the banality of evil
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Now far be it from me to say that that has happened to any human being whom I have ever met; there is a lot more latent capacity for good in most people than appears on the surface. Nevertheless, it is a possibility that a person will let himself be so mastered by his desires that he will lose all ability to resist them, and lose any belief that it would be good to do so. It is the extreme case of what we have all often seen; people increasingly mastered by desires so that they lose some of their ability to resist them, and some of their sensitivity to the goodness of doing so. The less we impose our order on our desires, the more they impose their order on us. We may describe a person in this situation of having lost his capacity to overrule his desires as having ‘lost his soul.’
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I too hesitate to declare any man beyond redemption—but it is hard to think of a more plausible candidate than Eichmann. His incomprehensible moral blindness, his exasperating equanimity and narrow-mindedness—these things are perfectly consistent with his having lost the most essential property of his humanity: his conscience. M. Scott Peck has said that disgust and confusion are the normal response of a healthy psyche in the presence of evil. And this may be why the creature in the glass box in Jerusalem could have no meaningful commerce with his human interrogators: It was no longer human.
“Eichmann went to the gallows with great dignity,” reports Arendt. “He was in complete command of himself; nay, he was more: He was completely himself. Nothing could have demonstrated this more convincingly than the grotesque silliness of his last words. He began by stating emphatically that he was a Gottgläubiger, to express, in common Nazi fashion, that he was no Christian and did not believe in life after death. He then proceeded: ‘After a short while, gentleman, we shall meet again.’” Arendt’s surmises that this obvious self-contradiction is best explained by Eichmann’s vacuity of mind. Unable to summon remarks worthy of the occasion, he was drawing on the clichés of funeral oratory. “It was as though in those last minutes he was summing up the lesson that this long course in human wickedness had taught us—the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.”