Socially accepted wickedness is reframed as an inherent imposed quality rather than chosen action

Evidence

It was Disraeli who had discovered that vice is but the corresponding reflection of crime in society. Human wickedness, if accepted by society, is changed from an act of will into an inherent, psychological quality which man cannot choose or reject but which is imposed upon him from without, and which rules him as compulsively as the drug rules the addict. In assimilating crime and transforming it into vice, society denies all responsibility and establishes a world of fatalities in which men find themselves entangled. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 258

Categorization

• DEFINE: Arendt’s core distinction between crime (chosen act, judged morally/legally) and vice (inherent, imposed, compulsive quality) — a mechanism at the heart of how society denies responsibility and how racialized exclusion later operates.
• XREF: Connects to how the ‘racial predestination’ logic feeds into the totalitarian framework Arendt builds later in the book — crime becoming inherent quality is the seed of ‘racially predestined’ criminality. — connects to: The collective’s brutality masks manipulation rather than true human quality; The powerful preach contentment and dismiss rule as too hard for commoners — Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America:…, 172