Hannah Arendt
The banality of evil
Not wicked, just not thinking
Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 1963
What kind of state is I only follow the list and never ask why. What she saw in the courtroom changed her mind.
What actually happened?
She went to Jerusalem in 1961 expecting a monster and found a mediocre man. He spoke almost entirely in officialese and stock phrases, could not produce a sentence of his own, and returned again and again to duty, orders, and the promotions he had missed. She gave the thing a name: the banality of evil — done not out of wickedness but because he had never thought about it. His most striking feature, she wrote, was not stupidity. It was thoughtlessness: the whole faculty of judgement handed over, with only execution kept back.
Doing what the list says is a choice, and the cheapest one
Not asking why is not neutral; it hands judgement to whoever wrote the list. It is cheap because you owe nothing to the outcome. It is dangerous because you become the executing mechanism for any list at all.
The more times you say I was told to do it this way, the faster your own judgement shrinks.
Stock phrases are the symptom
She noticed the man had no language of his own, only ready-made formulas. That is what a formula is for: when there is a sentence available to say, nothing has to be thought. Someone who speaks only in stock phrases has mostly stopped thinking.
Listen to the words you use when explaining your own job. If every one of them is off the shelf, that part has been asleep a while.
Not thinking is a trained habit
She insists the man was not born that way; he arrived there one step at a time. Every unasked question, every order simply carried out, reinforced it. The reverse is equally a habit: stopping once to ask why this is set this way builds the other one.
Once a day, take one thing you do by the list and ask why it is set that way. Not to change it — to keep that part awake.
How do I use it today?
Where you are: your work is mostly done by the list, and you can say less and less about why any of it is set that way.
Ask first: which steps here can I actually explain? When I describe my job, am I using my own words or off-the-shelf ones?
Where it goes wrong: reading it as everyone who carries out orders is guilty, or using it to judge the colleague who follows procedure — she is describing a state, not assigning blame; and it is not a call to question everything, only to keep the ability to stop and think.
Lines to keep
Not done out of wickedness. Done without ever having thought.
The more you say I was told to, the less judgement remains.
A stock phrase saves you the trouble of thinking one up.
Same situation, other people are asking
I do what the list says and I have stopped asking why.None of the rules here are mine. Is anything still mine?I just do what I'm told · all 2 questions →If this one named what you are going through,
send it to someone who needs it, or keep it somewhere you will find it again.