Hanna Arandt, Totalitarianism, and the Banality of Evil

Years ago, the expression “the Banality of Evil” introduced me to the writings of Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), the Jewish-German-American philosopher and political theorist. She left Germany in 1933, settling for a time in Czechoslovakia, Switzerland and France. In 1937 the Nazi’s stripped her of her German citizenship. She escaping to the U.S. in 1941 and became a citizen in 1950. She wrote many books and essays about the nature of power and totalitarianism, and lectured at several universities including Notre Dame, UC Berkeley, Princeton, Northwestern, University of Chicago, and Yale.

What could be “banal” about evil, I wondered? That expression led me to Arendt’s book, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963). In 1961, The New Yorker assigned her to cover the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the SS Nazi and organizer of the mass deportation of Jews to the ghettos and concentration camps for extermination. He was captured in Argentina in 1960, tried the next year in Jerusalem, and executed in 1962. Are criminals like Eichmann consciously evil or is evil behavior sometimes a product of obeying orders without thinking, without critically analyzing the consequences of one’s actions? Sitting in that Jerusalem courtroom, Eichmann appeared to Arendt like any effete clerk sitting behind a desk stamping paperwork. He didn’t have horns and a tale. How could an ordinary, everyday human bureaucrat commit such atrocities? What does that say about human nature? Can evil truly result from such banality?

Arendt’s book was criticized by the Jewish community. She disapproved of how the trail was conducted. Even her friends accused her of lack of empathy, or even sympathy for the victims. They accused her of claiming that some Jews were complicit in the Holocaust because they didn’t defend themselves. Arendt denied the accusation and wrote: “There was the unexpected conclusion certain reviewers chose to draw from the ‘image’ of the book created by certain interest groups in which I allegedly claimed the Jews had murdered themselves.”

What’s the relationship between culture and evil? As Philip Zimbardo points out in The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil (2007), when organizations face problems with employee behavior, they’ll often say that there are always a few bad apples in every group. There’s truth to that. On the other hand, a corrupt apple barrel can latch onto our fears and insecurities, leading us into irrational group-think. We humans can quickly rationalize behaviors that we may later regret, especially when we’re embedded within cohesive groups led by an authority figure. We resort to our ancient, tribal instincts. That’s what Arendt meant when she wrote about the lack of critical analysis, the thoughtlessness that can lead banality into evil.

Over the years I’ve continued to read Arendt’s books and essays. In her classic, The Origin of Totalitarianism (1951), she describes the culture surrounding dictators as “a curiously varying mixture of gullibility and cynicism.” Everyone is expected to react to the “lying statements of the leaders and the central unchanging ideological fiction of the movement.” Sound familiar? Politics is a game, she claims, and the first rule is that “The Fuhrer is always right.” The movement’s propaganda is that all events are scientifically predictable, but only by those who are brilliant leaders. Thus, the leader has “monopolized this knowledge” and is always right and always will be right. Arendt writes: “To a member of a totalitarian movement, this knowledge has nothing to do with truth and this being right nothing to do with the objective truthfulness of the leader’s statements which cannot be disproved by facts, but only by future success or failure.”

Recently, Lapham’s Quarterly produced a special publication called The History of Fake News. Real “fake news” is nothing new. Calling news you don’t like “fake news,” or labeling the truth “fake news” is also not new. Propaganda is as old as human nature. Reading this The History of Fake News inspired me to reread The Origin of Totalitarianism. As I did, this section stood out:

“A mixture of gullibility and cynicism had been an outstanding characteristic of mob mentality before it became an everyday phenomenon of masses. In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. The mixture in itself was remarkable enough because it spelled the end of the illusion that gullibility was a weakness of unsuspecting primitive souls and cynicism the vice of superior and refined minds. Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”

If you cry “wolf” enough, some people will cease to listen and resort to cynicism. If you scream “fake news” enough about the truth, many will become cynical, and rather than investigate, will cease to even care."

Trump’s world is not new. It is a clever rehash of what’s been known about mass psychology and totalitarianism for quite some time. Read Eric Hoffer’s The True Believerand The Ordeal of Change. Anyone who studies history should not be surprised about what’s happening in our country and the world today. Technological advance combined with savvy mass-social media has given these extreme ideologies and their movements more power. We must resist and it won’t be easy. We must avoid thoughtless, banal assent and at least make the attempt to bushwhack through the jungle of facts, lies and opinions.

Doug Capra is a writer who lives in Seward.