Eichmann’s evil lay in a generalizable absence of thinking rather than 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

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Hannah Arendt’s ‘banality of evil’ concept from Eichmann in Jerusalem.