphasized the importance of "normalizing the unthinkable." According to him, "doing terrible things in an organized and systematic way rests on 'normalization.' This is the process whereby ugly, degrading, murderous, and unspeakable acts become routine and are accepted as 'the way things are done.'"

He describes how Nazi soldiers, who were instinctively horrified by what they were doing, were instructed to try to dissociate from their bodies and their actions, and identify themselves completely and impersonally with the nationalist cause.

Whereas in our world, we judge each other with our own set of complex rules, and we treat each other based on those rules, rather than just rules of survival. It results in a lot of conflict that has absolutely nothing to do with competing for a mate, finding food, or sheltering. We trick ourselves into believing the complex rules are more real than reality. We think 'evil' is real, when in reality it's an imaginary concept that doesn't exist as a part of nature. There is no such thing as an evil being.

Hell, we think there's an invisible being in the sky that watches our every move and judges us, and based on that belief we kill people. As a species, we're insane.

"Oh, to get one's teeth again into a Farinata, a Henry VIII, or even a Hitler! There was real crackling there; something to crunch; a rage, an egotism, a cruelty only just less robust than our own. It put up a delicious resistance to being devoured. It warmed your inwards when you'd got it down. Instead of this, what have we had tonight? There was a municipal authority with Graft sauce. But personally I could not detect in him the flavour of a really passionate and brutal avarice such as delighted one in the great tycoons of the last century. Was he not unmistakably a Little Man — a creature of the petty rake-off pocketed with a petty joke in private and denied with the stalest platitudes in his public utterances — a grubby little nonentity who had drifted into corruption, only just realizing that he was corrupt, and chiefly be-cause everyone else did it? ..."

... "The difficulty lay in their very smallness and flabbiness. Here were vermin so muddled in mind, so passively responsive to environment, that it was very hard to raise them to that level of clarity and deliberateness at which mortal sin becomes possible. To raise them just enough; but not that fatal millimetre of “too much.”" [1]

Which is to say the quality of a "banal evil" is kind of a product of our modern bureaucratic capitalist society.

[1] http://www.samizdat.qc.ca/arts/lit/Toast_CSL.pdf