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Comment by ashalhashim | Hacker News Reader

> “It goes back to Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil a bit,” says director Andrew Neel. “These everyday things that are beloved to us, like food, can take on an entirely different dimension within the context of a dictatorship.”

That’s not at all what Arendt was writing about. She was writing about those who do evil things are rarely the “evil” monsters we imagine but rather bureaucrats motivated by things like promotions. Hard to remain motivated to consume an article after reading this in the opening.

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Hannah Arendt's 'banality of evil,' as I understand it, refers to human beings who are incapable of thinking. Within a massively bureaucratized and divided system, the immense guilt of killing someone is broken down into tiny, mundane tasks, like stamping a document. Because the system absorbs all individual moral friction, ordinary people can become cogs in a vast machinery of evil without ever questioning it. (In other words, the individual is not morally evil, but the system is designed to break things down so thoroughly that it renders those parts mindless, and that is the truly frightening part.)

In that sense, I can understand part of what the article is claiming. The phrase 'it was a great gig' seems to be the core of what it was trying to say. The high salary, the Mercedes, the abundant food supplies all point to the fact that the source of that funding came from the dictatorship.

An individual can be moral, but the system numbs them. That is why evil is not interesting; its desires are too simple. Wanting to earn more money, wanting to beat someone else, becoming consumed by such things. But in that regard, good is interesting. Because it means overcoming one's own contradictions, striving for the greater good, or even sacrificing one's life for the sake of everyone.

> Hannah Arendt's 'banality of evil,' as I understand it, refers to human beings who are incapable of thinking. Within a massively bureaucratized and divided system, the immense guilt of killing someone is broken down into tiny, mundane tasks, like stamping a document. Because the system absorbs all individual moral friction, ordinary people can become cogs in a vast machinery of evil without ever questioning it.

While I fully accept that "the banality of evil" has become such a well-known aphorism that it's meaning may have shifted, this is not how Hannah Arendt introduced the saying. She was specifically talking about Adolf Eichmann and what motivated him. Eichmann wasn't some low-level cog "numbed by the system" - he was the logistical architect of the Holocaust, and he knew his actions would lead to the deaths of millions of people.

What Arendt meant by "the banality of evil" was that Eichmann wasn't motivated by a rabid hatred of Jews. He just wanted to get his promotion, move ahead, make money, etc. But, again, he knew his actions would murder millions, he just didn't care. He wasn't "broken down by the system", he was the system.

"The banality of evil" really is talking about motivation in Arendt's use of it. Often times we think of "evil" as needing to be motivated by fanatical hatred, but a lot of the time it's just motivated by a desire for a nicer car.

You are probably right. I think the confusion comes from the fact that I remembered it that way because of what Eichmann said in court. (I was confused too, so I looked it up.) I think I must have mixed it up with later concepts like the Stanford prison experiment. Thank you for the correction.

As you know, there has been a lot of talk about the Stanford prison experiment being manipulated. In that sense, I think this experiment also has that aspect to it. Distorting results out of an obsession with fame and ordinariness is fundamentally a violation of research ethics.

As always, I often realize that I misremember concepts as I go through life. Thank you for the correction

But I think that is overly presumptuous though.

Some people have a different moral framework. Some people think Saddam’s brutal dictatorship was for the better because it finally brought stability. When forced to choose between stability and freedom, they choose stability.

There are also just simply amoral people too who just don’t care.

So I wouldn’t automatically assume someone working in an “evil” regime as “trapped as a cog” — they might frankly be OK with it. This is why sometimes just cutting off the head doesn’t enact change.

"When forced to choose between stability and freedom"

Who created the illusion of this binary decision? I'll bet it was the dictator.

That is what makes the world interesting. You, unlike the unthinking people I was describing, are different. You are different from those who do not reflect on the final outcome of a subject and do not empathize with it, because you can empathize with a life trapped within a particular system or framework. I also do not think you are wrong. All context must ultimately be judged according to the situation. In some respects, I think you are right. And that is a good thing. We are different people, we think differently, and I like that difference in thinking.

Careful "bro", that way is "multiculturalism*", "moral relativism" & further, "nihilism".

In other words, I don't think either of yous' thoughts are incompatible with "universal morality", but indeed two small steps towards it

*Eg Cheese and kimchi (with enough pepper) are both tasty, or both disgusting, or one but not the other, and you should never/always consider feeding the dictator with either

Perhaps the world 'needs' a few dictators to remind those not living under their thumb how great that is.

So.. maybe not try too hard to have the very concept of dictatorship go extinct? </sarcasm>

I meant only that one could try and preserve 'dictators' as a sensory experience. But not necessarily an actual experience.

> Within a massively bureaucratized and divided system, the immense guilt of killing someone is broken down into tiny, mundane tasks, like stamping a document. Because the system absorbs all individual moral friction, ordinary people can become cogs in a vast machinery of evil without ever questioning it. (In other words, the individual is not morally evil, but the system is designed to break things down so thoroughly that it renders those parts mindless, and that is the truly frightening part.)

Spot on!

Your comment explains why massive bureaucracies can get nearly anything done, because people are just following orders. For example Jallianwala Bagh (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jallianwala_Bagh), the people shooting were just following orders. Nearly all atrocities can be explain by the design of bureaucracies to eliminate moral friction.

Reminds me of Vogons[1] and Nobody cares[2]

[1] Here is what to do if you want to get a lift from a Vogon: forget it. They are one of the most unpleasant races in the Galaxy. Not actually evil, but bad-tempered, bureaucratic, officious and callous. They wouldn't even lift a finger to save their own grandmothers from the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal without orders—signed in triplicate, sent in, sent back, queried, lost, found, subjected to public inquiry, lost again, and finally buried in soft peat for three months and recycled as firelighters. The best way to get a drink out of a Vogon is to stick your finger down his throat, and the best way to irritate him is to feed his grandmother to the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal. On no account should you allow a Vogon to read poetry at you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogon

[2] https://grantslatton.com/nobody-cares and discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42707238

This is an interesting article backed by months of hard work. It offers perspectives we probably won't find anywhere else. The quote is pretty tangential.

I see this over and over again on HN: pick the weakest sentence, attack it, proclaim the article is rubbish, and move on. Why? There are no internet points awarded for maximum drive-by cynicism.

> Why? There are no internet points awarded for maximum drive-by cynicism.

Clearly there are - the comment is like first or second most upvoted here.

> I see this over and over again on HN: pick the weakest sentence, attack it, proclaim the article is rubbish, and move on. Why?

It's to heuristically filter content on quality to optimize information consumption, i.e. concluding early: "This is probably not going to be worth my time, because this author seems to make fairly trivial easily avoidable mistakes (or something similar)". I appreciate the signal from other people here, even if it is not always accurate.

There is a lot of content to filter through nowadays.

I think it's a useful heuristic, but if you apply it too harshly, you'll deprive yourself of interesting perspectives. It's also hard to correct, because you don't get to know how many false positives it produces. So, it should be used with care.

People may make mistakes in an area they have less expertise in than the reader, and still be able to provide a view from a side the reader knows less about. Also, it's not difficult enough to mistake a deviation from a dearly held belief for a faux-pas in somebody else's thinking.

You can argue that it's still worth it to apply the filter strictly, because there's so much chaff to cut through; but it's not always done with enough appreciation for how much it may tend to reinforce one's own bubble. I also suspect that the more trigger-happy people would not be too understanding or even introspective when having that same filter applied to them.

Having this filter is useful and necessary. It's just that when it can be observed, because the people applying it post about it, it often seems to be the overzealous kind of dismissal.

What happens when the reader is wrong?

Later:

> By most measures, theirs was a great gig – logic that can excuse almost anything. “Saddam’s chef got a car every year,” Neel says. “That phrase, ‘it was a great gig,’ I think, actually runs the world. Like, ‘It was just business.’”

I’d say they understood the meaning.

No, they did not. Arendt’s point about evil being banal is that the perpetrator’s behavior is motivated by the banal. A chef isn’t the perp. They’re adjacent to the monsters and they might be motivated by and fixated on the banality of doing great work.at most this is juxtaposition of evil and banality.

But didn’t the chef literally serve the dictator, pushing moral concerns aside by dispassionately performing their assigned tasks?

It depends. If one is Iraqi and Saddam asks him to be his chef, they're not refusing. They're probably dead if they refuse. Chef's are also sourced from other countries without disclosing the actual client. Once they land their situation is precarious and getting out is next to impossible. One just shuts up, cooks and takes the money.

It's like everyone else serving the dictator. They money may be good, but threat to life is real and scary.

I wouldn't vilify them. It's the proverbial golden cage. They can't get out even if they want to.

In the Iraqi case Saddam was known for a similar strategy to North Korea. High-trust families, not persons, are identified and groomed for positions. Of course, if your son disgraced the regime with failure or betrayal both they and their family might be on the chopping block both literally and figuratively.

I happen to have known a former Iraqi ambassador under Saddam here in the US. He and his brother were selected at a young age of 10 or so, and provided the highest levels of education by the administration, for the administration. Their family was already high enough up but were rewarded further for providing their sons. However, after one of the Iraqi losses (Kuwait?) Saddam summoned his ambassadors back to Iraq. The brothers smelled blood in the water and fled to America for asylum. Unfortunately this caused their parents to be ostracized by the regime but luckily not killed.

This pattern existed across military, civil service, academia, and even to produce Olympic athletes.

These chefs are effectively being held hostage. One had his passport withheld. Another was executed for giving a kid a stomachache. This isn’t careerism.

Point taken, but maybe it's not that different than anyone who has no choice in any military. They could just shoot you for "cowardice" too.

Perhaps they understand the meaning, but this:

Is still a misquote/misrepresentation. People can understand a subject but still say wrong things about it.

It seems your misinterpreting the quote, it does never says that

> “These everyday things that are beloved to us, like food, can take on an entirely different dimension within the context of a dictatorship.”

Is the definition of the banality of evil concept. I would argue though that within the concept you will interpret banal things differently. For a more blatant example, the banal act of putting an approval stamp onto a piece of paper will be interpreted quite differently in the context of a administrator in Reichsbahn in Nazi germanycompared to an administrator at the Bundesbahn now.

Perhaps but using that quote to describe that relationship seemed very forced and ill-fitting. They tried to make it work but came up short because it wasn't an apt application of the quote.

I don't see a misrepresentation there - the need to eat and the love of good food is common to most of humanity and points to the fact that even dictators are also just people. Banal humans rather than cartoon villians.

> Hard to remain motivated to consume an article after reading this in the opening.

I think it's unfortunate to be so dismissive of an article over one quote from one person that you disagree with. You can still get something out of the piece if you open your mind a bit.

I really, really want to cite Joe Franks "The Dictator" here, notably the scene where he's eating the vegetables that have grown on himself (if I'm remembering correctly), but...I really doubt anyone will get the reference.

Joe Frank ... some of the best audio out there. I wonder whether one had to grow up at a certain time for his shows to make sense, and whether they'd be lost on newer generations.

He was a singular talent as a storyteller to be sure.

I used to be a regular listener to his show, but I haven't heard it in over 30 years. I can't even say that he'd make sense to me now today.

Tangential point but just to be clear, Ardent's book is a journalistic work not something that is proven or widely accepted. There are many who disagree with this idea that Einchman was just a simple person who took orders since there are several documented events where it's clear that he was a piece of shit nazi and fully embraced the role.

> In Eichmann Before Jerusalem (2014), the German historian Bettina Stangneth reveals another side to him besides the banal, seemingly apolitical man, who was just acting like any other ‘ordinary’ career-oriented bureaucrat. Drawing on audiotapes of interviews with Eichmann by the Nazi journalist William Sassen, Stangneth shows Eichmann as a self-avowed, aggressive Nazi ideologue strongly committed to Nazi beliefs, who showed no remorse or guilt for his role in the Final Solution – a radically evil Third Reich operative living inside the deceptively normal shell of a bland bureaucrat. Far from being ‘thoughtless’, Eichmann had plenty of thoughts – thoughts of genocide, carried out on behalf of his beloved Nazi Party. On the tapes, Eichmann admitted to a sort of Jekyll-and-Hyde dualism:

I, ‘[t]he cautious bureaucrat,’ that was me, yes indeed. But … this cautious bureaucrat was attended by a … a fanatical [Nazi] warrior, fighting for the freedom of my blood, which is my birthright… Arendt completely missed this radically evil side of Eichmann when she wrote 10 years after the trial that there was ‘no sign in him of firm ideological convictions or of specific evil motives’. This only underscores the banality – and falsity – of the banality-of-evil thesis. And though Arendt never said that Eichmann was just an innocent ‘cog’ in the Nazi bureaucracy, nor defended Eichmann as ‘just following orders’ – both common misunderstandings of her findings on Eichmann – her critics, including Wolfe and Lipstadt, remain unsatisfied.

https://aeon.co/ideas/what-did-hannah-arendt-really-mean-by-...

Why? It seems like you take umbrage with a particular quote, but you understand that the author of the article didn't make this statement, right?

That’s exactly his point about the motivations of the chefs. It’s not identical, but close enough.

Also I have to wonder why this made to the front page of a tech forum. One of the things I used to love about HN was that it was free of politics. These days it seems like there's just political propaganda everywhere in the guise of being relevant to tech. Hope HN doesn't become another political echo chamber like Reddit.

HN was never free of politics. Politics was present here literally whole time I know the site - which can be like 14 years.

I mean, you're right. But it was always subtle, not so in-your-face like it is today.

"There are hardly any excesses of the most crazed psychopath that cannot easily be duplicated by a normal kindly family man who just comes in to work every day and has a job to do."

But, uh, I don't think I'll necessarily assign that level of moral gravity to chef.

I think your interpretation is a little rigid. And did you read the rest of the article?

I ended up going back and reading the article. It’s not bad that it’s bad writing, it’s that the opening is sloppy and turned me off from reading the article instead of pulling me in the way a good lede should.

The subject is interesting, which is why I clicked the link in the first place. I might check out the documentary. But the misunderstanding/loose invocation of Arendt is a turnoff imo

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