Arendt located evil in the refusal to think, not in monstrosity

Evidence

Hannah Arendt famously characterized Eichmann less as monstrous or demonic than as involving a “total absence of thinking.” It is this she finds most disturbing, because so generalizable. The anti-intellectualism, the war on thinking, on independence of mind, the refusal to read, to think critically or deeply, the rejection of all but one or one kind of book, this is the danger to humankind through which Arendt lived and on which she reflected so compellingly. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1917 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

These are the family of processes that seem to me to be involved in creating individuals who willingly do evil. That they often occur together, and that many of them are frequently caused by the same circumstances, is undeniable. It is the fact that many of these processes are involved in the conversion process, and that the individual is in some unstable and dynamic state—now relying on one justification, now on another—that seems to me to become obscured when an altered state is postulated. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 3940 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Guénon anticipated Arendt’s banality-of-evil thesis about German Orientalism; Arendt traced totalitarian susceptibility to fragmentation in modern lives — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 261; Eichmann’s evil lay in a generalizable absence of thinking rather than monstrosity. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1917 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Eichmann’s evil lay in a generalizable absence of thinking rather than monstrosity. #corroborates (0.96) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1917
• People who do evil use shifting justifications rather than entering a fixed altered state #complicates (0.74) — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 3940