Abstract
When I sat in the courtroom in Jerusalem, what struck me was not a monster but a man of remarkable ordinariness. This note tries to say what I meant by the banality of evil, and why I came to believe that the activity of thinking — not intelligence, not learning — is our surest defence against complicity.
The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal.
The phrase that has followed me since 1963 was never meant as a theory of evil. It was a description. Adolf Eichmann did not hate the people he sent to their deaths; he scarcely thought about them at all. What he displayed was not stupidity but thoughtlessness — a curious, quite authentic inability to stop and consider what he was doing from any standpoint but his own. He spoke almost entirely in officialese — the clichés of promotion and procedure. Language that is dead to reality is often the first sign that thinking has stopped. He spoke in clichés because clichés spared him the burden of judgment.
This raises a question older than any trial. If evil can be done without wicked motives, by men who are merely going along, then the old picture of the villain who knowingly chooses the bad is not enough. We are left to ask whether the habit of thinking itself — the silent dialogue of the self with itself that Socrates called the two-in-one — might condition us against the worst.
The two-in-one
To think, in this Socratic sense, is to be at once the one who speaks and the one who answers back. When I act badly, I must afterward live with the doer of the deed; I return home, as it were, to a companion I cannot escape. The person who never conducts this inner conversation is never troubled by such a companion — and it is exactly this untroubledness that makes him available for any purpose.1
Thinking, then, is not the privilege of the philosopher. It is a faculty every person possesses and most decline to use. Its political fruit is judgment: the capacity to say this is right, this is wrong when the rules everyone else obeys have themselves gone wrong. In the rare moments when the whole of a society collapses into criminality, those few who refuse are not the ones who held fast to a superior system of values. They are simply the ones who remained willing to judge for themselves — who asked whether they could still live with themselves if they complied.
I do not offer this as consolation. That such thoughtlessness could wreak more havoc than all the evil instincts taken together is, perhaps, the lesson of that long century of camps and wars. But if thinking has any bearing on conduct, it is here, at the rare moment when the stakes are highest and the crowd is moving in one direction, that its quiet refusal matters most.2