I Was Just Banal Evil (Essay, Dushan)

We hear unpleasantly often these days statements that are variations of: „We only followed laws!“

„I only followed laws“ – we associate this justification with the Nazis at Nuremberg. They also „only followed orders.“ That’s what we learned in school.

Did our teachers (or the curriculum designers) ever think about what we students were supposed to do with this information?

They presumably wanted to make it tangible how „it could happen back then.“ (The ultimate answer was of course provided by Henryk Broder: „If you ask yourselves how that could happen back then: because they were like you are today.“)

We students were supposed to understand the psychology of the people. But for what purpose?

Were we implicitly being trained to act illegally and refuse orders when the laws and/or the actions of the state went against our conscience?

In this context, a particularly striking article of the Basic Law comes to mind:

The Federal Republic of Germany is a democratic and social federal state. […] All Germans shall have the right to resist any person seeking to abolish this constitutional order, if no other remedy is available.
– Basic Law, Article 20

It is of course a paradoxical „right,“ because to whom would you appeal to enforce this right?

In fact, those who are replacing democracy with the totalitarian form of government „Our Democracy“ are implicitly invoking this „emergency spirit.“ If you define your own power as „democracy,“ you have the right to eliminate political opponents by any means. You imagine yourself in „preventive resistance.“

No, the „right to resistance“ will not be granted to you by the authorities. (It speaks no flattering judgment about the mental state of those German demonstrators today who take to the streets at the behest of government parties and government-funded „NGOs,“ and actually believe they are in „resistance“ – a „resistance“ against opposition and dissenters?!)

Evil from Non-Thinking

But if we took seriously what we were taught back then, and if we placed conscience before blind obedience, by what criteria would we recognize what is evil?

Relevant Structures teaches us that evil is what weakens those structures that should be (to all of us) as important as possible. (Religions, ideologies, or even hedonism calibrate which structures are how relevant.)

We know what evil is, but how does this particular evil arise?

We’re not talking here about crimes of pleasure or greed. We’re talking here about crimes of the kind that a person who cannot (or will not) think of politics and conscience separately might feel called to resist, because he believes that „no other remedy is available.“

Well, the author who taught us to think about the „banality of evil“ describes the causes of the relevant evil painfully precisely:

Evil arises from the failure of thinking. It eludes thinking, because as soon as thinking attempts to engage with evil and examine the premises and principles from which it emerges, it finds nothing there. That is the banality of evil.
– Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (own translation, see Google Books)

Most people actually don’t act evil out of malice, but out of stupidity. Out of often self-chosen failure to consider the real connections and foreseeable consequences – such as the consequences when one „only followed orders.“ (See also essays like „Are they stupid or evil? Does it even make a difference?“ or „There is no right to stupidity“.)