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Philosophy
Lately, I’ve been reading a lot of female philosophy and want to share 3 cool ideas I found.
The “Banality of Evil”
German-Jewish philosopher, Hannah Arendt, was intrigued to attend the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the organizers of the Holocaust. She was disappointed when the trial exhibited a frail, bald, fat man calmy providing testimony on the orders he undertook to a quiet courtroom. The trial felt boring, human, and civil, much the opposite when contrasted by the evil and hatred of his actions.
Here we have the phenomenon of the “Banality of Evil,” society’s ability to take heinous acts and normalize them when processing them through the processes and procedures of the established institutions. Bureaucracy at its finest (worst), is taking something terrible that we should deal with, and pacifying it until it’s almost irrelevant.
Many decades later, this is even more disturbing. Through increased media presence, we are exposed to multiple atrocities each day, ones which we lack any stable discourse or recourse to actually solve because they are “too complex.” It becomes…
