Part 3. The Essence of Evil. In the previous installments, we've said we're going to be dealing with some sensitive content.

There's not as much in this installment.

We're looking at the philosophy and the concept of the banality of evil.

With that said, we hope you stick around and enjoy the show.

So we closed the final part of the last episode with Hannah Wrenz's own words,

assessing Eichmann as he gives this one final cliche before he dies.

And she says that this sums up the whole thing, really, the banality of evil.

When you first come across this term, and I'm only speaking personally for myself right now, is that I find banality to be an odd choice of word. I think that it could be

interpreted in a lot of different ways that you actually have to unpack it quite a bit.

And for her to use this term right at the end of the book and just leave it there, I suspect

for a lot of people, was not only confusing, but potentially insulting. And there was backlash.

But before we get onto that, I want to draw our attention just straight away to,

there's a quote from Hannah Arendt in her own words.

I think it's best to start there.

And then we can start unpacking the term and perhaps looking at what other people have said from it.

So in the postscript to Eichmann and Jerusalem, which would not have been in the original audition in the New Yorker, but would have been put into later editions as a response to some of the things that people said about the book. She says, for when I speak of the banality of evil, I do sue only in the strictly factual level, pointing to a a phenomenon which said one in the face at the trial.

Eichmann was not Eago and not Macbeth and nothing would have been farther than in the mind than to determine with Richard the third to prove a villain.

And then the really important bit here, except for extraordinary diligence in looking out for his own personal advancement, he had no motives at all.

And this diligence in itself was in no way criminal.

He certainly would never have murdered his superiors in order to inherit his post.

He merely, to put it colloquially, never realized what he was doing.

Now, she does go on to say a couple of other things there, but that's a big bit of it, is that when she's assessing the banality of evil, is that she seems to be linking it to a certain state of mind that Icom and has, that it's his lack of a certain type of thinking.

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