That’s not at all what Arendt was writing about. She was writing about those who do evil things are rarely the “evil” monsters we imagine but rather bureaucrats motivated by things like promotions. Hard to remain motivated to consume an article after reading this in the opening.
In that sense, I can understand part of what the article is claiming. The phrase 'it was a great gig' seems to be the core of what it was trying to say. The high salary, the Mercedes, the abundant food supplies all point to the fact that the source of that funding came from the dictatorship.
An individual can be moral, but the system numbs them. That is why evil is not interesting; its desires are too simple. Wanting to earn more money, wanting to beat someone else, becoming consumed by such things. But in that regard, good is interesting. Because it means overcoming one's own contradictions, striving for the greater good, or even sacrificing one's life for the sake of everyone.
While I fully accept that "the banality of evil" has become such a well-known aphorism that it's meaning may have shifted, this is not how Hannah Arendt introduced the saying. She was specifically talking about Adolf Eichmann and what motivated him. Eichmann wasn't some low-level cog "numbed by the system" - he was the logistical architect of the Holocaust, and he knew his actions would lead to the deaths of millions of people.
What Arendt meant by "the banality of evil" was that Eichmann wasn't motivated by a rabid hatred of Jews. He just wanted to get his promotion, move ahead, make money, etc. But, again, he knew his actions would murder millions, he just didn't care. He wasn't "broken down by the system", he was the system.
"The banality of evil" really is talking about motivation in Arendt's use of it. Often times we think of "evil" as needing to be motivated by fanatical hatred, but a lot of the time it's just motivated by a desire for a nicer car.
Some people have a different moral framework. Some people think Saddam’s brutal dictatorship was for the better because it finally brought stability. When forced to choose between stability and freedom, they choose stability.
There are also just simply amoral people too who just don’t care.
So I wouldn’t automatically assume someone working in an “evil” regime as “trapped as a cog” — they might frankly be OK with it. This is why sometimes just cutting off the head doesn’t enact change.
Spot on!
Your comment explains why massive bureaucracies can get nearly anything done, because people are just following orders. For example Jallianwala Bagh (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jallianwala_Bagh), the people shooting were just following orders. Nearly all atrocities can be explain by the design of bureaucracies to eliminate moral friction.
Reminds me of Vogons[1] and Nobody cares[2]
[1] Here is what to do if you want to get a lift from a Vogon: forget it. They are one of the most unpleasant races in the Galaxy. Not actually evil, but bad-tempered, bureaucratic, officious and callous. They wouldn't even lift a finger to save their own grandmothers from the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal without orders—signed in triplicate, sent in, sent back, queried, lost, found, subjected to public inquiry, lost again, and finally buried in soft peat for three months and recycled as firelighters. The best way to get a drink out of a Vogon is to stick your finger down his throat, and the best way to irritate him is to feed his grandmother to the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal. On no account should you allow a Vogon to read poetry at you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogon
[2] https://grantslatton.com/nobody-cares and discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42707238
I see this over and over again on HN: pick the weakest sentence, attack it, proclaim the article is rubbish, and move on. Why? There are no internet points awarded for maximum drive-by cynicism.
Clearly there are - the comment is like first or second most upvoted here.
It's to heuristically filter content on quality to optimize information consumption, i.e. concluding early: "This is probably not going to be worth my time, because this author seems to make fairly trivial easily avoidable mistakes (or something similar)". I appreciate the signal from other people here, even if it is not always accurate.
There is a lot of content to filter through nowadays.
> By most measures, theirs was a great gig – logic that can excuse almost anything. “Saddam’s chef got a car every year,” Neel says. “That phrase, ‘it was a great gig,’ I think, actually runs the world. Like, ‘It was just business.’”
I’d say they understood the meaning.
> “It goes back to Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil a bit,” says director Andrew Neel. “These everyday things that are beloved to us, like food, can take on an entirely different dimension within the context of a dictatorship.”
Is still a misquote/misrepresentation. People can understand a subject but still say wrong things about it.
> Hard to remain motivated to consume an article after reading this in the opening.
I think it's unfortunate to be so dismissive of an article over one quote from one person that you disagree with. You can still get something out of the piece if you open your mind a bit.
> In Eichmann Before Jerusalem (2014), the German historian Bettina Stangneth reveals another side to him besides the banal, seemingly apolitical man, who was just acting like any other ‘ordinary’ career-oriented bureaucrat. Drawing on audiotapes of interviews with Eichmann by the Nazi journalist William Sassen, Stangneth shows Eichmann as a self-avowed, aggressive Nazi ideologue strongly committed to Nazi beliefs, who showed no remorse or guilt for his role in the Final Solution – a radically evil Third Reich operative living inside the deceptively normal shell of a bland bureaucrat. Far from being ‘thoughtless’, Eichmann had plenty of thoughts – thoughts of genocide, carried out on behalf of his beloved Nazi Party. On the tapes, Eichmann admitted to a sort of Jekyll-and-Hyde dualism:
I, ‘[t]he cautious bureaucrat,’ that was me, yes indeed. But … this cautious bureaucrat was attended by a … a fanatical [Nazi] warrior, fighting for the freedom of my blood, which is my birthright… Arendt completely missed this radically evil side of Eichmann when she wrote 10 years after the trial that there was ‘no sign in him of firm ideological convictions or of specific evil motives’. This only underscores the banality – and falsity – of the banality-of-evil thesis. And though Arendt never said that Eichmann was just an innocent ‘cog’ in the Nazi bureaucracy, nor defended Eichmann as ‘just following orders’ – both common misunderstandings of her findings on Eichmann – her critics, including Wolfe and Lipstadt, remain unsatisfied.
https://aeon.co/ideas/what-did-hannah-arendt-really-mean-by-...
But, uh, I don't think I'll necessarily assign that level of moral gravity to chef.
The subject is interesting, which is why I clicked the link in the first place. I might check out the documentary. But the misunderstanding/loose invocation of Arendt is a turnoff imo
We started doing this years ago after realizing that book review titles often do pirouettes on top of the book being reviewed; it's kind of a minor art form (a very minor art form!) but it doesn't serve the reader who just wants to know what-is-this.
I wouldn't call the OP title a pirouette, but the pattern of following HN's original-title rule through an extra hop (from the review to the thing being reviewed) has held up so well that we do it pretty consistently now.
It's amazing how many sub-cases like this there are. Who would have thought that reviews need to be handled differently from non-reviews, but it actually does work better.
