What If Your Job Was Killing People?

In this episode of American Socrates, we dig into Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem and her famous idea of the “banality of evil.” Arendt argued that great wrongs can be carried out not just by monsters, but by ordinary people who fail to think critically about their actions. What does this mean for the rest of us—especially in today’s political climate?

From Nazi Germany to Trump’s America, this episode asks: What is our responsibility when our leaders do wrong? Can clear thinking really protect us from going along with injustice? And how do we stay human when the system tells us not to ask questions?

Whether you're new to political philosophy or just trying to make sense of the world, this one's for you.

Transcript

Imagine yourself playing the big soccer game, you're on the field. Is there anything that you can do that won't either help your team or hurt them? That's the question that we're going to be asking today. What is your level of responsibility inside a political order? Because we want to know. What if the greatest evil isn't done by monsters but by ordinary people just going along with it? What if the scariest thing about mass violence isn't the hate but the thoughtlessness in this episode, we're going to dive into Hannah Arendt's controversial idea of the banality of evil.
Welcome back to American Socrates. Today, we're talking about what this means for political responsibility. When does obedience, routine and detachment become dangerous? I want to know, what does it take to really think in dark times? To get us started, I think we actually need to go back to Plato. Plato had told us that there's this important difference we need to pay attention to between appearances and reality. We need to understand that sometimes things can look one way but actually be another, and then we can use that idea to try and make sense of the world. So in this sense, Plato's sense, appearances turn out to be bad things. They are obstacles that we need to get around to get to a deeper reality.
Arendt is going to disagree with Plato. She's going to try and sort of redeem appearances by simply saying that they are the things that experience is made of. So our perspectives are not our enemy here, our perspectives are incredibly important. They are what we use to come to know any sense of reality, whether it's appearance or some sort of deeper knowledge. What she has in mind here is the idea that the only thing that you come to know as reality is simply another appearance, or, should we say, maybe a better informed appearance. So I want to read a quote from her here where she's talking about this sort of perspectivism that she is getting into, especially as it comes to political thinking. She writes that political thought is representative. I form an opinion by considering a given issue from different viewpoints, by making present to my mind the standpoints of those who are absent. That is, I represent them. This process of representation does not blindly adopt the actual views of those who stand somewhere else and hence look upon the world from a different perspective. This is a question neither of empathy, as though I try to be or to feel like somebody else, nor of counting noses and joining a majority, but of being and thinking in my own identity, where actually I am not, the more people's standpoints I have present in my mind, the stronger will be my capacity for representative thinking. Okay, what she means by this is, when we think politically, we need to think about it from as many points of view as we possibly can. And she doesn't mean here that you suddenly imagine yourself as something that you're not like. If you're a white man, you cannot pretend to be a black man. If you are a woman, you cannot pretend to be a guy. So the idea here is not that you're thinking about things from a point of view that is entirely alien to you, because you're never gonna be able to do that. The point here is that you are thinking about yourself as though you were one of those things. What would it be like for me if I was in this position of this person, so, like, if we were gonna analyze something like race-based slavery in the antebellum United States, we could say, like, well, as a white person, what would it be like for me and my family, were we slaves? I'm not thinking about it from the point of view of being black. I'm thinking about it from the point of view of being me in that situation. That is political thought for Arendt; that is how we come to know political truths. We imagine ourselves in someone else's situation. So in the 1960s, Hannah Arendt was hired by Life magazine to cover the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. He had escaped after the war and made it to South America, where he had hidden out for quite some time, but then was eventually captured by Mossad and brought back to Israel. Trial, Hannah went there and watched the trial and ended up writing a book about her experiences. In that book, she deals with like who this guy is, and that's what we're going to take a look at now. All right, we're going to need a little background though to understand Eichmann's position here, we have to understand what was going on in Germany at the time. So there's this Jewish question that the Germans were wrestling with. And the question is basically, what do we do with the Jews? Right? We could say, in contemporary America right now, like we have an immigrant question, what do we do with immigrants? Anyway? There were multiple solutions to this. The first solution that the Third Reich came up with was to ban immigration and to deport foreign Jews. We don't want these Jews here. They're not our Jews, getting rid of them, and no more Jews would be allowed into the country. The second solution, when that one didn't work, was ghettoization. Well, maybe we just need to round up all the Jews and make them all live in like certain pre-designated neighborhoods, we'll cram them in. We'll have seven families living in a one-bedroom apartment, that kind of thing. And when that didn't work, that wasn't concentrated enough, they moved on to built concentration camps. So there would be these little camps, like military style camps, in which the Jews would have to live. Well, that didn't solve all of Germany's problems, either, and so they moved on to a third and final solution, which probably most of us are familiar with, and that's the idea of extermination. So it starts with banning immigration and deportation, moves on to concentration, and then finally ends in extermination. Now, Adolf Eichmann participated in this as a member of the SS. He was an Obersturmführer who organized the transfer of people to different concentration camps. He was essentially the train master who allowed people to move from or not allow, but scheduled people to move from one camp to another, and this included death camps such as Auschwitz, where it was his job to make sure that they had enough people to kill. The interesting thing about Eichmann Arendt says is that he was not particularly anti-Semitic. He didn't really hate Jews. This was just his job. And he said that over and over again at his trial, he was only doing his job. She writes, he did his duty. He not only obeyed orders, he also obeyed the law, and that's going to be the problem for us in this particular essay, Eichmann broke no laws, so he's not a criminal in the traditional sense. The final solution was the law in Germany, and Eichmann was a sworn deputy of the state tasked with carrying it out. So how do we prosecute a person like that? Arendt basically argues that we have a court here and we've got a criminal, but we lack a crime. She writes that a great crime offends nature so that the very earth cries out for vengeance, that evil violates a natural harmony which only retribution can restore, and that a wronged collectivity owes a duty to the moral order to punish the criminal. But she says that this is a rather uncritical position, and she criticizes the Israeli court for assuming it is the law. It, she says, only expresses what every man's conscience would tell him anyway. This is vengeance, not justice. And so she wants to know who was the real victim here. She says it's not primarily the Jews or the communists or the Poles or the gypsies or the homosexuals or the mentally disabled. These groups were indubitably harmed, but they were harmed with legal authority and sanction. So it's not a crime in that sense. How would we then judge a whole country for choosing its own laws, or for the citizens of that country for obeying their own laws? Now she says that the real victim here is mankind in its entirety. Hence, these are crimes against humanity. The court Arendt says, mostly ignores this. In fact, she imagines the judge saying, just as you supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to share the earth with the Jewish people and the people of a number of other nations, as though you and your superiors had any rights to determine who should and should not inhabit the world, we find that no one that is no member of the human race can be expected to want to share the earth with you. This is the reason, and the only reason, you must hang so Eichen repu Tates, essential fact of human life, in Arendt's opinion, that men, not man, live on the earth and inhabit the world. By which she means, it's not this ideal form of you know mankind, that we're talking about here, but the individual perspectives of individual human beings. This is interesting, because what she's trying to say is only in the presence of other people do human beings exist as human beings, and not me.
Merely as say, animate things, or, you know, so much flesh, so much bile, so much stomach acid, so on and so forth. So it's only through these other people, this sense of them, seeing us for who we are, that we get to be human. And it's also through these different perspectives that we come to know both ourselves and reality. A good, quick way to understand this is the idea that without checking with anybody else, it would be impossible for you to tell if you were insane or not.
And so the idea here is that the rest of the human race acts as some kind of mirror in which we can reflect not only ourselves, but our sense of reality.
This is because she says that human beings can take action in the world. We can bring new state into the world. You know, we can imagine things. We can make things up, but by treating them as if they're real, as acting as if those distinctions matter. We can make things real. For acts to be real, we need to acknowledge them and other people have to acknowledge them as well. To call someone the king means that other people have to recognize them as the king. No one can be the king if no one believes that they're the king, if everyone else just says, like, well, you're not the king. The guy who's claiming to be the king is just a guy with a funny-looking metal hat. So she asks, was Eichmann simply unlucky? Here she imagines herself talking to Eichmann, saying, You told your story in terms of a hard luck story, and knowing the circumstances we are up to a point willing to grant you that under more favorable circumstances, it is highly unlikely that you would have ever come before us or before any criminal court. It was nothing more than misfortune that made you a willing instrument in the organization of mass murder. So for Arendt, Eichmann's crime is somewhat formal. It's not what he, the individual, did. It's the organization that he was a part of. He and others, she says, attempted to destroy the space between people and to control who will see what they had done. In other words, the Nazis wanted to control appearances. They wanted to make things look a certain way so that people will believe a certain thing, they will then make those actions real. Consider this line from George Orwell, who wrote, He who controls the present controls the past, and he who controls the past controls the future. The idea here is, is, if you can control appearances, if you can make things look a certain way, you can get people to act a certain way, and through that action, they will make manifest the things that you desire. So the threat of Nazism, then, for rent, is that they threaten the possibility condition of being human. They take the ability for us to be recognized, for certain people to be recognized as humans and strip that away. This is not a matter of saying like, well, these people are bad. Let's kill them. That's too simple. What it's saying is is these people don't deserve the status of being human. And because they don't deserve the status of being human, whatever happens to them doesn't matter. They're like cockroaches. The cockroaches aren't human. You can smash them with your foot if you want to. No one's going to put you in prison for that. That's the crime here, removing our ability to recognize someone as human through this propaganda, through this law and order and this whole system. So Arendt judges it kind of like this. She says, the longer one listened to him, meaning Eichmann, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected to an inability to think, namely to think from the standpoint of somebody else. And despite all of 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 whole enterprise and was also hard to sustain in the view of the suffering that he and his like had caused to millions of people. His worst clowneries were hardly noticed and almost never reported. Eichmann is not a monster. Eichmann is a clown. He's a useful idiot. He's a bureaucratic, good fellow who just wants to shine in his job. He wants to be praised for the work that he does. He wants to go home with a good paycheck and a gold star on his report card. It was just unfortunate for him that his work happened to be genocide. However, he and the rest of Germany believed that it was necessary. It was vital that they were saving Germany. Eichmann's real crime, then, according to Arendt, was that he was uncritical. He made no effort to consider what he was doing from any perspective other than his own. He may even have lacked the capacity to consider it. This makes him very useful to the powers that be. If someone wants to go around consolidating power, killing off their enemies and things like that. They're going to need help. The thing that separates Hitler as the house painter and Hitler as de Fuehrer were the useful idiots. They're the ones who gave him all the power. They're the ones who never questioned, who never looked at anything from any perspective other than their own. That kind of attitude, that kind of ignorance, allowed them to commit the greatest atrocities and just go home and have dinner. They never had to worry about it. They never had to think about it. And if they did, the Nazis would be there to support them and to tell them that what they were doing was right and that they are their true heroes. But mostly those sorts of people were weeded out. It was the useful idiots who were promoted, the fools who were loyal rather than smart. So where does this leave us? She says that such evil calls out for retribution, but the monsters have all escaped. They've all committed suicide or killed during the war, and we have only been left with the useful idiots. So this brings me back to the idea of political responsibility. We are all responsible for our political actions. I began this episode with the idea that you're on the soccer field, and if you're on the soccer field, there's really nothing you can do that isn't helping or hurting your team. The idea here is that when it comes to politics, there simply is no sideline. Everyone's on the field all the time. You're either for something or you're against it. There is no neutral position. There's no bench that you can sit on comfortably and be like, well, this doesn't affect me, so it doesn't matter. That is not how politics work. You have to imagine yourself in all of the different positions, or you are being a useful idiot. So she says, When our governments act, we are responsible for determining our level of approval or disapproval, and we can't be absolved of that responsibility. In this case, Eichmann is responsible, then for his actions in carrying out unethical orders he chose to follow without critically thinking about it, and his imbecility then makes him a mundane villain, one that Arendt understands to be far more dangerous than any kind of radical evil person. It's not the Charles Mansons or the Reinhard Heydrichs of the world who are really the problem. It's the Adolf Eichmanns. It's the useful idiots, because those people go around and empower these radically evil people to do the greatest of atrocities. There is no way they could have done such a thing without the support and help of a bunch of uncritical fools. So this is the idea, she says, of the banality of evil. Evil is not twisting its mustache and laughing maniacally. Evil is just doing your job without asking any questions. It's not wondering whether this is right or not. It's just following orders because there's a $60,000 paycheck in it and potentially a promotion, if you just keep your mouth shut and do a good job of kissing in the boots of the person above you. So what makes the banal so dangerous is that they're merely going along with evil, and they're just happy to be of service. These are ordinary people just trying to get by in their lives, in their efforts, thanks, in a large part, to the constructions of a few empowered individuals who are radically evil, these people will ultimately commit the most terrible atrocities. Think about it. It's highly unlikely that Hitler ever killed anyone, but it was through his actions, his getting these other people to act, that millions of people were executed, millions it's the banality of evil then that makes it so dangerous, we tend to be pre-programmed for obedience to authority. Take the Stanley Milgram experiment. If you want. Milgram tried to ask the question, why did so many Germans go along with the Third Reich's ideas? Why didn't any of them stop and say, Hey, this doesn't seem right, and so he created the experiments, you've probably heard of it, where he had people flipping switches trying to test whether or not negative reinforcement, in this case, electrical shocks, would increase their response rate answering questions on a quiz. In other words. So if you knew you were going to get punished, would you try and do better? At least that's what the people thought that they were being tested for. In reality, the question was to see how far they would go in the switches. It seems like you could go all the way to literally executing someone by electrocuting them to death. In the name of science, in the experiment, he had a guy in a lab coat, the experimenter sit there telling the people that they had to flip the switches that they needed to go on, that this was about science, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And the question was, is, how many switches would they flip? How far would they go in the line? Everybody did it a little bit. What they found the first round of this was that about 60-some odd percent of people will go to a lethal dose. So that means you can get about 60% of people to kill other people just in the name of following the proper authorities, because they don't know what else to do. But different circumstances matter. Here he did varieties of experiments on this and in one of them, he removed the lab coat. Simply removing the lab coat dropped the number of people who were willing to obey. In other experiments, and my personal favorite, there was one experiment in which nobody went all the way. And in that experiment, the main difference was, is that there were two authorities. Each authority disagreed with the other. So you'd have one authority telling you you need to flip the switches. It was important, you know, the same speech that had gone on before, but the other one had a different speech in which he disagreed and said that you should stop that this was probably unethical. In that case, 0% of respondents went all the way.
This is the whole point of checks and balances in a government. The idea that you have multiple authorities and that they are in opposition to each other is what keeps us from going crazy as a people, from murdering each other, from seizing property from each other because somebody has been deemed an undesirable.
So in the end, what can we ask about Eichmann for? What can he be punished? Arendt rejects that his death can relieve anyone of the consequences of his actions. We're not bringing people back here. So killing him would do nothing in that sense. Nor would his death take away the pain of those who died or the trauma from those who survived, nor would it be a warning to anti Semites that this is what happens, nor would it be a lesson or a reminder of the existence of anti semitism, nor would it be a demonstration of Jewish or Israeli might, nor would it be a relief of the guilt of the German people, she says, rather, Eichmann's death simply cannot be seen as a punishment, which is what we do to human beings, what we do to individual law breakers. Rather, his death doesn't restore his humanity. It doesn't restore our humanity. Eichmann's death, then is really just retribution, and that doesn't do us any good. An alternative to this was not in a rent but comes years later in South African apartheid, and it was the idea of Desmond Tutu and President Nelson Mandela, the idea of Truth and Reconciliation,
the crime here was formal. The crimes that had been committed under apartheid were legal and sanctioned, and so punishing all of the people who act within authority seems like an equal wrong. So rather than killing them, the way the Israelis killed Eichmann, they came up with the alternative of simply having to come forward, testify publicly to the things that you had done, and then all would be forgiven. There would be no more punishment than that. Now, if you didn't do that, if you refused to do that, or you tried to hide some of the things you did past a certain date, then you could be prosecuted for those things, but as long as you came forward and just openly admitted, this is what I did, when under a time when this was legal, all would be forgiven. It's sort of a powerful reversal of that need for vengeance. It's a form of social forgiveness that's pretty rare, the idea that, yes, crimes were done, but we're going to forgive it, because we're going to move on.
So Hannah Arendt's warning wasn't just about one man or one regime, her real concern and maybe her gift to us is the idea that evil doesn't always come wearing a villain's cape. Sometimes it shows up in a tie or by wearing a badge. Shows up in the meeting rooms and at the desk. The banality of evil means ordinary people can become agents of horror, not because they hate people, but because they don't think about things. They just follow orders. They just obey the law. They do their jobs and they forget to ask what it is they're doing or who they're hurting.
Political responsibility isn't just about voting or protesting. It's about staying awake. It's about thinking from the perspective of other human beings. It's about refusing to outsource your conscience to an authoritarian system. So here's my call to action for you. Don't be Eichmann. Don't be the useful idiot. Be the one who asks questions. Be the one who notices when things are going wrong. Be the one who refuses to participate, who refuses to go along. Because if evil is banal, then resistance has to be brave, and it's going to have to start with you. Thanks for tuning in to American Socrates. If today's episode of philosophy got you thinking in new ways, make sure to subscribe. But you'll never miss an episode. New Full Episodes drop every Wednesday. If you enjoyed the show, leave a review. It helps others find us, and it means a lot. And if you know someone who could use a little more practical wisdom in their life, share this episode with them. Want more visit American socrates.buzzsprout.com for show notes, resources and exclusive content. You can also follow me on Facebook, Blue Sky or Tiktok to keep the conversation going until next time. Keep questioning everything you.