The banality of evil and blind obedience

In 1960, Adolf Eichmann, one of the key men responsible for carrying out the Final Solution -the Nazi plan to kill millions of Jews in concentration camps- was kidnapped in Argentina by Israeli agents and taken to Jerusalem where he was tried for crimes against humanity. Hannah Arendt, a German born American renowned political philosopher, wanted to take this unique opportunity to hear at the trial, first hand, the testimony of a protagonist of one of the most evil regimes in history. She persuaded The New Yorker magazine to send her to cover the story, which would eventually result in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.

 During the Eichmann trial, the testimonies of many of the victims of the Holocaust were heard for the first time. Arendt joked about the attitude of the chief prosecutor, Gideon Hausner, whose rhetorical flourishes she felt converted the trial into a show. Never afraid of courting controversy, she also questioned the attitude of the Jewish councils throughout Europe that had worked with the Nazis, in many cases facilitating the mass deportations to the death camps. 

 Arendt was also struck by Eichmann’s attitude during his trial, describing his composure throughout as he gave testimony, and employing the term the banality of evil, for which she is perhaps best remembered in the popular imagination:

 “For when I speak of the banality of evil, I do so only on the strictly factual level, pointing to a phenomenon which stared one in the face at the trial. Eichmann was not Iago and not Macbeth, and nothing would have been farther from his mind than to determine with Richard III 'to prove a villain.' Except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement, he had no motives at all… He merely, to put the matter colloquially, never realized what he was doing… It was sheer thoughtlessness — something by no means identical with stupidity —that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of that period. And if this is 'banal' and even funny, if with the best will in the world one cannot extract any diabolical or demonic profundity from Eichmann, this is still far from calling it commonplace… That such remoteness from reality and such thoughtlessness can wreak more havoc than all the evil instincts taken together which, perhaps, are inherent in man — that was, in fact, the lesson one could learn in Jerusalem.”

 Arendt's purpose was to demythologize evil; the common but delusory idea that there are people somehow possessed and who have chosen the path of evil since they were children. After careful analysis of Eichmann, she concludes that evil is prosaic and that any number of ordinary people are capable of acts of great cruelty.

Eichmann was not a psychopath in the conventional sense, an outcast alienated from society or suffering from a mental breakdown and therefore arguably unaccountable for his actions, but instead came over as a bureaucrat who insisted that while he was responsible for the deaths of millions of people, he was simply following orders and never personally killed anybody.  

 Arendt’s account of the trial aroused controversy and she was accused by some of portraying Eichmann sympathetically rather than focusing on his victims. This was unfair, and there is no doubt that she considered Eichmann one of the worst criminals of his time. Furthermore, she fully supported the court’s decision to hang him after finding him guilty. 

It is nevertheless significant that Arendt chose to portray Eichmann as little more than a pen-pusher despite his having arranged the mass deportation under horrendous conditions of hundreds of thousands of human beings who he knew were then to be gassed. 

In fact, after the world learnt of the crimes committed by the Nazis at the end of World War II, there was intense debate among moral philosophers on the nature of evil and the conflict between obedience and conscience.  But conflict in earlier times had prompted similar discussion as to whether as humans we have an inclination either toward benevolence or evil. 

As explained in a previous article here, For example, the Geneva-born political thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued in the years leading up to the French Revolution that we are born in a state of purity until our contact with society corrupts us. Our only hope is return to a state of nature where we can explore our true selves. This approach was in large part inspired by the European encounter in the eighteenth century with the native peoples of the Americas and Australia who were seen by Rousseau as naive and kind, but who, once taken to the metropolis, were unable to integrate and became transgressors. The Tarzan story is inspired by this myth. 

A century earlier, British philosopher Thomas Hobbes argued "homo homini lupus" (man is a wolf to man) and that it is only through the force of the state that we can tame our nature and guarantee relative social peace. Without the coercion of law imposed by public authorities we would return to a natural state of chaos, where violence and the law of the strongest would prevail, making life “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

However, Arendt was not interested in generic human inclination. What she was really concerned with was how, in an advanced, educated society with collectively agreed moral principles – which the Nazi regime had still not had time to eradicate – there were still people to be found whose behavior or complicity could cause much damage. Hence the banality of evil.

 Shortly after Eichmann’s trial, Stanley Milgram, a professor of psychology at Yale University, conducted a series of experiments that would soon be copied around the world. His original purpose was to answer the question "Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?" Milgram selected a group of participants with different profiles he called "teachers" who were told that they had to deliver a series of electric shocks to "learners” if they did not respond correctly to a word association exercise supervised by an “experimenter” authority figure. Assigning roles was important, as we tend to associate behavior with function. The teachers were also told that the electric shocks would increase in power. In reality, no electric shocks were actually being delivered and the so-called learners, who were actors employed for the experiment, had been told to feign pain and scream louder and louder with each discharge. Had the discharges been real, by the end of the experiment, the learners would have been dead.   

 The main finding of the experiment was that most of the teachers followed orders, despite their protests. While all the participants eventually delivered what they believed to be 300-volt shocks to their hapless learners, 65% went all the way up to 450 volts. Milgram had conducted pre-experiment surveys with his colleagues in the psychology department who said that only 1.2% of the 100 participants would go the whole way. Based on this estimate, Milgram initially intended to carry out the experiment with Americans and then with German participants, working on the assumption that they had a more entrenched sense of duty and obedience. In view of the results with the Americans, he decided not to do the experiment with Germans. However, similar exercises in various countries have since shown that there are no significant differences in obeying authority regardless of cultural diversity.    

 Leaving aside the validity of comparisons between the horrors of Nazism and Milgram’s disturbing experiments, the question of obedience in business is worthy of exploration, particularly in the context of how business decisions impact on the lives of others, both locally and globally. Over the course of their careers, managers are likely to receive orders or indications from above that may have harmful consequences for other people: lay-offs during a downsizing exercise,  closing an unprofitable business unit, reducing expenses at the risk of lower standards or poor service, knowingly manufacturing defective products or trying to influence officials. 

On those occasions, recalling examples of history that show how decadence may happen down a slippery slope, deriving into real harm to others and evil, serve as warnings to be in permanent alert.

Note

The photograph above portrays the group sculpture "Shoes on the Danube", in Budapest, in memory of the victims of the Nazi holocaust