The banality of moral and intellectual evil

Thomas Harding:

To paraphrase Hannah Arendt—as portrayed in the recently released movie of the same name—the Nazi war criminal’s actions stemmed from her well-known phrase “banality of evil,” not as a result of mental illness but as a result of a lack of thinking. 

Their greatest error was delegating the process of thinking and decision-making to their higher ups. In Rudolf Höss’s case, this would have been his superiors, particularly Heinrich Himmler.

To many this conclusion is troubling, for it suggests that if everyday, “normal,” sane men and women are capable of evil, then the atrocities perpetrated during the Holocaust and other genocides could be repeated today and into the future.

Yet, this is exactly the lesson we must learn from the war criminals at Nuremberg. We must be ever wary of those who do not take responsibility for their actions. (emphasis added) 

And we ourselves must be extra vigilant, particularly in this day of accelerated technological power, heightened state surveillance, and global corporate reach, that we do not delegate our thinking to others.

Rob's comment:

It goes deeper than thinking. It's a failure of moral imagination when we demonize our enemies, real and imagined. That led the United States to develop "anti-personnel" weapons, like napalm and cluster bombs, which of course the Trump administration has embraced.

During World War II there was the British-American saturation bombing of German cities and the US firebombing of Tokyo, not to mention Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And we were supposedly the good guys!

In the US today, what's the moral/intellectual/emotional process that leads so many conservatives to confuse toughness with cruelty? 

Only their therapists and maybe their significant others know the answer. But it has its origins not only in intellectual deficiency, but in some kind of psycho-sexual deformity as described by Wilhelm Reich.

Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil

The Mass Psychology of Fascism

The Responsibility of Peoples