Worth pointing out, Hannah Arendt's is a woman. She wrote about Adolf Eichmann, who in her view from reporting on his trial in Jerusalem, was simultaneously a complete non-entity AND a horrible war criminal. Which to her was a far more horrifying prospect than if he had been a raging asshole or an evil genius or what not.
Self-righteousness is incompatible with coalition building.
Most Germans weren't directly exposed to the worst horrors, and while many who committed them "were only following orders", the vast majority of the german army and populace (while complicit, don't mistake me) was just "lets just get through this and keep our heads down and everything will be fine"
Of course most Germans weren't aware. The camps were built far away from the largest urban centers. They simply partook of the cheap soap and road tar that kept magically coming in.
I'm reminded of the episode of Band of Brothers where the villagers claim ignorance and the guy says, "How could you not know?!? It smells like burning meat and it's snowing ash!"
I don't buy people becoming indoctrinated to the point where, like a bird-beak record player from the Flintstones, "It's a living," in less than a generation. It doesn't make sense but has an appearance of truth, ergo it's specious.
One of the points Arendt, who is not a guy, is trying to make via the argument is that our inability to conceive of the banality of evil is, itself, a problem.
You say that you "don't buy" the possibility of a person being a Nazi, shipping jews off to death camps, and thinking of it as a job. You don't think people could be indoctrinated that quickly. You don't consider it a possibility. It had to be the case that Nazis were frothing-at-the-mouth psychopaths.
And Arendt says, "Dude, Adolf Eichmann was just a normal guy. He wasn't a monster. He simply thought of himself as doing his job."
We try to protect ourselves by pretending that some qualitative, fundamental shift has to occur for a person to aid in death camps. But that is not the case. Eichmann was just, basically, an accountant. He was just doing his job. When we realize that, it becomes far more terrifying than what we take to be possible.
Perhaps you should read the book, rather than dismiss it out of hand.
She wrote about Adolf Eichmann, who in her view from reporting on his trial in Jerusalem, was simultaneously a complete non-entity AND a horrible war criminal. Which to her was a far more horrifying prospect than if he had been a raging asshole or an evil genius or what not.
I'm just saying I don't buy it. The BTK killer was a husband and church deacon for decades; didn't make his crime less horrible.
She wrote about Adolf Eichmann, who in her view from reporting on his trial in Jerusalem, was simultaneously a complete non-entity AND a horrible war criminal. Which to her was a far more horrifying prospect than if he had been a raging asshole or an evil genius or what not.
I'm just saying I don't buy it. The BTK killer was a husband and church deacon for decades; didn't make his crime less horrible.
She didn't say it did. That was her point.
Self-righteousness is incompatible with coalition building.
She wrote about Adolf Eichmann, who in her view from reporting on his trial in Jerusalem, was simultaneously a complete non-entity AND a horrible war criminal. Which to her was a far more horrifying prospect than if he had been a raging asshole or an evil genius or what not.
I'm just saying I don't buy it. The BTK killer was a husband and church deacon for decades; didn't make his crime less horrible.
Perhaps this is the confusion?
She's not denying that the acts were horrible.
She's stating that the persons who commit these acts are just normal people who conceived of themselves as doing their jobs.
For what reason do you take Arendt's observation to be impossible in principle?
The BTK killer was a husband and church deacon for decades
Just because a person is an asshole psycho doesn't mean they walk around in soiled clothes, with bags under their eyes, muttering "Kill, kill, kill..." all the time.
Also, the entire idea of exterminating a race of people, just in conception, is psychotic. Maybe for low level people it was no more than a a "job' but it wasn't a job created in a vacuum. There was a huge culture of hatred developed toward the victims and a regime that used followers, than used more loyal followers to kill the first round of followers off.
Just because a person is an asshole psycho doesn't mean they walk around in soiled clothes, with bags under their eyes, muttering "Kill, kill, kill..." all the time.
Right. They're just normal people, like you and me, who do monsterous things.
Also, the entire idea of exterminating a race of people, just in conception, is psychotic. Maybe for low level people it was no more than a a "job' but it wasn't a job created in a vacuum. There was a huge culture of hatred developed toward the victims and a regime that used followers, than used more loyal followers to kill the first round of followers off.
That's the story we tell ourselves. They had to be qualitatively different from us, because we could never do that.
Just because a person is an asshole psycho doesn't mean they walk around in soiled clothes, with bags under their eyes, muttering "Kill, kill, kill..." all the time.
Right. They're just normal people, like you and me, who do monsterous things.
But they aren't like you and me. We don't exactly know what creates a psycho, whether it's all nature, all nurture, or some combo of both. I do know that I don't have the disturbed psycho-sexual make-up to murder people, and I'm guessing you don't either.
Also, the entire idea of exterminating a race of people, just in conception, is psychotic. Maybe for low level people it was no more than a a "job' but it wasn't a job created in a vacuum. There was a huge culture of hatred developed toward the victims and a regime that used followers, than used more loyal followers to kill the first round of followers off.
That's the story we tell ourselves. They had to be qualitatively different from us, because we could never do that.[/quote]
I didn't say 'we' (which I'm assuming you mean as a society) could never do that. What I'm pointing out is that unless you have a culture where you first use brown shirts, then off them using black shirts and have a regime headed by nothing by psychotics ordering this slaughter in mass and endlessly, in a vacuum it just doesn't occur by itself. If 'we' had all those mitigating factors, I, one, would leave the country like Einstein, Murnau, Dietrich, and a host of others did, but I'm sure that if 'we' were just like Nazi Germany 'we' could become like Nazi Germany.
But they aren't like you and me. We don't exactly know what creates a psycho, whether it's all nature, all nurture, or some combo of both. I do know that I don't have the disturbed psycho-sexual make-up to murder people, and I'm guessing you don't either.
So, you think that Adolf Eichmann was a monster.
And when Arendt, who actually saw the man, wrote
Despite all the efforts of the prosecution, everybody could see that this man was not a "monster," but it was difficult indeed not to suspect that he was a clown. And since this suspicion would have been fatal to the entire enterprise [his trial], and was also rather hard to sustain in view of the sufferings he and his like had caused to millions of people, his worst clowneries were hardly noticed and almost never reported
You think she is fundamentally mistaken, based upon your presupposition that Eichmann was a monster.
You think she is fundamentally mistaken, based upon your presupposition that Eichmann was a monster.
I'm going based on having current knowledge of someone like BTK who bound, tortured, and killed women...and was a loving husband and church deacon. For decades.
I'm going off the assumption that if he's not in a position to slaughter people, Eichmann probably put on his pants one leg at a time, read and enjoyed books, maybe preferred coffee over tea. Like BTK was a loving husband when he wasn't in some other town murdering someone.
You think she is fundamentally mistaken, based upon your presupposition that Eichmann was a monster.
I'm going based on having current knowledge of someone like BTK who bound, tortured, and killed women...and was a loving husband and church deacon. For decades.
I'm going off the assumption that if he's not in a position to slaughter people, Eichmann probably put on his pants one leg at a time, read and enjoyed books, maybe preferred coffee over tea. Like BTK was a loving husband when he wasn't in some other town murdering someone.
This is, if anything, actually a more terrifying worldview than the banality of evil implies. You seem to be proposing that those who do evil are different, but appear identical until special circumstances allow their monstrosity to emerge. When you consider historical examples of monstrous behavior committed for ethnic, national, or religious reasons you frequently find a majority of the population participating. Equating Eichmann with BTK equates racist nationalism with psychotic sadism. So most (or at least many) people are closeted psychotic sadists, just waiting to be in a position to slaughter people.
This banality of evil stuff is a less terrifying topic of discussion than - or at least not as close to home as - the systematic torture perpetrated by my own countrymen. But maybe your ideas could soften the blow. Apparently our torturers are a bunch of deranged sadists who've latched onto a convenient reason to act out their fantasies, not deluded nationalists who earnestly believe that they are doing a necessary service for the defense of the United States. So I can safely view them as monsters unlike myself, a suitable target for my derision because I and people like me are fundamentally different from those others.
Actually, I am starting to come around to this worldview. More people should think this way. Maybe someday we'll all get together and just get rid of all the monsters. Wouldn't that be nice?
You think she is fundamentally mistaken, based upon your presupposition that Eichmann was a monster.
I'm going based on having current knowledge of someone like BTK who bound, tortured, and killed women...and was a loving husband and church deacon. For decades.
I'm going off the assumption that if he's not in a position to slaughter people, Eichmann probably put on his pants one leg at a time, read and enjoyed books, maybe preferred coffee over tea. Like BTK was a loving husband when he wasn't in some other town murdering someone.
I think there's a problem in your conflation of a self-motivated serial killer with a person who is employed by the state to do bad things. I'm hardly an expert but these seem like markedly different things.
You think she is fundamentally mistaken, based upon your presupposition that Eichmann was a monster.
I'm going based on having current knowledge of someone like BTK who bound, tortured, and killed women...and was a loving husband and church deacon. For decades.
I'm going off the assumption that if he's not in a position to slaughter people, Eichmann probably put on his pants one leg at a time, read and enjoyed books, maybe preferred coffee over tea. Like BTK was a loving husband when he wasn't in some other town murdering someone.
I think there's a problem in your conflation of a self-motivated serial killer with a person who is employed by the state to do bad things. I'm hardly an expert but these seem like markedly different things.
This is also true.
For reference, Eichmann's fundamental duties were making sure the trains to the concentration camps ran efficiently. He was also behind a lot of efforts to get them out of Germany before the Final Solution was implemented. And attended the Wannsee Conference, but was basically a secretary there.
He was a bureaucrat performing bureaucratic functions without thinking about them critically. There were two major points to her theory:
1) The Nazi leadership was not all psychotic, as was and is frequently believed.
2) The conditions of a modern state allowed ordinary people to commit terrible atrocities. People could just totally ignore morality because they were sufficiently detached from the results of their actions.
See also: economists/bankers in the last 10 years or the lawyers who approved torture, to end up closer to the theoretical topic.
John Yoo and David Addington are examples of the banality of evil. This motherfucker is just normal evil.
enlightenedbum on
Self-righteousness is incompatible with coalition building.
But they aren't like you and me. We don't exactly know what creates a psycho, whether it's all nature, all nurture, or some combo of both. I do know that I don't have the disturbed psycho-sexual make-up to murder people, and I'm guessing you don't either.
We're better people.
Being a psychopath doesn't necessarily mean one is a heinous murderer. It isn't a solid state of mind, and it seems somewhat problematic to conflate the condition with absolute evil.
I'm unsure of your line of reasoning regarding the nazi situation; are you suggesting there was a massive confluence of psychopaths that organized during this era? That would seem extremely unlikely.
Is a book every human being should read. We all will do evil, if put in the proper position to do so. It is possible to monitor yourself and your situation in order to reduce your propensity for "just following orders", but so long as you assume a priori that you are "a good person" and would therefore never ever do something mean you're just another asshole who's going to jack someone up to 450 Volts because someone in a lab coat told you too. Avoiding evil requires attention and maintenance.
My own opinion: the conclusions drawn from Milgram's experiments (and their replications) are far, far too broad. Yes, it is easy to get people to shock other people with doses of electricity that they are aware are non-lethal within a controlled environment. This is not the same thing as obeying a command to exterminate a chamber full of people, and Milgram (and proponents of the experiment) pretend that it is.
Moreover, some variations of the experiment yielded telling results: if a researcher is only communicating with someone via phone, they often refused to obey the command and /or claimed to obey while not 'shocking' anyone.
That's the story we tell ourselves. They had to be qualitatively different from us, because we could never do that.
-.-
Well, Hitler was dying of syphilis & had suffered brain damage as a result of a mustard gas attack during his WWI tour, Goering was a morphine addict prone to violent outbursts at random and Goebbels was a crippled social pariah who seemed to resent everything around him. Some of Hitler's cabinet, of course, do seem to fit the description of ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances (Himmler being swept-up in the ecstasy of suddenly being a man of exceptional privilege, with all of the sex & luxury that comes alongside it; Rosenberg being provided bot a vehicle and platform for for his delusional Utopian ideas; Bormann being given the opportunity to live out his fantasy of hanging the sword of Damocles over the church), but it's unlikely we'd have had the holocaust or even the European theater of war without the outrageous elements within the Third Reich.
It's not a 'story'. Read the accounts of Hitler falling to his knees, during the favorable parts of his Eastern campaign, and biting into throw rugs. Read the account of Goebbels deciding that the most humane way to avoid capture was to have himself, his wife and his children machine-gunned to death. Watch Hitler's anti-Semitic speeches, or read Goebbels's radio addresses, and compare them to contemporaneous analogues. They are not representative of the norm. Read the accounts of the Beer Hall Putsch, where armed members of the German Socialist Worker's Party - with Hitler at the fore - attempted to seize the German parliament at gunpoint.
Those are some of the meatiest samplings of things not-quite-right in the Reichstag off of the top of my head, but the best arguments against the 'banality of evil', at least in the case of Germany, come from Bauer & Kwiet:
1) During the last fair election in Germany before Hitler took power, 63 percent of the population voted against the Germany Socialist Worker's Party. This in spite of all of the hardships imposed by the Versailles treaty, the rampant anti-Semitism of the time, the growing popularity of socialism (which the Nazis hijacked) and the ridiculous incompetence & corruption within the alternative offering.
The public saw Hitler for hat he was, and they rejected him, German pride be damned.
Moreover, this type of Jew-baiting was not new. Politicians in Germany had a decades-long knack for attempting to sway the masses with racist & ultra-nationalist rhetoric - but that rhetoric didn't manifest into a Holocaust or global conflict. So, what made the difference in 1920?
2) The aftermath of the Night of the Long Knives shows a clear distinction between Hitler and his closest allies vs the majority of the Nazi party. For the psychopaths in charge of the organization, the assassination of the brownshirts represented an ideological achievement; for those who were swept-up in the glory of the moment, it represented a sudden, frightening glimpse of who Hitler was and a threshold they hadn't realized that hubris as leading them across. Now that they were through it, there was no turning back (unless you were willing to throw away your life, and perhaps that of your family as well).
You also missed her point. Which was not that all evil was banal, but that modernity allowed it to be so. She would agree the leadership was pretty fucked up. The whole book is about what we'd recognize as middle management.
Self-righteousness is incompatible with coalition building.
Arendt's views are, by and large, considered to be either on the fringe of consensus among historians or outside of it (that doesn't mean she's wrong, of course, and history is not an exact science in any case); 'Origins of Totalitarianism' offers some pretty fanciful explanations for why the Holocaust took place (and some of her arguments have been more or less outright proven false through the work of - of all people - David Irving). She most certainly does, in that volume, attempt to claim that Hitler and his cabinet were entirely normal persons.
She didn't have access to the archive records & journals that we now do, of course, so I don't blame her for making speculations that turned-out to be incorrect: but she was incorrect.
You might consider reading Cesarani's 'Becoming Eichmann', where rather compelling evidence is presented in the form of personal letters that:
1) Eichmann was indeed vehemently anti-semitic and motivated by his racism.
2) Arendt herself was racist, and this informed her perspective on Eichmann's trial.
It's also worth noting that Arendt only witnessed fragments of the trial, and crucially, she did not witness Eichmann's defense.
Don't worry! We here in the US are working to make sure it becomes a violent, poverty stricken third world country. Give it some time!
This guy is not banal evil, he did set out to do terrible things, benefited from them and justifies them even when they are proven to be wrong.
Rodriguez is a vengeful fanatic plain and simple.
He differs from someone who is either in no position to really oppose the evil actions, like a soldier carrying out government programs, or in a position which gradually was turned to evil ends, like an accountant sending trains on time. He sought out to destroy people and brought torture along as a tool, ignoring the morality when directly faced with the choice to use it.
The difference is important because banal evil is something EVERYONE is vulnerable to and if you are in a position of power or authority you need to be constantly aware of possibly being part of some terrible action.
The lawyers that passed this shit off as legal are probably part of that, finding a way to justify torture sounds like a difficult challenge some lawyers would love to theorize about, while others would fear losing their jobs. The key is they probably did not want to actually torture someone or even be part of it, yet they were.
It does not really matter in terms of guilt, Eichmann should be just as guilty no matter what his motivation; however, it does matter in terms of both rehabilitation and more importantly prevention of these kinds of behaviors. (I am in no way implying Eichmann himself should have been rehabilitated but that some kinds of institutional crimes can be.)
He's a shy overambitious dog-catcher on the wrong side of the law. She's an orphaned psychic mercenary with the power to bend men's minds. They fight crime!
My own opinion: the conclusions drawn from Milgram's experiments (and their replications) are far, far too broad. Yes, it is easy to get people to shock other people with doses of electricity that they are aware are non-lethal within a controlled environment. This is not the same thing as obeying a command to exterminate a chamber full of people, and Milgram (and proponents of the experiment) pretend that it is.
Have you watched the videos recorded of the experiments? The subjects are given strong reason to believe that the person they are shocking has a heart attack.
Well, Hitler was dying of syphilis & had suffered brain damage as a result of a mustard gas attack during his WWI tour, Goering was a morphine addict prone to violent outbursts at random and Goebbels was a crippled social pariah who seemed to resent everything around him. Some of Hitler's cabinet, of course, do seem to fit the description of ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances (Himmler being swept-up in the ecstasy of suddenly being a man of exceptional privilege, with all of the sex & luxury that comes alongside it; Rosenberg being provided bot a vehicle and platform for for his delusional Utopian ideas; Bormann being given the opportunity to live out his fantasy of hanging the sword of Damocles over the church), but it's unlikely we'd have had the holocaust or even the European theater of war without the outrageous elements within the Third Reich.
It's not a 'story'. Read the accounts of Hitler falling to his knees, during the favorable parts of his Eastern campaign, and biting into throw rugs. Read the account of Goebbels deciding that the most humane way to avoid capture was to have himself, his wife and his children machine-gunned to death. Watch Hitler's anti-Semitic speeches, or read Goebbels's radio addresses, and compare them to contemporaneous analogues. They are not representative of the norm. Read the accounts of the Beer Hall Putsch, where armed members of the German Socialist Worker's Party - with Hitler at the fore - attempted to seize the German parliament at gunpoint.
They are "stories." Most of the accounts were written by people who weren't there, defended by people who want them to be true, as a desperate effort to avoid admitting that these inhuman monsters were, in fact, human. It's like the "hitler had one nut," theory, the "the highest-ranking SS were all homosexual deviant monsters," theory, and the "hitler was an atheist" idea. They take a few facts (sometimes not even that) and stretch the context and declare all the evils perpetrated by the nazis to be "circumstantial evidence." It uses the same principles as the 9/11 troofers to defend the underlying myth that the Nazis were somehow not human and that we are nothing like them.
Their actions? Their coup attempt? Oh yes those things (the ones that actually happened) were quite wild, but they were also the kind of things "normal" people do. Hell, you yourself mentioned "jew-baiting" and hate was a political tool in Germany (throughout Europe, really). Goebbels heard, correctly, that the Russian army raping and murdering its way to Berlin like this was medieval warfare and most accounts suggest morphine and cyanide, not machine guns. The Beer Hall Putsch? Not that different than other showy, flashy, romanticized "revolutions" and, in fact, Adolph Hitler did it specifically because he wanted to pretend he was starring in his own movie. If you haven't seen the "Hitler or Ann Coulter?" comparison quizzes...well that's probably for the best because the internet sucks BUT the fact remains that the biggest difference was Adolph Hitler's writings were more eloquent.
Now that they were through it, there was no turning back (unless you were willing to throw away your life, and perhaps that of your family as well).
In all the history of WWII there were only fourteen accounts of Germans who were punished for refusing to carry out orders to kill Jews: nine were executed, four were sent to concentration camps, one was transferred to a military penal unit. Claims of coercion by force are almost completely unsubstantiated and particularly doubtful. I mean, I guess there could have been a whole lot of KP duty that didn't get reported, but that doesn't seem like it's in the same vein.
Were the leaders weird? Yeah. But they weren't weirder than any other person crazy enough to become a political leader. And Jose Rodriguez, who UNDENIABLY committed numerous acts of evil and villainy, is NOT a political leader. He is a proud and devoted soldier, his only real stand-out is that he is still publicly defending his actions, just like other criminals and monsters. He, like any other human being, rationalizes his behaviors as necessary and just.
That is the lesson, that is the horror. To admit that the greatest monster in the world is going to be completely human, is going to have an excuse, is going to be able to live with itself.
You think she is fundamentally mistaken, based upon your presupposition that Eichmann was a monster.
I'm going based on having current knowledge of someone like BTK who bound, tortured, and killed women...and was a loving husband and church deacon. For decades.
I'm going off the assumption that if he's not in a position to slaughter people, Eichmann probably put on his pants one leg at a time, read and enjoyed books, maybe preferred coffee over tea. Like BTK was a loving husband when he wasn't in some other town murdering someone.
This is, if anything, actually a more terrifying worldview than the banality of evil implies. You seem to be proposing that those who do evil are different, but appear identical until special circumstances allow their monstrosity to emerge.
What I'm proposing is based on psychology. If we are all literally the same and some people just kill others and some don't then we've essentially ignored years of psychological study.
You think she is fundamentally mistaken, based upon your presupposition that Eichmann was a monster.
I'm going based on having current knowledge of someone like BTK who bound, tortured, and killed women...and was a loving husband and church deacon. For decades.
I'm going off the assumption that if he's not in a position to slaughter people, Eichmann probably put on his pants one leg at a time, read and enjoyed books, maybe preferred coffee over tea. Like BTK was a loving husband when he wasn't in some other town murdering someone.
I think there's a problem in your conflation of a self-motivated serial killer with a person who is employed by the state to do bad things. I'm hardly an expert but these seem like markedly different things.
I wish we had detailed psychological profiles on the highest members of the Reich. Since that's impossible we can only speculate based on what we know. But the idea that there's just no way people with various levels of derangement could come to power in an organization that was in part based on mysticism strikes me as supremely hopeful in its thinking.
You can also compare Nazis with other Nazis like Gert Frobe (the guy who played Goldfinger) who used his tenure as a member of NASDAP to help German Jews escape the country.
You think she is fundamentally mistaken, based upon your presupposition that Eichmann was a monster.
I'm going based on having current knowledge of someone like BTK who bound, tortured, and killed women...and was a loving husband and church deacon. For decades.
I'm going off the assumption that if he's not in a position to slaughter people, Eichmann probably put on his pants one leg at a time, read and enjoyed books, maybe preferred coffee over tea. Like BTK was a loving husband when he wasn't in some other town murdering someone.
This is, if anything, actually a more terrifying worldview than the banality of evil implies. You seem to be proposing that those who do evil are different, but appear identical until special circumstances allow their monstrosity to emerge.
What I'm proposing is based on psychology. If we are all literally the same and some people just kill others and some don't then we've essentially ignored years of psychological study.
What psychology, exactly?
No one is saying it is impossible that a person could be monstrous, and that this could drive them to commit evil despite their circumstance. It's easy to list serial killers and lunatics driven by their profound individual mental problems, who seem to be normal to most observers but are compelled to do the abnormal and the deviant in extreme, violent ways.
What people are saying is that a person can be normal and can be led to commit evil because of their circumstance, regardless of their mental normalcy. They are saying that evil can be institutionalized, that instead of a person committing evil because they are abnormal, they can commit evil because evil becomes part of what's normal. This is a pretty well-worn and well-demonstrated idea. A man who believes he is torturing people for the good of his nation seems like an excellent example of this.
It's similar to those cases where someone gets murdered, and an entire apartment block, who would've been in a position to help or call the police before it happened, instead does nothing because they assume someone else has acted. Or even how you react when emergency presents itself.
That didn't actually happen, btw. In the famous incident you're referring to, the article that made it famous clevelrly left out a lot of details, like that the majority of the crime happened out of anyone's view or hearing, and that nevertheless practicality every person who had any clear witness of the event did in fact call 911 about it before the murder occurred.
There are several known similar psychological factors, such as hesitating to run to someone's aid if others around you can be seen not to act, or acting horribly so long as it ratchets up in small increments, or the ways authority can distort behavior on both sides. But there isn't really much evidence in experimentation or reality that someone sitting in their apartment wouldn't immediately cally the police if they suspected a crime being committed outside, especially a violent one.
If we are all literally the same and some people just kill others and some don't then we've essentially ignored years of psychological study.
Clearly we're not all literally exactly the same.
But that's also not what "banality of evil" means. Unfortunately, 'banality of evil' is getting conflated with a couple of other ideas in the thread.
"Banality of evil" simply means that horrendous acts can be motivated by responses to authority and social pressure; that the actor may not be any more predisposed than the average person to feelings of maliciousness or cruelty; and that the actor might not even feel responsible for his actions because he was responding to authority. It is the idea that "following orders" excuses the individual from personal moral culpability.
This does not necessarily describe all acts of violence - there are plenty of people who commit violence because they feel malicious and genuinely want to hurt people. (see: Nick Groth's Men Who Rape)
At the same time, there isn't a single separating factor that categorically distinguishes people who commit acts of violence from people who don't. There are only spectrums - propensity towards violence, empathy, responses to authority, impulse control. A person at one end of one of these spectrums is clearly different from a person at the opposite end, but when you try to separate people into buckets of "normal people" and "abnormal people" things start to get really messy. (see: Bad Men Do what Good Men Dream by Robert Simon)
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
You think she is fundamentally mistaken, based upon your presupposition that Eichmann was a monster.
I'm going based on having current knowledge of someone like BTK who bound, tortured, and killed women...and was a loving husband and church deacon. For decades.
I'm going off the assumption that if he's not in a position to slaughter people, Eichmann probably put on his pants one leg at a time, read and enjoyed books, maybe preferred coffee over tea. Like BTK was a loving husband when he wasn't in some other town murdering someone.
This is, if anything, actually a more terrifying worldview than the banality of evil implies. You seem to be proposing that those who do evil are different, but appear identical until special circumstances allow their monstrosity to emerge.
What I'm proposing is based on psychology. If we are all literally the same and some people just kill others and some don't then we've essentially ignored years of psychological study.
What psychology, exactly?
No one is saying it is impossible that a person could be monstrous, and that this could drive them to commit evil despite their circumstance. It's easy to list serial killers and lunatics driven by their profound individual mental problems, who seem to be normal to most observers but are compelled to do the abnormal and the deviant in extreme, violent ways.
What people are saying is that a person can be normal and can be led to commit evil because of their circumstance, regardless of their mental normalcy. They are saying that evil can be institutionalized, that instead of a person committing evil because they are abnormal, they can commit evil because evil becomes part of what's normal. This is a pretty well-worn and well-demonstrated idea. A man who believes he is torturing people for the good of his nation seems like an excellent example of this.
What psychology? The study of psychopathology. That's how you and I know we're different than BTK unless you had a bad time of it as a kid killing animals and wetting your bed.
And I get that people are saying that. And I'm saying that for something to become institutionalized, a.k.a., "The way we do things around here," in only a few years is a position that includes ignoring the number of Germans that fled when they saw the way their country was headed, ignores the Reich using their loyal, true-believers to kill off their early followers, etc. There was a pretty huge confluence of events orchestrated from the top to make sure people of a certain mindset were in the positions they were.
I simply disagree with the idea that anyone can become this way, which is true only if you ignore all those mitigating factors I mentioned.
And like I said, I can more easily buy a "diminishing returns of evil" theory than a purely "banal" one. I don't see why the idea of people getting inured to what they are doing is harder to accept than them just doing it blindly from the get go.
I simply disagree with the idea that anyone can become this way, which is true only if you ignore all those mitigating factors I mentioned.
A lot of people who join the military never think they could kill another person. That all changes when it becomes for the right cause. People, including those in the Milgram experiments, demonstrate time and time again they will do terrible, horrible things for a cause they feel is worthy of it.
Edit: And on those experiments Radiolab did an excellent piece surrounding them. Also a war criminal who felt he was doing the right thing.
I simply disagree with the idea that anyone can become this way, which is true only if you ignore all those mitigating factors I mentioned.
A lot of people who join the military never think they could kill another person.
Oh, no, I get that. I thought about editing my response to include that idea. It's actually preying on that psychology of getting people to kill. Once you get a soldier to get over that "hump" (apologies for the crudeness of speech regarding humanity) of killing their first enemy combatant, the rest do become easier. It also, like we see on Mad Men, makes a pretty strong argument for why we had such a culture of alcohol in the middle century following WWII and Korea.
I think that the right circumstances are not necessarily easy to produce. Sure, people fled Germany rather than become a part of a movement that they likely found repulsive. But were they, as people, in some way essentially different from people who stayed? I don't think you can say they were; there are so many complicating factors, and it seems absurdly reductive to suggest that the only people who stayed and participated were those with a pathological psychological difference that made them capable of evil.
I don't think anyone is capable of evil in any one circumstance, but everyone is likely capable of evil in SOME circumstance.
I think that the right circumstances are not necessarily easy to produce. Sure, people fled Germany rather than become a part of a movement that they likely found repulsive. But were they, as people, in some way essentially different from people who stayed?
I also gave an example of Gert Frobe, who stayed and used his position to help others, though. That suggests an essential difference, yes.
I don't think you can say they were; there are so many complicating factors, and it seems absurdly reductive to suggest that the only people who stayed and participated were those with a pathological psychological difference that made them capable of evil.
the Reich using their loyal, true-believers to kill off their early followers, etc. There was a pretty huge confluence of events orchestrated from the top to make sure people of a certain mindset were in the positions they were.
Does it? Or are we just afraid to admit that which path we take comes down to quantum dice or some conflux of unknowable uncountable historical factors?
While racing light mechs, your Urbanmech comes in second place, but only because it ran out of ammo.
It's similar to those cases where someone gets murdered, and an entire apartment block, who would've been in a position to help or call the police before it happened, instead does nothing because they assume someone else has acted. Or even how you react when emergency presents itself.
That didn't actually happen, btw. In the famous incident you're referring to, the article that made it famous clevelrly left out a lot of details, like that the majority of the crime happened out of anyone's view or hearing, and that nevertheless practicality every person who had any clear witness of the event did in fact call 911 about it before the murder occurred.
There are several known similar psychological factors, such as hesitating to run to someone's aid if others around you can be seen not to act, or acting horribly so long as it ratchets up in small increments, or the ways authority can distort behavior on both sides. But there isn't really much evidence in experimentation or reality that someone sitting in their apartment wouldn't immediately cally the police if they suspected a crime being committed outside, especially a violent one.
EDIT: Ok Feral already said that a while ago.
Yeah, just to be clear, 911 didn't exist at the time. It was rolled out in stages over the 1970s.
At the time Kitty Genovese was murdered, if you wanted the police, you usually dialed zero and asked for the operator to connect you, or phone books would have a page of emergency numbers that you would cut out and put by the phone or on the fridge or something. But in a big city, different people might be calling entirely different numbers - they might be calling different departments at one police department building, or they might be calling different buildings entirely. And there was no consistent process (manual or technical) for tracking these calls and where they were going. Some lines might have call logs, some wouldn't; sometimes somebody would pick up the phone, sometimes they wouldn't, etc.
This is historically important because some of the big ripple effects from the Genovese incident were, first, the NYPD upgrading their phone systems and requiring call logs; and later the rollout of the 911 system.
But it also ties back into bystander effects because one of the ways to break through a bystander effect is to teach people a very clear, memorable schema for taking action. "If you see X, do Y." "If you hear screaming, call 911."
Feral on
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
What psychology? The study of psychopathology. That's how you and I know we're different than BTK unless you had a bad time of it as a kid killing animals and wetting your bed.
Do all violent criminals have a history of killing animals and wetting their beds?
Do all children who killed animals and wet their beds grow up to be violent criminals?
Do both criteria have to be present - both killing animals and wetting their beds - or are they simply indicators?
If they are indicators, what traits are they indicators of?
You keep saying "it's psychology" but it's not really clear to me that you have a defensible model of violent behavior that invalidates anything Hannah Arendt said.
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
You keep saying "it's psychology" but it's not really clear to me that you have a defensible model of violent behavior that invalidates anything Hannah Arendt said.
the Reich using their loyal, true-believers to kill off their early followers, etc. There was a pretty huge confluence of events orchestrated from the top to make sure people of a certain mindset were in the positions they were.
You keep saying "it's psychology" but it's not really clear to me that you have a defensible model of violent behavior that invalidates anything Hannah Arendt said.
the Reich using their loyal, true-believers to kill off their early followers, etc. There was a pretty huge confluence of events orchestrated from the top to make sure people of a certain mindset were in the positions they were.
What was that mindset and how did it differ from what Arendt described in Eichmann in Jerusalem?
Neither loyalty nor being a "true believer" (in an Eric Hoffer sense) are incompatible with the banality of evil.
Feral on
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
You keep saying "it's psychology" but it's not really clear to me that you have a defensible model of violent behavior that invalidates anything Hannah Arendt said.
the Reich using their loyal, true-believers to kill off their early followers, etc. There was a pretty huge confluence of events orchestrated from the top to make sure people of a certain mindset were in the positions they were.
What was that mindset and how did it differ from what Arendt described in Eichmann in Jerusalem?
the number of Germans that fled when they saw the way their country was headed
I also gave an example of Gert Frobe, who stayed and used his position to help others, though. That suggests an essential difference, yes.
You keep saying "it's psychology" but it's not really clear to me that you have a defensible model of violent behavior that invalidates anything Hannah Arendt said.
the Reich using their loyal, true-believers to kill off their early followers, etc. There was a pretty huge confluence of events orchestrated from the top to make sure people of a certain mindset were in the positions they were.
What was that mindset and how did it differ from what Arendt described in Eichmann in Jerusalem?
the number of Germans that fled when they saw the way their country was headed
I also gave an example of Gert Frobe, who stayed and used his position to help others, though. That suggests an essential difference, yes.
Different behavior doesn't establish an essential difference in personality. That's fundamental attribution error. This is social psych 101 stuff here.
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
Posts
Of course most Germans weren't aware. The camps were built far away from the largest urban centers. They simply partook of the cheap soap and road tar that kept magically coming in.
I'm reminded of the episode of Band of Brothers where the villagers claim ignorance and the guy says, "How could you not know?!? It smells like burning meat and it's snowing ash!"
One of the points Arendt, who is not a guy, is trying to make via the argument is that our inability to conceive of the banality of evil is, itself, a problem.
You say that you "don't buy" the possibility of a person being a Nazi, shipping jews off to death camps, and thinking of it as a job. You don't think people could be indoctrinated that quickly. You don't consider it a possibility. It had to be the case that Nazis were frothing-at-the-mouth psychopaths.
And Arendt says, "Dude, Adolf Eichmann was just a normal guy. He wasn't a monster. He simply thought of himself as doing his job."
We try to protect ourselves by pretending that some qualitative, fundamental shift has to occur for a person to aid in death camps. But that is not the case. Eichmann was just, basically, an accountant. He was just doing his job. When we realize that, it becomes far more terrifying than what we take to be possible.
Perhaps you should read the book, rather than dismiss it out of hand.
I'm just saying I don't buy it. The BTK killer was a husband and church deacon for decades; didn't make his crime less horrible.
She didn't say it did. That was her point.
Why not?
For what reason do you take Arendt's observation to be impossible in principle?
Perhaps this is the confusion?
She's not denying that the acts were horrible.
She's stating that the persons who commit these acts are just normal people who conceived of themselves as doing their jobs.
Just because a person is an asshole psycho doesn't mean they walk around in soiled clothes, with bags under their eyes, muttering "Kill, kill, kill..." all the time.
Also, the entire idea of exterminating a race of people, just in conception, is psychotic. Maybe for low level people it was no more than a a "job' but it wasn't a job created in a vacuum. There was a huge culture of hatred developed toward the victims and a regime that used followers, than used more loyal followers to kill the first round of followers off.
Right. They're just normal people, like you and me, who do monsterous things.
That's the story we tell ourselves. They had to be qualitatively different from us, because we could never do that.
But they aren't like you and me. We don't exactly know what creates a psycho, whether it's all nature, all nurture, or some combo of both. I do know that I don't have the disturbed psycho-sexual make-up to murder people, and I'm guessing you don't either.
We're better people.
That's the story we tell ourselves. They had to be qualitatively different from us, because we could never do that.[/quote]
I didn't say 'we' (which I'm assuming you mean as a society) could never do that. What I'm pointing out is that unless you have a culture where you first use brown shirts, then off them using black shirts and have a regime headed by nothing by psychotics ordering this slaughter in mass and endlessly, in a vacuum it just doesn't occur by itself. If 'we' had all those mitigating factors, I, one, would leave the country like Einstein, Murnau, Dietrich, and a host of others did, but I'm sure that if 'we' were just like Nazi Germany 'we' could become like Nazi Germany.
So, you think that Adolf Eichmann was a monster.
And when Arendt, who actually saw the man, wrote
You think she is fundamentally mistaken, based upon your presupposition that Eichmann was a monster.
I'm going based on having current knowledge of someone like BTK who bound, tortured, and killed women...and was a loving husband and church deacon. For decades.
I'm going off the assumption that if he's not in a position to slaughter people, Eichmann probably put on his pants one leg at a time, read and enjoyed books, maybe preferred coffee over tea. Like BTK was a loving husband when he wasn't in some other town murdering someone.
This is, if anything, actually a more terrifying worldview than the banality of evil implies. You seem to be proposing that those who do evil are different, but appear identical until special circumstances allow their monstrosity to emerge. When you consider historical examples of monstrous behavior committed for ethnic, national, or religious reasons you frequently find a majority of the population participating. Equating Eichmann with BTK equates racist nationalism with psychotic sadism. So most (or at least many) people are closeted psychotic sadists, just waiting to be in a position to slaughter people.
This banality of evil stuff is a less terrifying topic of discussion than - or at least not as close to home as - the systematic torture perpetrated by my own countrymen. But maybe your ideas could soften the blow. Apparently our torturers are a bunch of deranged sadists who've latched onto a convenient reason to act out their fantasies, not deluded nationalists who earnestly believe that they are doing a necessary service for the defense of the United States. So I can safely view them as monsters unlike myself, a suitable target for my derision because I and people like me are fundamentally different from those others.
Actually, I am starting to come around to this worldview. More people should think this way. Maybe someday we'll all get together and just get rid of all the monsters. Wouldn't that be nice?
I think there's a problem in your conflation of a self-motivated serial killer with a person who is employed by the state to do bad things. I'm hardly an expert but these seem like markedly different things.
This is also true.
For reference, Eichmann's fundamental duties were making sure the trains to the concentration camps ran efficiently. He was also behind a lot of efforts to get them out of Germany before the Final Solution was implemented. And attended the Wannsee Conference, but was basically a secretary there.
He was a bureaucrat performing bureaucratic functions without thinking about them critically. There were two major points to her theory:
1) The Nazi leadership was not all psychotic, as was and is frequently believed.
2) The conditions of a modern state allowed ordinary people to commit terrible atrocities. People could just totally ignore morality because they were sufficiently detached from the results of their actions.
See also: economists/bankers in the last 10 years or the lawyers who approved torture, to end up closer to the theoretical topic.
John Yoo and David Addington are examples of the banality of evil. This motherfucker is just normal evil.
Being a psychopath doesn't necessarily mean one is a heinous murderer. It isn't a solid state of mind, and it seems somewhat problematic to conflate the condition with absolute evil.
I'm unsure of your line of reasoning regarding the nazi situation; are you suggesting there was a massive confluence of psychopaths that organized during this era? That would seem extremely unlikely.
My own opinion: the conclusions drawn from Milgram's experiments (and their replications) are far, far too broad. Yes, it is easy to get people to shock other people with doses of electricity that they are aware are non-lethal within a controlled environment. This is not the same thing as obeying a command to exterminate a chamber full of people, and Milgram (and proponents of the experiment) pretend that it is.
Moreover, some variations of the experiment yielded telling results: if a researcher is only communicating with someone via phone, they often refused to obey the command and /or claimed to obey while not 'shocking' anyone.
-.-
Well, Hitler was dying of syphilis & had suffered brain damage as a result of a mustard gas attack during his WWI tour, Goering was a morphine addict prone to violent outbursts at random and Goebbels was a crippled social pariah who seemed to resent everything around him. Some of Hitler's cabinet, of course, do seem to fit the description of ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances (Himmler being swept-up in the ecstasy of suddenly being a man of exceptional privilege, with all of the sex & luxury that comes alongside it; Rosenberg being provided bot a vehicle and platform for for his delusional Utopian ideas; Bormann being given the opportunity to live out his fantasy of hanging the sword of Damocles over the church), but it's unlikely we'd have had the holocaust or even the European theater of war without the outrageous elements within the Third Reich.
It's not a 'story'. Read the accounts of Hitler falling to his knees, during the favorable parts of his Eastern campaign, and biting into throw rugs. Read the account of Goebbels deciding that the most humane way to avoid capture was to have himself, his wife and his children machine-gunned to death. Watch Hitler's anti-Semitic speeches, or read Goebbels's radio addresses, and compare them to contemporaneous analogues. They are not representative of the norm. Read the accounts of the Beer Hall Putsch, where armed members of the German Socialist Worker's Party - with Hitler at the fore - attempted to seize the German parliament at gunpoint.
Those are some of the meatiest samplings of things not-quite-right in the Reichstag off of the top of my head, but the best arguments against the 'banality of evil', at least in the case of Germany, come from Bauer & Kwiet:
1) During the last fair election in Germany before Hitler took power, 63 percent of the population voted against the Germany Socialist Worker's Party. This in spite of all of the hardships imposed by the Versailles treaty, the rampant anti-Semitism of the time, the growing popularity of socialism (which the Nazis hijacked) and the ridiculous incompetence & corruption within the alternative offering.
The public saw Hitler for hat he was, and they rejected him, German pride be damned.
Moreover, this type of Jew-baiting was not new. Politicians in Germany had a decades-long knack for attempting to sway the masses with racist & ultra-nationalist rhetoric - but that rhetoric didn't manifest into a Holocaust or global conflict. So, what made the difference in 1920?
2) The aftermath of the Night of the Long Knives shows a clear distinction between Hitler and his closest allies vs the majority of the Nazi party. For the psychopaths in charge of the organization, the assassination of the brownshirts represented an ideological achievement; for those who were swept-up in the glory of the moment, it represented a sudden, frightening glimpse of who Hitler was and a threshold they hadn't realized that hubris as leading them across. Now that they were through it, there was no turning back (unless you were willing to throw away your life, and perhaps that of your family as well).
She didn't have access to the archive records & journals that we now do, of course, so I don't blame her for making speculations that turned-out to be incorrect: but she was incorrect.
You might consider reading Cesarani's 'Becoming Eichmann', where rather compelling evidence is presented in the form of personal letters that:
1) Eichmann was indeed vehemently anti-semitic and motivated by his racism.
2) Arendt herself was racist, and this informed her perspective on Eichmann's trial.
It's also worth noting that Arendt only witnessed fragments of the trial, and crucially, she did not witness Eichmann's defense.
Don't worry! We here in the US are working to make sure it becomes a violent, poverty stricken third world country. Give it some time!
This guy is not banal evil, he did set out to do terrible things, benefited from them and justifies them even when they are proven to be wrong.
Rodriguez is a vengeful fanatic plain and simple.
He differs from someone who is either in no position to really oppose the evil actions, like a soldier carrying out government programs, or in a position which gradually was turned to evil ends, like an accountant sending trains on time. He sought out to destroy people and brought torture along as a tool, ignoring the morality when directly faced with the choice to use it.
The difference is important because banal evil is something EVERYONE is vulnerable to and if you are in a position of power or authority you need to be constantly aware of possibly being part of some terrible action.
The lawyers that passed this shit off as legal are probably part of that, finding a way to justify torture sounds like a difficult challenge some lawyers would love to theorize about, while others would fear losing their jobs. The key is they probably did not want to actually torture someone or even be part of it, yet they were.
It does not really matter in terms of guilt, Eichmann should be just as guilty no matter what his motivation; however, it does matter in terms of both rehabilitation and more importantly prevention of these kinds of behaviors. (I am in no way implying Eichmann himself should have been rehabilitated but that some kinds of institutional crimes can be.)
Have you watched the videos recorded of the experiments? The subjects are given strong reason to believe that the person they are shocking has a heart attack.
They are "stories." Most of the accounts were written by people who weren't there, defended by people who want them to be true, as a desperate effort to avoid admitting that these inhuman monsters were, in fact, human. It's like the "hitler had one nut," theory, the "the highest-ranking SS were all homosexual deviant monsters," theory, and the "hitler was an atheist" idea. They take a few facts (sometimes not even that) and stretch the context and declare all the evils perpetrated by the nazis to be "circumstantial evidence." It uses the same principles as the 9/11 troofers to defend the underlying myth that the Nazis were somehow not human and that we are nothing like them.
Their actions? Their coup attempt? Oh yes those things (the ones that actually happened) were quite wild, but they were also the kind of things "normal" people do. Hell, you yourself mentioned "jew-baiting" and hate was a political tool in Germany (throughout Europe, really). Goebbels heard, correctly, that the Russian army raping and murdering its way to Berlin like this was medieval warfare and most accounts suggest morphine and cyanide, not machine guns. The Beer Hall Putsch? Not that different than other showy, flashy, romanticized "revolutions" and, in fact, Adolph Hitler did it specifically because he wanted to pretend he was starring in his own movie. If you haven't seen the "Hitler or Ann Coulter?" comparison quizzes...well that's probably for the best because the internet sucks BUT the fact remains that the biggest difference was Adolph Hitler's writings were more eloquent.
In all the history of WWII there were only fourteen accounts of Germans who were punished for refusing to carry out orders to kill Jews: nine were executed, four were sent to concentration camps, one was transferred to a military penal unit. Claims of coercion by force are almost completely unsubstantiated and particularly doubtful. I mean, I guess there could have been a whole lot of KP duty that didn't get reported, but that doesn't seem like it's in the same vein.
Were the leaders weird? Yeah. But they weren't weirder than any other person crazy enough to become a political leader. And Jose Rodriguez, who UNDENIABLY committed numerous acts of evil and villainy, is NOT a political leader. He is a proud and devoted soldier, his only real stand-out is that he is still publicly defending his actions, just like other criminals and monsters. He, like any other human being, rationalizes his behaviors as necessary and just.
That is the lesson, that is the horror. To admit that the greatest monster in the world is going to be completely human, is going to have an excuse, is going to be able to live with itself.
What I'm proposing is based on psychology. If we are all literally the same and some people just kill others and some don't then we've essentially ignored years of psychological study.
I wish we had detailed psychological profiles on the highest members of the Reich. Since that's impossible we can only speculate based on what we know. But the idea that there's just no way people with various levels of derangement could come to power in an organization that was in part based on mysticism strikes me as supremely hopeful in its thinking.
You can also compare Nazis with other Nazis like Gert Frobe (the guy who played Goldfinger) who used his tenure as a member of NASDAP to help German Jews escape the country.
What psychology, exactly?
No one is saying it is impossible that a person could be monstrous, and that this could drive them to commit evil despite their circumstance. It's easy to list serial killers and lunatics driven by their profound individual mental problems, who seem to be normal to most observers but are compelled to do the abnormal and the deviant in extreme, violent ways.
What people are saying is that a person can be normal and can be led to commit evil because of their circumstance, regardless of their mental normalcy. They are saying that evil can be institutionalized, that instead of a person committing evil because they are abnormal, they can commit evil because evil becomes part of what's normal. This is a pretty well-worn and well-demonstrated idea. A man who believes he is torturing people for the good of his nation seems like an excellent example of this.
That didn't actually happen, btw. In the famous incident you're referring to, the article that made it famous clevelrly left out a lot of details, like that the majority of the crime happened out of anyone's view or hearing, and that nevertheless practicality every person who had any clear witness of the event did in fact call 911 about it before the murder occurred.
There are several known similar psychological factors, such as hesitating to run to someone's aid if others around you can be seen not to act, or acting horribly so long as it ratchets up in small increments, or the ways authority can distort behavior on both sides. But there isn't really much evidence in experimentation or reality that someone sitting in their apartment wouldn't immediately cally the police if they suspected a crime being committed outside, especially a violent one.
EDIT: Ok Feral already said that a while ago.
Clearly we're not all literally exactly the same.
But that's also not what "banality of evil" means. Unfortunately, 'banality of evil' is getting conflated with a couple of other ideas in the thread.
"Banality of evil" simply means that horrendous acts can be motivated by responses to authority and social pressure; that the actor may not be any more predisposed than the average person to feelings of maliciousness or cruelty; and that the actor might not even feel responsible for his actions because he was responding to authority. It is the idea that "following orders" excuses the individual from personal moral culpability.
This does not necessarily describe all acts of violence - there are plenty of people who commit violence because they feel malicious and genuinely want to hurt people. (see: Nick Groth's Men Who Rape)
At the same time, there isn't a single separating factor that categorically distinguishes people who commit acts of violence from people who don't. There are only spectrums - propensity towards violence, empathy, responses to authority, impulse control. A person at one end of one of these spectrums is clearly different from a person at the opposite end, but when you try to separate people into buckets of "normal people" and "abnormal people" things start to get really messy. (see: Bad Men Do what Good Men Dream by Robert Simon)
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
What psychology? The study of psychopathology. That's how you and I know we're different than BTK unless you had a bad time of it as a kid killing animals and wetting your bed.
And I get that people are saying that. And I'm saying that for something to become institutionalized, a.k.a., "The way we do things around here," in only a few years is a position that includes ignoring the number of Germans that fled when they saw the way their country was headed, ignores the Reich using their loyal, true-believers to kill off their early followers, etc. There was a pretty huge confluence of events orchestrated from the top to make sure people of a certain mindset were in the positions they were.
I simply disagree with the idea that anyone can become this way, which is true only if you ignore all those mitigating factors I mentioned.
And like I said, I can more easily buy a "diminishing returns of evil" theory than a purely "banal" one. I don't see why the idea of people getting inured to what they are doing is harder to accept than them just doing it blindly from the get go.
A lot of people who join the military never think they could kill another person. That all changes when it becomes for the right cause. People, including those in the Milgram experiments, demonstrate time and time again they will do terrible, horrible things for a cause they feel is worthy of it.
Edit: And on those experiments Radiolab did an excellent piece surrounding them. Also a war criminal who felt he was doing the right thing.
Oh, no, I get that. I thought about editing my response to include that idea. It's actually preying on that psychology of getting people to kill. Once you get a soldier to get over that "hump" (apologies for the crudeness of speech regarding humanity) of killing their first enemy combatant, the rest do become easier. It also, like we see on Mad Men, makes a pretty strong argument for why we had such a culture of alcohol in the middle century following WWII and Korea.
I don't think anyone is capable of evil in any one circumstance, but everyone is likely capable of evil in SOME circumstance.
I also gave an example of Gert Frobe, who stayed and used his position to help others, though. That suggests an essential difference, yes.
Yeah, just to be clear, 911 didn't exist at the time. It was rolled out in stages over the 1970s.
At the time Kitty Genovese was murdered, if you wanted the police, you usually dialed zero and asked for the operator to connect you, or phone books would have a page of emergency numbers that you would cut out and put by the phone or on the fridge or something. But in a big city, different people might be calling entirely different numbers - they might be calling different departments at one police department building, or they might be calling different buildings entirely. And there was no consistent process (manual or technical) for tracking these calls and where they were going. Some lines might have call logs, some wouldn't; sometimes somebody would pick up the phone, sometimes they wouldn't, etc.
This is historically important because some of the big ripple effects from the Genovese incident were, first, the NYPD upgrading their phone systems and requiring call logs; and later the rollout of the 911 system.
But it also ties back into bystander effects because one of the ways to break through a bystander effect is to teach people a very clear, memorable schema for taking action. "If you see X, do Y." "If you hear screaming, call 911."
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Do all violent criminals have a history of killing animals and wetting their beds?
Do all children who killed animals and wet their beds grow up to be violent criminals?
Do both criteria have to be present - both killing animals and wetting their beds - or are they simply indicators?
If they are indicators, what traits are they indicators of?
You keep saying "it's psychology" but it's not really clear to me that you have a defensible model of violent behavior that invalidates anything Hannah Arendt said.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
What was that mindset and how did it differ from what Arendt described in Eichmann in Jerusalem?
Neither loyalty nor being a "true believer" (in an Eric Hoffer sense) are incompatible with the banality of evil.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Different behavior doesn't establish an essential difference in personality. That's fundamental attribution error. This is social psych 101 stuff here.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.