Banality of Evil 4: Complex Situations
January 1, 2026
by William P. Meyers

Site Search

Popular pages:

When It's Complicated Becomes an Excuse for Evil

Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem has plenty of examples of how mixing some good into a situation can enable people to perform evil functions. Adolf Eichmann saw himself as helping Jews when his job was facilitating their emigration to Palestine and other destinations outside of Germany during the first few years of the Hitler regime. See my essay When Zionists Loved Nazis for some vivid examples.

Here I want to illustrate the theme with other historical and modern examples. In 1960, in any of the southern (former Confederacy) United States, to be a member of the police you had to be willing to enforce the racial segregation laws. Your job was to ensure the safety of the public by enforcing laws, and many of those laws were identical to those used by good regimes: no murder, no attacking people, no stealing other people's money or goods, etc. But there were two approaches to enforcing the racist regime. You could minimize, enforcing only when it was demanded by white people, and with a minimum of force. Or you could maximize, picking on black people whenever possible, even if they were not in violation of the segregation laws. And of course, with tens of thousands of police officers in the South, there were many gray areas and variations on the theme.

Cultural forms of oppression also provide examples. Before women's rights were recognized, it was not illegal to refuse to hire a woman for a job she was the most qualified applicant for. Same for hiring non-European-Americans. Not the same scale of evil as killing masses of people in concentration camps during the Nazi era. But not good. The people who made these decisions mainly did not weigh the ethics of it at all. They did what was customary. American labor and social organizations believed many workers were underpaid. Were the people who paid low wages evil, or just following normal business culture?

The Democratic Party of the United States is the only political party, so far, that has dropped atomic bombs on cities filled with civilians. Was this good, because it ended the war with Japan, or evil? When, under Republicans, the U.S. attacked and conquered the recently liberated nation of the Philippines, usually included as part of the Spanish-American War, what acts distinguished the banal from the truly evil? [See U.S. War Against Asia]

I would conclude that evil tends to be banal. Societal level decisions are rarely made by psychopaths. When slaves were first imported to what would become the United States, to the colony of Virginia in 1619, there was no mastermind of evil planning for about 250 years of slavery and another 100 years of Jim Crow segregation. The English pirate captain who captured the Africans on the Portuguese ship Sao Joao Bautista saw the action as ordinary business. The colonists who bought the slaves needed workers. Slavery was a global practice, with many white people having a slave status. Later, perhaps, it can be said that certain plantation owners and politicians tipped the scales to a diabolical form of evil. There was no Hitler in overall charge of the scheme, but a long series of U.S. presidents from Washington to Buchanan presided over hundreds of thousands of Eichmanns, the white slave masters and their varied enforcers, propagandists, and politicians.

Which brings us to the Slow Motion Apocalypse and environmental deterioration. I don't know of any human being who has set out to purposefully destroy the earth. Petroleum industry executives may deserve to be hung until dead, but their ordinary culture is to do a good job making money and pretend problems caused by oil are minor or imaginary. Was Ahab evil because he commanded a whaling ship, and decades later whales were almost extinct? Is the soy farmer with 10,000 acres of beans a good guy trying to feed the world, or an evil plotter against native ecosystems?

If a landlord is getting by on his current rents (let's say of apartments in a city) and the rents of the city go up, for whatever reason, is it evil of that landlord to raise rents to market rates? Is it banal, cultural, everyone does it evil, or is it true, diabolical, Son of Satan evil?

Just following orders and customs is a way of life for most of the world's eight billion people. Failing to follow orders and customs, trying to be truly good, is usually a recipe for failure, both social and economic. Even national leaders rarely change things, whether they be elected like Donald Trump or somehow have gained dictatorial powers.

Most people try to be good most of the time. When the cultural definition of goodness changes, most people will change, eventually. Unfortunately it is also true that when culture changes from good to evil, most people will conform outwardly, at the very least. Germans certainly did during the Nazi era, as did white southerners during the Jim Crow era.

I am worried that if the Trump regime remains in power too long, many more Americans will adopt his grab-any-money-you-can-any-way-you-can culture, which already has a long track record with the human race. We can do better, but it will take much effort.

Not giving up Hope, so Happy New Year.