On Evil
We should not be afraid to use the correct word, no matter how banal it may be.
Good and evil are not concepts I have historically found much use for. As an atheist, I’ve always found these terms to be reductive and unhelpful, generally reserved for religious and political grifters to scapegoat people who don’t conform to their supernatural rulebooks. Human beings are not D&D characters, they are complex beings motivated by a matrix of overlapping and often contrary influences, based in environmental and genetic factors.
However, throughout history, certain movements and people have committed such grandiose acts of violence against our collective identity as human beings that they have been effectively turned into universal synonyms for evil.
I was not raised with a fear of a wrathful god, or that I would be “left behind” if I didn’t do my homework, but I was provided enough of an emotional and intellectual understanding of the world and other humans that I could develop my own sense of right and wrong, basically a secular version of the Golden Rule. “Do unto others” is a pretty strong foundation for morality as it turns out.
When I learned about the Holocaust as a nine-year old child—from television, incidentally—I was profoundly affected. My own experience with being bullied had given me a pretty good idea that human beings were capable of a range of terrible behavior, but this threw a cold splash of water on my own sense of victimhood and showed me just how much worse people could be.
I didn’t learn until much later, and didn’t really absorb fully until the last few years, the story of my own Jewish grandparents, whose families were scapegoated as evil by the Russian White Army—as Bolsheviks and communists—and forced to come to America through violent pogroms a century ago. This same myth was recycled by the man most synonymous with the word “evil,” Adolf Hitler, to generate the requisite conditions for the Holocaust—with an assist from an antisemitic, narcissistic American oligarch with a fancy new kind of car, Henry Ford.
Henry Ford, Elon Musk & The Dearborn Independent of the 21st Century
Cult leaders and dictators have always created alternate realities based on fear, so they can control people with it. They identify an enemy, regardless of whether the scapegoat is guilty of anything, dehumanize it — and drain their victims of labor and resources to “fight” the boogeyman. Historically, authoritarian cults have had to physically isolate …
Our collective consciousness has a blind spot for evil, partly because it seems so, as Hannah Arendt said about Nazi Adolf Eichmann, banal.
“…what she found was not a figure of radical, awful, evil, but a small, rather pompous man – talking in cliches, self-important and radically unable to think about where he was and who he was talking about. Eichmann was banal. This didn't mean he was not evil – he was definitely evil – but that the evil he represented is going to be far more difficult to counter. Eichmann was thoughtless. He was the kind of guy who sat next to you at a wedding and talked through you, looked through you, unaware that you were there. Eichmann couldn't grasp the world that was full of plural, different people. So he eliminated a section of it. This evil, Arendt said, this thoughtless evil had got into our culture and was spreading like fungus.”
No one wants to admit they are “evil” so they will find rationales for doing evil things. It is these rationales that spread like “fungus.”
The rationale for the evils of Nazi Germany was that society had become too “weak,” that it needed cleansing of degeneracy to restore order. Jews were a convenient scapegoat because much of the groundwork had already been laid, as my grandparents would have told you, by imperialist Russians. The banality of the Holocaust is that it was founded on an act of plagiarism, a man and a movement too bereft of creativity to come up with a new lie or a new scapegoat.
But as Arendt predicted, the fungus never stopped growing and it never stopped being banal. The regime that captured the American government is categorically evil, proudly so, exquisitely so. Nevertheless, we still can’t quite seem to put a finger on it. It’s a remarkable thing to witness.
Here’s a very short clip of the current iteration of evil, in all its banality—the richest man in the world, with professional propagandist Joe Rogan.
“The fundamental weakness of western civilization is empathy. The empathy exploit. They’re exploiting a bug in western civilization, which is the empathy response.”
This is a truly remarkable statement, betraying either a fundamental, and dangerous, misunderstanding of human beings, and civilization, or something even worse—the intentional spreading of the “fungus” Arendt described seeing in the eyes of Adolf Eichmann, the metastasis of evil.
Another Arendt quote is important here:
“The death of human empathy is one of the earliest and most telling signs of a culture about to fall into barbarism.”
This is undoubtedly true, as any cursory reading of the history of dictatorships and genocides will tell you. Dehumanization, as Mike Flynn wrote about in his manual for teaching civilians how to perform psychological operations aka “fifth generation warfare,” comes right before killing.
Elon Musk knows this. Barbarism, and killing, is his goal.
Last night, Elon Musk, posted a clip of himself doing a non-denial denial of his true beliefs. He says he couldn’t possibly be a “Nazi” because Nazis only “invade Poland.” He says being a Nazi is not about “their mannerisms and their dress code”—like a Hitler salute—but about starting wars and enacting genocide.
In other words, exactly what this regime is already doing.
That’s why capitulation by the likes of Chuck Schumer, who had the audacity to be on a tour for a book warning about antisemitism when he bent down before Elon Musk and Donald Trump, proves that evil, banal as it is, is non-partisan. That’s why the silence of the corporate media, establishment politicians and the greater punditocracy about the true purpose of this regime will, unless something drastic happens, prove Arendt to be not just a German-Jewish historian and philosopher, but a prophet of American evil.
Long Live a Free America and a Free World. Glory to Ukraine.
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Jim, this is one of your best pieces! Yes, we're faxing Evil, and yet most Americans, especially the Press, are treating tRump/Musk/Vance/Theil like just another Republican administration.
The best definition of evil I've come across is that it consists of treating a person as an "it" rather than as a "thou," dehumanizing other human beings out of either hatred, sadism, or indifference. That's what's happening now.
I watched Chuck Schumer interviewed about his collaboration with the GOP, and although I could tell that he sincerely believed what he was doing was for the best, I wanted to reach into the TV, grab him by the collar, shake him, and ask him, "Remember the Judenrat in the Warsaw Ghetto? The Jewish collaborators who helped the Nazis because they were sure that if they didn't, the Nazis would behave even more barbarically?"
My wife and I are also descended from refugees who came to America early in the 20th century, and my grandfather was a war crimes investigator for the U.S. Army in Europe in World War II. We've both studied history for decades and are angry and scared at the "It can't happen here" complacency, even now, of so many. Oh, yes it can.
I served on active duty as a Marine for twenty years to protect our Constitution against "all enemies, foreign and domestic." It's in more danger right now than at any time since the Civil War, maybe even since the War of 1812, and those "enemies foreign and domestic" have begun to blur together so much that it's hard to tell who is which.