On Evil

What is evil? by Hannah Arendt

"Arendt travelled to Jerusalem to cover the Eichmann trial. She expected to encounter a cold calculating monster (...). Instead what she found was something far more shocking. Eichmann was an altogether innocuous and seemingly normal little man - in some sense, he was a cliché, a stereotypical bureaucrat, a sort of sleepwalker in life, a person who refused to comprehend the weight of his crimes. (...) What Arendt found was a man that was thoughtless, that never stopped to put himself in someone else's shoes; someone with an unquestioning sense of obligation to authority, who all his life had been a follower, a person eager to fit in. He suffered from blind allegiance and self-deception about the morality of his actions. This made Arendt rethink the concept of evil. What she encountered was the banality of evil, an everyday sort of evil: a bureaucrat eager to do his job - one who lacked empathy or perspective."