Evil on a large scale rarely comes from monsters. It comes from many ordinary people who have stopped talking to themselves — who have handed their judgement and responsibility over to an authority, an order, a spirit of the age, without thinking for themselves. That, in short, is Hannah Arendt's most uncomfortable insight. And it is far more precise than her most famous phrase suggests.
The "Banal Bureaucrat" — a Famous Mistake
Almost everyone knows the formula of the "banality of evil", which Arendt coined in 1963 in her report on the Eichmann trial. What stuck in the public memory was a caricature: Adolf Eichmann, the organiser of the deportations, as a grey desk-man who merely followed orders and hardly grasped what he was doing. That image is outdated. In Eichmann Before Jerusalem (2011) the philosopher Bettina Stangneth, drawing on his own writings and the so-called Sassen interviews, showed that Eichmann was a convinced, ideologically committed antisemite who deliberately played the role of the dutiful order-taker in court — and Arendt fell for it.
Does that make her concept worthless? No — it was simply aimed at the wrong address. "Banal" does not fit the few architects of mass murder. It still fits the many hands that joined in, disturbingly well. That is where it pays to look.
Ordinary Men
The most striking material on this comes not from philosophy but from history. In Ordinary Men (1992), the historian Christopher Browning studied a single reserve police unit — Battalion 101, which took part in mass shootings in occupied Poland in 1942. The men were neither fanatics nor SS elite: middle-aged family men, artisans, salesmen, workers, too old for front-line service. In their first major massacre, in the village of Józefów, they shot around 1,500 women, children and elderly people in a single day.
The crucial point: the commanding officer explicitly offered that anyone who did not feel up to it could step aside. Only a handful took the offer. So it was not naked coercion — those who refused had no execution to fear. What drove the rest to take part was a web of group conformity, the wish not to look like a weakling in front of comrades, deference to authority, careerism — and a gradual habituation in which moral standards quietly shifted. Hatred, Browning found, was not the main engine.
This is exactly the dynamic that the piece Herd Behaviour in Humans describes in the lab — Asch's conformity against one's own perception, the social price of deviating. In Browning you see the same mechanism in deadly earnest, where what is at stake is not the length of lines but life and death.
Three Moves That Make a Perpetrator
The social psychologist Harald Welzer systematised this observation in Perpetrators: How Ordinary People Become Mass Murderers (2005). His sober thesis: looking for special character defects in the perpetrators is looking in the wrong place — for practically no group of people collectively refused to kill. Instead of personality, Welzer looks at the situation and names three mechanisms that make killing possible:
- Delegating responsibility — "this is not mine to answer for, I only carry it out."
- Not contradicting the order — the small, everyday decision simply not to say "no" at the decisive moment.
- Distancing oneself inwardly from the act — reframing the deed as work, as duty, as a technical procedure.
In this way, Welzer writes, killing becomes within a few weeks "work" that one performs like any other. And he shows that the same mechanism is not confined to National Socialism: it recurs in Vietnam, in Rwanda, in Yugoslavia. It is not a German special case but a human possibility.
Obedience? — Milgram, Read Honestly
At this point the name Stanley Milgram comes up almost reflexively. In his famous experiment (from 1961), participants administered apparently ever-stronger electric shocks to a (in fact play-acting) learner at the instruction of an experimenter. A majority went to the highest level. Jerry Burger's replication (2009) confirmed a similar magnitude with an ethically softened design (around 70% passed the 150-volt mark).
But the popular label "humans obey blindly" falls short — and that matters here:
- The data are not as clean as they look. In Behind the Shock Machine, the historian of science Gina Perry showed, from Milgram's own archive, that he sanitised results and pressured participants to keep going.
- It was not blind obedience. The social psychologists Alex Haslam and Stephen Reicher interpret the findings as "engaged followership": participants carried on not because they switched off their conscience, but because they identified with a supposedly good cause — "science".
- And that is exactly the point: they did not switch off — they adopted someone else's framing as their own, without examining it.
Read correctly, then, Milgram supports not the caricature of the command-robot but Arendt's finer thesis. It is not about servitude, but about the suspension of one's own examining.
Arendt's Real Discovery: Thoughtlessness
What preoccupied Arendt about the Eichmann trial was, in the end, not Eichmann the person but a question she pursued in her last, unfinished work, The Life of the Mind: does the capacity to refrain from evil perhaps hang on thinking itself? Her suspicion was that the most devastating thing is neither stupidity nor innate wickedness, but sheer thoughtlessness — the not-being-at-home-with-oneself, the habitual going-along in ready-made phrases. Her report on Jerusalem already closes on exactly this lesson:
"That such remoteness from reality and such thoughtlessness can wreak more havoc than all the evil instincts taken together which, perhaps, are inherent in man — that was, in fact, the lesson one could learn in Jerusalem."
What matters is what Arendt means by "thinking" — nothing academic, no intelligence in the sense of a test. She means what she calls the "two-in-one": the silent dialogue I hold with myself. In reflecting, I split, as it were, into one who asks and one who answers — and I must give an account of myself to myself. This inner conversation is taxing and unsettling, because it again calls into question what "seemed beyond doubt when one was acting thoughtlessly". Whoever holds it cannot lie to themselves so easily. Whoever avoids it has switched off the inner brake.
The Few Who Did Not Join In
The most striking part of Arendt's thinking is her answer to the question that Browning forces on us: what distinguished the few who refused from the many who joined in? In her lecture Personal Responsibility under Dictatorship (1964) she gives a surprising answer. It was not the morally most educated with the firmest principles — for firm rules, she writes, can be swapped "overnight", and whoever clings only to rules in the end merely holds fast to the habit of holding fast to something.
The steadfast were marked by something else — a relation to themselves:
"… they refused to murder, not so much because they still held fast to the command 'Thou shalt not kill', but because they were unwilling to live together with a murderer — themselves."
That is the core. The precondition for it, Arendt writes, has "nothing to do with a higher level of education or intelligence", but solely with the readiness to live explicitly together with oneself — to hold that silent dialogue which, since Socrates and Plato, we call thinking. Whoever stays in conversation with themselves cannot become a murderer without henceforth living under one roof with a murderer. And her soberest finding about the majority: what broke down in the early years of the regime was not, first of all, personal responsibility, but personal judgement.
The same goes for the popular "lesser evil" argument — that one only joined in to prevent worse. Arendt's objection has a cool clarity: those who choose the lesser evil forget very quickly that they chose an evil.
Conscience as an Inner Authority — and the Life Review
Here the circle closes back to the themes of this site. Arendt's "silent dialogue with myself" is nothing other than a precise description of conscience — and of a conscience that precisely does not come from outside. It is not the order, not the majority, not the spirit of the age, not even the rule one was raised on. It is the self-presence of consciousness, the inner voice one cannot hide from, because one is it. Evil arises where a person lets this voice fall silent and lets themselves be steered from outside.
There is a remarkable point of contact with near-death research. One of the most frequently reported elements of a near-death experience is the life review — the panoramic re-living of one's own life, often, and this is the decisive thing, from the perspective of others: one feels what one did to another person, from their side. In Bruce Greyson's decades of research this motif recurs again and again. One need not draw any final certainty about an afterlife from it to see the parallel: what Arendt describes in sober philosophical terms — that in the end one has to live together with oneself and everything one has done — reappears in the life review as immediate moral experience. The "murderer one does not want to live with" is, in the review, no longer an image but oneself, feeling one's own deed from the other side.
The Uncomfortable Symmetry
It would be the most comfortable and cheapest conclusion to point the finger at "the Germans back then". That is exactly what misses the point. Browning, Welzer and Arendt agree that the mechanism described is not tied to a nation, a time or an ideology — it is a permanent human possibility, and it works in every group, including one's own, including the one that takes itself to be the good guys. The same symmetry runs through the related pieces on conformity, on propaganda and the manipulation of the masses, and on the psychology of defence.
The antidote, therefore, is neither heroic nor rare. It is quiet, everyday and open to everyone, "regardless of level of education or intelligence": to stay in conversation with oneself, not to hand over one's own judgement, not to go along out of convenience at the decisive moment. Examine for yourself and come to terms with yourself first — then act. Evil does not begin with the order. It begins when someone stops talking to themselves.
Sources
- Arendt, H. (1964): Personal Responsibility under Dictatorship. In: Responsibility and Judgment (ed. J. Kohn) — the non-participants, the dialogue with oneself, the breakdown of judgement, the lesser-evil argument.
- Arendt, H. (1971/1978): The Life of the Mind. Thinking. — thoughtlessness, the "two-in-one" of thinking.
- Arendt, H. (1963/1964): Eichmann in Jerusalem. A Report on the Banality of Evil. — the "remoteness from reality and thoughtlessness" quote is from the postscript to the enlarged edition.
- Stangneth, B. (2011): Eichmann Before Jerusalem. The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer. — correcting the image of the "thoughtless" Eichmann.
- Browning, C. R. (1992): Ordinary Men. Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. — conformity, peer pressure, the offer to opt out.
- Welzer, H. (2005): Perpetrators. How Ordinary People Become Mass Murderers. — delegating responsibility, not contradicting, distancing.
- Milgram, S. (1974): Obedience to Authority. — the obedience experiment.
- Burger, J. M. (2009): Replicating Milgram. American Psychologist 64(1) — ethically softened replication, ~70% past 150 V.
- Perry, G. (2013): Behind the Shock Machine. — critical re-examination of Milgram's data and methods.
- Haslam, S. A. & Reicher, S. D. (2012 ff.): "Engaged followership" — obedience as active identification, not blind compliance.