Something to ponder this morning.

[Mik]

I almost put this in Mildly Interesting, but thought it was too important. We see this today. It is unfathomable the number of people, some friends, condemning SCOTUS reining in of presidential power, just as they did with Biden and his student loan forgiveness under disguise of the emergency powers act. If anything, I see it as indication that our guardrails still work, despite his belligerence.

The glass booth was completely bulletproof.
It was 1961.
Jerusalem.
Inside the courtroom, a man was on trial for organizing the murder of millions of people. The world expected to see a monster. They expected a foaming, fanatical, terrifying demon of a man.

Sitting in the press gallery was a fifty-four-year-old philosopher reporting for The New Yorker. She had barely escaped the Holocaust herself.

She looked at the man in the booth. She didn't see a monster. She saw a terrifyingly boring, mediocre bureaucrat who spoke in cliches, had a terrible memory, and just wanted a promotion.

Her name was Hannah Arendt.
Hannah knew the face of fascism better than almost anyone. In 1933, as a brilliant young Jewish scholar in Germany, she had been arrested by the Gestapo for researching anti-Semitic propaganda.

She narrowly escaped to France, was thrown into an internment camp, escaped again, and fled to America as a stateless refugee. In 1951, she published The Origins of Totalitarianism, a massive, groundbreaking autopsy of how entire societies voluntarily surrender their freedom and descend into madness.

She was celebrated as one of the greatest political minds of her generation.
But her coverage of the trial in Jerusalem would nearly destroy her life.

When she published her resulting book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, she coined a phrase that would permanently alter how we understand human morality: "The banality of evil."

She argued that the greatest atrocities in history aren't committed by sociopaths or cartoon villains. They are committed by completely ordinary people who simply stop thinking. Adolf Eichmann wasn't a psychotic mastermind; he was a terrifyingly unthinking middle-manager who just followed the rules and wanted to please his bosses.

But she didn't stop there. She did the unthinkable.

She wrote with brutal, unflinching honesty about the Jewish councils (the Judenräte) that had been forced to cooperate with the Nazis, arguing that the bureaucratic compliance of some Jewish leaders had inadvertently made the destruction smoother and more efficient.

The world exploded in fury.

The Jewish community was devastated. Lifelong friends cut her off completely. The Israeli establishment denounced her. Prominent intellectuals accused her of blaming the victims and excusing the perpetrators. They called her an arrogant traitor, a self-hating Jew, and a woman entirely devoid of empathy.

They demanded she retract her words. They demanded she apologize for causing so much pain.
Hannah refused.

She stood her ground, arguing that a philosopher's only loyalty is to the truth, no matter how agonizing it is to face. She believed that the moment we demand people write history simply to comfort us, we lose our ability to understand how evil actually functions in the real world.

She died in 1975, having never backed down from her absolute demand that humanity must actively engage in the process of thought.

She taught us that the most dangerous weapon on earth isn't a bomb or a gun, but a normal, everyday mind that has surrendered its duty to think.

She was the brilliant, stateless refugee who survived the Gestapo, stared into the eyes of the Holocaust's architect, and sacrificed her own reputation to warn the world about the terrifying ordinariness of evil.

[Mik]

This post is deleted!

[taiwan_girl]

True words.

[Horace]

Somewhere down that road of introspection should be a realization that most of us go through our lives without having to make any particularly difficult moral choices, especially not choices that pit us against a genuine cultural threat which would gladly steam roll us with great righteousness and no remorse. I know Trump haters like to imagine themselves in that position, but they are not, not even close.

[Mik]

By comparison of consequences you’re correct. But the principle still applies to evils great and small.

[Renauda]

@Horace said in Something to ponder this morning.:

Somewhere down that road of introspection should be a realization that most of us go through our lives without having to make any particularly difficult moral choices, especially not choices that pit us against a genuine cultural threat which would gladly steam roll us with great righteousness and no remorse. I know Trump haters like to imagine themselves in that position, but they are not, not even close.

I feel exactly the same way about the righteous and remorseless Maple MAGAts who are currently infecting this province with their divisive and performance politics promoting the breakup of this country.

[Horace]

There's also Peter Singer's famous paper from 1972 which makes the perfectly defensible point that "evil" lurks in today's mainstream moral frameworks, just better hidden, and at more of a distance.

Link to video