I'm going to Godwin myself here, but it kind of echoes Hannah Arendt's 'Banality of Evil' — this summary from Wikipedia covers it a bit, but I recommend reading the actual text, especially in the context of today's political climate... for those who aren't familiar, Eichmann was a Nazi on trial in Israel who was defending his complicity as "following orders."

"Arendt's book introduced the expression and concept "the banality of evil". Her thesis is that Eichmann was not a fanatic or sociopath, but an extremely average person who relied on clichéd defenses rather than thinking for himself and was motivated by professional promotion rather than ideology. Banality, in this sense, is not that Eichmann's actions were ordinary, or that there is a potential Eichmann in all of us, but that his actions were motivated by a sort of stupidity which was wholly unexceptional. She never denied that Eichmann was an anti-semite, nor that he was fully responsible for his actions, but argued that these characteristics were secondary to his stupidity."