In this video you will learn about the social theories of Hannah Arendt, a Jewish German whose philosophy provided a framework that could help explain the sort of cultural issues that led up to and enabled the horrors of the Holocaust. You can also learn about a certain Nazi official who was seen by many as a mastermind of evil as he helped organize the transport of over one million Jewish people to concentration camps and ghettos. Yet, while being observed when he was tried for his crimes against humanity his appearance and mannerisms didn’t seem to fit the mold of what many people may think of as the marks of a merciless killer.
The apparent contrast between his outward nature and his crimes is the sort of thing Hannah Arendt researched and didn’t seem to find unexplainable at all. I won’t cover everything in the video exactly, but one of her profound statements that people quote from her work in The Life of the Mind is, “The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.” Another thing she noticed was that a world that emphasizes the economic value of humans over their moral worth as human beings is one that can quickly lead to the disregard of human rights.
She also noticed that in a highly individualistic society in which we lack strong communal bonds outside of work, it is easy to comply if work asks us to participate in dehumanizing others, because our own sense of belonging and survival is dependent on submission to larger organizational structures. When we are conditioned to outsource our thought processes, morals, and values to someone else it is very easy to justify or disregard the negative impact our individual actions have on others and tell ourselves that what we are doing is necessary.
According to Hannah Arendt what happened to Jews in Germany isn’t merely an isolated event caused by an abnormal amount of unusually evil people, but that the social conditions that allowed for that is something we still need to be mindful of today. It is not inherently the case that people who do extremely horrible things are uniquely evil, they can be ordinary people who are simply compliant with evil or willing to turn a blind eye and sign off on things to get ahead. Her philosophy also warns us that we need to be careful not to become absorbed in group think and passively echo whatever our leaders say but we need to think for ourselves. We need to take moral responsibility for the impact of our own actions as individuals, and not just accept what leadership claims is moral. Her research into human nature warns us about how easy it is to come to prioritize submission to hierarchy over critical thinking and how dangerous that can be in regards to morality. We need to be careful to avoid making an idol out of a job or desire to fit in.
