Hello, my name is Jesan Sorrells and this is the Leadership Lessons
from the Great Books podcast episode number
153.
What. Responsibilities do civil service bureaucrats
have to society and culture? Where does
free will, autonomy and needing to pay your mortgage run up
against or bump up against ethics and morals?
Who judges the criminality and deviance of actors who were
quote unquote just doing what they were told and quote unquote following
orders? And what responsibility do
individuals have in checking the power of the government
by standing a thwart bureaucratic control and yelling
stop? These and many
others are some of the questions
that the post World War II Nuremberg Trials of
members of the Nazi government of Germany
sought to answer in order to reassemble
a world broken by war and shocked into silence
by the presence of concentration camps.
But the answers to these questions, provided to a generation
of Americans and accepted by a couple of generations afterward
and as quote unquote, just the way things are,
are now in our time, well over 80
plus years after World War II being
deconstructed, particularly as the post World War II
liberal world order is falling apart or is being
reassembled, depending upon your perspective everywhere in the
West. The COVID 19
pandemic of course, brought many of these questions to the forefront in
the United States and globally now, particularly for the last
three generations of people, Gen Xers, Millennials and Gen Zers
who have never stared the atrocity of the concentration camps
directly in the face and whose only connection to that world
is through grainy black and white films or through
boomer generated hagiographies produced over
the last 30 years. Confronting the
terror of bureaucratic disinterested insistence on
compliance and the ruthless application of state power
to those who would rebel is new for us
living now, but would have been very familiar
to the pre World War II generations that
eventually had to deal with the consequences of all of that
at Nuremberg. To
wit, today on the podcast we will be introducing an
authority who wrote most of her work in direct and vehement
opposition to all forms of totalitarianism, both
fascism and communism. She was
unapologetically philosophical during a post World
War II era where women, and in particular
Jewish women, were just finding their feet in the
space of political and social philosophy.
Today we will be looking at the
major themes and exploring the life of the author
of Eichmann in Jerusalem Report on the
Banality of Evil by Hannah Arendt
Leaders look up. We are losing
by leaps and bounds the lessons of of
Nuremberg to our detriment
in the west and today we are going
to look at Eichmann in Jerusalem, a report on the Banality of
Evil and we will be reading excerpts
from from the book. You can get a PDF
copy of this book online. I would recommend
picking it up and checking it out
now. To pick up from Eichmann in Jerusalem
a report on the Banality of Evil. We're going to pick up
in the first chapter of the
report and then we'll talk a little bit about
Hannah Arendt and her background here.
And I quote for it was history.
That as far as the prosecution was. Concerned, and that means the prosecutor
in the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in the
1960s. For it was the history that as far as the prosecution
was concerned, stood at the center of the trial. It is not
an individual that is in the dock at this historic trial and not the Nazi
regime alone, but anti Semitism throughout history.
This was the tone sent by Ben Gurion and faithfully followed by Mr.
Hausner, who began his opening address, which lasted through three
sessions with Pharaoh in Egypt and Haman's decree, quote
to destroy, to slay and to cause them to perish. Close quote
he then proceeded to quote. Ezekiel, quote and when I
the Lord passed by thee and saw thee polluted in thine own blood, I said
unto thee in thy blood live, explaining that these words
must be understood as, quote the imperative that has confronted this nation
ever since its first appearance on the stage of history, close quote
it was bad history and cheap rhetoric. Worse, it was clearly across
purposes with putting Eichmann on trial, suggesting that
perhaps he was only an innocent executor of some mysteriously
foreordained destiny, or for that matter, even of anti
Semitism, which perhaps was necessary to blaze the
trail of the blood stained road traveled by this people
to fulfill its destiny. A few sessions later,
when Professor Salo. W. Barron of Columbia University had testified to the
more recent history of Eastern European jewelry, Dr. Servetius
could no longer resist temptation and asked the obvious questions
why did all this bad luck fall upon the Jewish people? And don't you
think that irrational motives. Are at the basis of the fate of
this people beyond the understanding of a human
being? Is there not perhaps something like the
spirit of the history which brings history forward without the influence of men?
Is not Mr. Hauser basically in agreement with the school of historical law
in allusion to Hegel? And has he not shown that
what the leaders do will not always lead to the aim and
destination they wanted here? The intention was to destroy
the Jewish people and the objective was not reached and A new
flourishing state came into being. The argument
of the defense had now come perilously close to the newest and
anti Semitic notion about the Elders of Zion set forth in all
seriousness a few weeks ago, earlier in the Egyptian national assembly by
Deputy Foreign Minister Hussein Zulfikar Sabri.
Hitler was innocent of the slaughter of the Jews. He was a victim of the
Zionists who. Who had, quote, compelled him to
perpetrate. Crimes that would eventually enable them to achieve their aim, the
creation of the State of Israel. Close quote.
Except that Dr. Sevatius, following the philosophy of history
expounded by the prosecutor, had put history in the place usually
reserved for the Elders of Zion.
Despite the intentions of Ben Gurion and all the efforts of the prosecution,
there remained an individual in the dock, a person of flesh
and blood. And if Ben Gurion did not,
quote, care what verdict is delivered against Eichmann,
it was undeniably the sole task of the Jerusalem court
to deliver one. When you read
Eichmann in Jerusalem, you realize that
there are two very important. People that are at the center
of this report. One obviously
is the person being reported. On and his trial.
That would be Adolf Eichmann. But the other important
person is Hannah Arendt.
Hannah Arendt was born Joanna Arendt on October 14,
1906 and she died December
4, 1975. And in case you don't know anything about
her, she was a German and American
historian and philosopher. Now, she
described herself vociferously as
a philosopher and she
also described herself later on, at least initially, sorry, she described
herself as a philosopher. But as the course of her career
in writing and in letters and in teaching unfolded,
she referred to herself more, or thought of herself more
as a political philosopher. Her works
cover a broad range of topics, but she is best known for
for those works dealing with the nature of wealth, power and evil,
as well as politics, direct democracy, authority, tradition,
and of course, what we're going to cover today,
totalitarianism and tyranny.
Hannah Arendt was raised in a politically
progressive Jewish but secular family
and her mother was an ardent social democrat in
Germany in the 1920s and in the 1930s. As a matter of fact,
Aren't was once interviewed by a German program
in a German language only interview that you could find the link
to in the show notes below. The player of the podcast
episode or sorry, the podcast player you're listening to for this
episode. And in that interview she was asked about her childhood
and she was. She said that she was surprised the first time
she was exposed to a anti Semitism in Germany.
And that her mother effectively put a
stop to anti Semitic incidents in school that would occur
with her between Hannah and.
And adults, but between Hannah and children.
Hannah recalled, she was sent out basically to
forge and figure out how to deal with those anti Semitic incidents
on her own. After
completing the secondary education in Berlin, Arendt studied
at the University of Marburg under Martin Heidegger.
And she was deeply influenced by
Heidegger and deeply influenced by Karl
Jaspers. Martin Heidegger, just so that, you know, was
a German philosopher and theologian.
He ran into some problems
when he vociferously and
pretty much wholeheartedly went in on becoming
a part of the National Socialist Party under Hitler.
And spent a lot of his years in post war Europe
and in America running around apologizing. Well, not really apologizing,
running around justifying that decision.
Arendt was deeply in love with Heidegger. Matter of fact,
there's a lot of indication in her biography that he was probably her
first serious love affair. And he was significantly older,
older than her at the time. And this love affair
began when he or she was his
student at the University of Marburg.
In 1933, Arendt was
briefly imprisoned by the Gestapo for performing
illegal research into anti Semitism. And this was during
the period of time when Germany was beginning to lock
down most of its Jewish population and
was beginning to really turn the crank
and put pressure on Jews. This pressure, of course,
would culminate in the development of
auschwitz in the 1940s,
when Germany finally declared war on everybody in Europe
and invaded France. Hannah at that time had
escaped to France and there she was detained as an alien.
When Germany invade. She escaped the clutches
of the Nazis and made her way back to the United
States. In 1941, when she
landed in the United States, she did not speak any English. And she taught herself
over the course of a couple years how to do that. By the way. She
was a native German speaker, obviously, but she was also
fluent in French and in English. She
became a writer and editor and worked for the Jewish Cultural
Reconstruction. She also became an American Citizen in
1950 with the publication of
the Origins of Totalitarianism. In 1951, her
reputation as a thinker and a writer was established and an
entire series of political philosophical works
followed. She taught at many American universities
while consistently declining tenure track appointments. She
didn't want to be locked down. She had an inherent mistrust of
institutional and of institutional authority.
During the course of her career, she had many friendships and she got involved in
many controversies, including the controversies that we are going to talk
about today that cover her reporting on the
trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in the
1960s. She was
also consistently buried for many, many years. Her husband
died before she did, and she died suddenly of a heart
attack in December of 1975, leaving her
last work, the Life of the Mind, unfinished.
If you want to talk about a giant of the
20th century, an intellectual giant of the 20th century,
you probably would do well to include
Hannah Arendt in your list of giants of
political and philosophical thought of the
20th century. So just in case you
don't know anything about Adolf Eichmann,
let's go ahead and pick up from Menality
of Evil, a report on the
Menality of Evil by Hannah Arendt. Let's go ahead and pick up with
her description of Adolf
Eichmann. And I quote,
he was born on March 19, 1906
in Solingen, a German town in the Rhineland famous for
its knives, scissors and surgical instruments. 54
years later, indulging in his favorite pastime of writing his memoirs, he
described this memorable event as follows.
Quote Today, 15 years in a day after May 8,
1945, I began to lead my thoughts back to that 19th of March of the
year 1906, when at 5 o' clock in the morning I entered life on
earth in the aspect of a human being. The
manuscript has not been released by the Israeli authorities. Harry Mulish
succeeded in studying this autobiography for half
an hour, and the German Jewish weekly Der
Aufbau was able to publish short excerpts from it.
According to his religious beliefs, which had not changed since the Nazi period
in Jerusalem, Eichmann declared himself to be a got gluber,
the Nazi term for those who had broken with Christianity, and he refused
to take his oath on the Bible. This event was
to be ascribed to a higher bearer of meaning,
an entity somehow identical with the movement of the universe,
to which human life in itself devoid of higher meaning, is
subject. The terminology is quite suggestive
to call God a hoheran sinister meaning
linguistically, to give him some place in the military hierarchy, since the
Nazis had changed the military recipient of orders, the
Belfenschlemflanger, into a bearer of orders,
a befel strager, indicating as in the ancient bearer
of ill tidings, the burden of responsibility and of importance that
weighed supposedly upon those who had to execute orders.
Moreover, Eichmann, like everyone connected with the Final Solution, was
officially a bearer of secrets, a guy high
mainunstragger as well, which as far as self
importance went, certainly was nothing to sneeze at.
But Eichmann was not very much interested in metaphysics, remaining
singularly silent on any more intimate relationship between
the bearer of meaning and the bearer of orders, and proceeded
to a consideration of the other possible cause of his existence.
His parents and I quote, they would hardly
have been so overjoyed at the arrival of their firstborn
had they been able to watch how in the hour of my birth, the
norn of. Miss. Miss.
The norn of misfortune. There it is.
In spite of the norn of good fortune, was already spinning
threads of grand grief and sorrow into my life. But a kind
impenetrable veil kept my parents from seeing into the future.
Close quote. The
misinformation or the misfortune. Sorry, started soon enough. It
started in school. Eichmann's father, first an accountant for the tramways
and electricity company in Solingen, and after 1913, as an official
of the same corporation, Austria in Linz, had five children,
four sons and a daughter, of whom only Adolf, the eldest, it seems. Was unable
to finish high school or. Even to graduate from the vocational school for engineering
into which he was then put. Throughout his life, Eichmann
deceived people about his early, quote, unquote misfortunes by hiding behind the more
honorable financial misfortunes of his father in Israel. However, during
the first sessions with Captain Abner Lest, a police examiner who was to
spend approximately 35 days with him and who produced
3564 typewritten pages from the 76 recorder
tapes, he he was in an ebullent mood, full of enthusiasm about this
unique opportunity, quote, to pour forth everything I know,
and by the same token, to advance to the rank of the most cooperative defendant
ever. His enthusiasm was soon dampened, though never
quite extinguished, when he was confronted with concrete questions based on
irrefutable documents. The best proof of his initial boundless
confidence, obviously wasted on Captain Less, who said to Harry
Mulish the quote, I was Mr. Eichmann's father confessor. Close quote
was that for the first. Time in his life he admitted his early disasters,
although he must have been aware of the fact that he thus
contradicted himself on several important entries in all his official
Nazi records. Well,
the disasters were ordinary, since he, quote, had not exactly been the most
hard working pupil, close quote or, one may add, the most gifted.
His father had taken him first from high school and then from vocational school long
before graduation. Hence the profession that appears on all his
official documents, construction engineer, had about as much connection with
reality as the statement that his birthplace was Palestine, or that he was fluent in
Hebrew and Yiddish, another outright lie Eichmann had loved to tell both
to his SS comrades and to his Jewish victims. It was in
the same vein that he had always pretended that he had been dismissed from his
job as a salesman for the Vacuum Oil Company in Austria because of membership of
the National Socialist Party. The version he confided to Captain
Less was less dramatic, though probably not the truth either. He had been
fired because it was a time of unemployment when unmarried
employees were the first to lose their jobs. This explanation,
which at first seems plausible, is not very satisfactory because he lost his
job in the spring of 1933, when he had been engaged for a full two
years to Veronica or Vera Liebel, who later became his wife.
Why had he not married her before, when he still had a good job? He
finally married in March 1935, probably because bachelors in the SS,
as in the Vacuum Oil Company, were never sure of their jobs
and could not be promoted. Clearly
bragging had always been one of his cardinal vices.
While young Eichmann was doing poorly in school, his father left the tramway and
electricity company and went into business for himself. He bought a small mining enterprise
and put his unpromising youngster to work in it as an ordinary mining
laborer, but only until he found him a job in the sales department of the
Oberstresscheikken Electrobrau company, where Eichmann
remained for over two years. He was now about 22 years old and without
any prospects for a career. The only thing he had learned, perhaps, was
how to sell. What then happened was what he himself called his first
break, of which, again, we have two rather different versions.
In a handwritten biographical record he submitted in 1939 to win a promotion in
the SS, he described it as follows. Quote I worked during the years of
1925 to 1927 as a salesman for the Austrian Austrian
Electrobrau Company. I left this position of my own free will as the Vacuum
Oil Company of Vienna offered me the representative, the representation for
Upper Austria. The keyword here is
offered since, according to the story he told Captain Les in Israel,
nobody had offered him anything. His own mother had died when he was 10 years
old and his father had married again A cousin of his stepmother, a man who
he called uncle, who was president of the Austrian Automobile Club and
was married to the daughter of a Jewish businessman in Czechoslovakia had used his connection
with the general director of the Austrian vacuum oil company, a Jewish Mr. Weiss,
to obtain for his
tame, for his unfortunate relation a job as a traveling
salesman. Eichmann was properly grateful.
The Jews and his family were among his private reasons, quote
unquote, for not hating Jews.
Then we're going to move on a little bit as he moved through the vacuum
oil company and we're going to skip ahead
for whatever reasons. The year 1932 marked a turning point in his life.
It was in April of this year that he joined the National Socialist Party and
entered the SS upon an invitation of Ernst Kaltenbrunner,
a young lawyer in Linz who later became chief of the head office for Reich
Security, the Reichstagshire
heisChenwat, or the RSHA as I shall call it
henceforth. In one of those whose six main
departments, Bureau 4, under the command of Heinrich Mueller, Eichmann
was eventually employed as the head of section B4. In court.
Eichmann gave the impression of a typical member of the lower middle classes. And this
impression was more than borne out by every sentence he spoke or wrote
while in prison. But this was misleading. He was rather de
classe son of a solid middle class family and it
was indicative of his come down in social status that while his father was a
good friend of Kaltenbrunner's father, who was also Linz lawyer, the
relationship of the two sons was rather cool.
Eichmann was unmistakably treated by Kaltenbrunner as his social
inferior. Before Eichmann entered the party and the SS, he
had proved that he was a joiner. And May 8, 1945, the official
date of Germany's defeat, was significant for him, mainly because it then dawned upon him
that thenceforward he would have to live without being member of something
or the other. I sensed that I would have
to live a leaderless and difficult individual life.
I would receive no directives from anybody, no orders and
commands would any longer be issued to me. No pertinent ordinances
would be there to consult. In brief, a
life never known before lay
before me. One of the things that jumps out.
To you about Eichmann and
Arendt is their
weird parallels. They were both from
the same generation of Germans.
You know, Eichmann was born in. In. In 1906,
as was Aaron, actually. They were only separated by
birth by only about six months.
They both came up during the exact same time in Germany
and yet they had fundamentally different lives.
Hannah Arendt was raised as an
intellectual in a Jewish
subculture in Germany that was operating
at its moral, philosophical and some would even say its
theological height. There's a quote from
her. She said this about her upbringing quote. My early intellectual
formation occurred in an atmosphere where nobody paid much attention to
moral questions, we were brought up under the assumption
Das morlische verstett Schick van Scheblest.
Moral conduct is a matter of course,
close quote. That idea that moral
conduct is a matter of course
influenced how Arendt would look at her
contemporary, her social peer,
Adolf Eichmann, when he was eventually put
in the dock after being kidnapped in Argentina
by the Mossad. The
getting of Eichmann is a whole other. A whole other
episode. And we may cover that at some point in time in the. In the
future. What I really want to focus on today, or we should focus on today,
is one of the main themes, one of the main ideas in Eichmann in
Jerusalem. And the main idea, the first main idea that really jumps out to us
about this book is this idea of reportage.
For those of you who maybe are too young to
understand or experience this word, reportage is
what individuals as diverse as Hunter Thompson, all the way
to Joan Didion and of course James Baldwin and Hannah
Arendt engaged in in the middle part of the 20th century
in America. 20th century journalism in
America, from Walt Duranty all the way to the
folks who brought us the Pentagon Papers, used to be about
investigative journalism. Now investigative
journalism, the kind that we no longer have, even though we
have the Internet, that journalism was deep,
well researched, and journalists went out and sought
to understand the nature of the situation that they were
investigating in order to report on that situation back to the
public. Investigative journalist reports were long,
detailed and in depth. But then there's
reportage. And reportage was different. Reportage was where
the, the reporter or
the writer, usually a person with some writing
chops, usually a person of some fame, maybe a
novelist or even a political theorist like Arendt,
would be invited by a journalist
organization to turn their,
their skills in novel writing, their skills in essay writing,
their proven skills in political theorizing to
a particular topic that a pure journalist maybe wouldn't be
able to handle. And this is what Hannah Arendt was engaged in. She was engaged
in reportage around the Adolf Eichmann trial.
She was sent by the New Yorker in 1961 to cover the
Eichmann trial. And of course, her original reporting was published in
the New Yorker in the 1960s,
1962, 1963, that is
when about when her reporting, her reporting came out.
Now the thing you got to understand about Hannah Aaron, the thing that influenced
her reportage and influenced how she developed
her reporting around Eichmann's trial, was that
she never saw herself As a political leftist,
she also never saw herself as politically Jewish.
She instead saw herself primarily as an individual going to
report on an event that had happened to.
To another. Another individual, and
she and a group of individuals. And being set apart
from the atrocities
of World War II, she was able to
prioritize political oversight, social
questions. This consistent
prioritization of the political over the social was one of the
many, particularly in her reportage, in her books and even in
her political essays and philosophies, was one of the things that
consistently got her into trouble and generated
controversy around her all the way from her first book, the
Origins of Totalitarianism, all the way to
Eichmann in Jerusalem.
Because of the nature of how Aaron
interpreted her own existence. She
was. She was. She was deeply
interested in the surroundings of the trial of
Adolf Eichmann. And she attempted in her reportage to
explain how ordinary people, and this is one of her core ideas,
became actors in totalitarian systems. This
was considered by some to be an apologia. And
this was where the phrase was coined, the banality
of evil. Arendt,
quite frankly, when she went and saw Eichmann in the
dock, was shocked by how normal looking a
bureaucrat Adolf Eichmann was. Yes,
Arendt was locked up by the Gestapo. And yes, she first heard about
Auschwitz living in America as a refugee in
1943 and was stunned by
the fact of Auschwitz. Yes, she helped
many organizations establish
and resettle Jewish refugees in the State of Israel.
No, she did not think of herself as a Zionist
per se, but she did think of herself as someone who supported
the Jewish people and as an individual Jew,
not as a representative of humanity, not as a representative
of the German state, but as a representative of the
Jewish people. And she was still
shocked by how normal a bureaucrat Eichmann
was in the dock. He was not, much to her
surprise, a slavering monster. Nor was he
a cold, calculating sociopath like Goebbels or even
Heinrich Himmler. He was fundamentally,
and this is the. Thing that we all still struggle with and this is why
we will be. Reading the Banality of Evil probably for the remainder of
this century. He was fundamentally a
nobody from nowhere.
Back to the book. Back to Eichmann in
Jerusalem, a report on the Banality
of Evil. And I pick up here from the
postscript and I quote, there
is, of course, no doubt the defendant and the nature of his acts as
well as the trial itself raised problems of a general nature which go far
beyond the matters considered in Jerusalem. I have attempted to
go into some of the Problems in the epilogue, which ceases to be simple
reporting. I would not have been surprised if people had found my treatment
inadequate. And I would have welcomed a discussion of the general
significance of the entire body of facts, which could have been all the
more meaningful the more directly it referred to the concrete events.
I also can well imagine that an authentic controversy might have arisen over the
subtitle of the book. 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, quote, unquote, to prove a villain.
Except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his 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 superior in order to inherit his post. He merely, to put the
matter colloquially, never realized what he was doing.
It was precisely this lack of imagination which enabled him to sit for months
on end facing a German Jew who was conducting the police interrogation,
pouring out to his heart the man, or pouring
out his heart to the man and explaining again and again how it was that
he reached only the rank of Lieutenant colonel in the ss and that it had
not been his fault that he was not promoted
in principle. He knew quite well what it was all about. And in his final
statement to the court he spoke of the reevaluation of the values
prescribed by the Nazi government. He was not
stupid. 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, that is still far from calling it commonplace.
It surely cannot be so common that a man facing death, and moreover standing
beneath the gallows should be able to think of nothing but what he has heard
at funerals all his life, and that these lofty words should completely
be cloud the reality of his own death. That such remoteness from
reality and such thoughtlessness can wreck 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. But it
was a lesson neither an explanation of the phenomenon
nor a theory about it,
seemingly more complicated, but in reality far simpler than examining the
strange interdependence of thoughtlessness. And evil is the question of what kind
of crime is actually involved here. A crime, moreover, which all agree is
unprecedented. For the concept of genocide, introduced explicitly
to cover a crime unknown before, although applicable up to a point, is not fully
adequate for the simple reason that massacres of whole peoples are not
unprecedented. They were the order of the day in antiquity.
And the centuries of colonialization, imperialism provide plenty of examples of
more or less successful attempts of that sort of sort. The
expression administrative massacre seems better to fill the bill.
The term arose in connection with British imperialism. The English deliberately
rejected such procedures as a means of maintaining their rule over India.
The phrase has the virtue of dispelling the prejudice that such monstrous acts can
be committed only against foreign nation or a different
race. There is the well known fact that Hitler began his mass
murders by granting mercy deaths to the quote, unquote incurably ill,
and that he intended to wind up his extermination program by doing away with, quote
unquote, genetically damaged Germans heart and lung patients to start.
But quite aside from that, it is apparent that this sort of killing can be
directed against any given group, that is that the principle of selection
is dependent only upon circumstantial factors. It is quite
conceivable that in the automated economy of the not too distant future,
men may be tempted to exterminate all those whose intelligence
quotient is below a certain level.
In Jerusalem, this matter was inadequately discussed because it is actually very difficult
to grasp jurisdictiously. We heard the
protestations of the defense at Eichmann was, after all, only a tiny cog in the
machinery of the Final Solution and of the prosecution, which believed it had
discovered in Eichmann the actual motor. I myself attributed
no more importance to both theories than did the Jerusalem court, since the whole cog
theory is legally pointless, and therefore it does not matter at all what order
of magnitude is assigned to the cog named Eichmann. In its
judgment, the court naturally conceded that such a crime could be committed only by a
giant bureaucracy using the resources of government. But insofar as
it remains a crime, and that, of course, is the premise of for a trial,
all the cogs in the machinery, no matter how insignificant, are in court
forthwith transformed back into perpetrators, that is to
say, into human beings. If the defendant
excuses himself on the ground that he acted not as a man, but as a
mere functionary whose functions could just as easily have been carried out by anyone else,
it is as if a criminal pointed to the statistics on crime which set
forth that so and so Many crimes per day are committed in such and
such place, and declared that he only did what was
statistically expected, that it was mere accident
that he did it and not somebody else, since, after all,
somebody had to do it. Of course,
it is important to point, it is important to the political and
social sciences that the essence of totalitarian government, and perhaps
the nature of every bureaucracy, is to make functionaries
and mere cogs in the administrative machinery out of men, and thus
to dehumanize them. And one could debate long
and profitably on the rule of nobody, which is
what the political form known as bureaucracy
truly is.
So we will cover that idea of the rule of
nobody from nowhere and tie it into
the upcoming rule, at least in the west, of
all of us, by the wonderful
vicissitudes of large language model
algorithms in our next episode, where we will talk
with Tom Libby and Harvey Seifer
about the banality of
evil. But just to introduce,
Just to keep with the theme of this particular episode, where we're really focusing on
introducing the themes of the book,
I think the larger idea here, the larger
leadership lessons that we can take from Eichmann in
Jerusalem, are these.
So if we look at Hannah Aaron,
right, if we look at her as a writer, we look at her as a
political theorist. If we look at her as a woman,
probably she would not describe herself as a feminist. She never used that
language. She probably thought it was mostly ridiculous
because she had never been withheld, at least not in her
estimation, ever been withheld, or been.
Or been pushed back or not been allowed to enter any place where a man
was allowed to enter. Much like Zora Neale Hurston
before her, she probably would have looked askance
at being called a feminist.
But if you look at Hannah Arendt's work and you look at
her, particularly her reportage here on Eichmann, on the
Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, the last trial
of Nuremberg, Hannah Arendt was consumed
by thinking and writing about the threats to human freedom
presented by scientific abstraction and bourgeois
morality. Intellectually, she was an
independent thinker, a loner, and not a joiner, separating
herself from schools of thought and even attempting. To separate herself from
ideology. What this means is,
while it made her unique when the New Yorker called her up in
1961 and probably correctly sent
her to Jerusalem, it also virtually guaranteed that there was
going to be a controversial controversy of some kind, based on
some conclusion that she were to draw from
staring at Eichmann finally as. Again, as a
person who had been arrested by the Gestapo, finally staring at
Eichmann in the face.
And this is the thing that we don't
get right. We particularly don't get
it. 80 years away from the horrors of World War
II. What is it like to actually
look at your perpetrator?
Not of a small crime, not of a robbery or murder.
And I don't want to minimize those crimes because they do impact people. But
when we're talking about state level criminality,
those crimes are minimal. What is it like
to stand in the dock and stare at this
person and realize
that they're just another human being,
they aren't Satan himself. And
yes, in your mind you might have built them up and they'll do until Satan
gets here. But then Satan turns
out to be just a little ruffled
man. And not just any kind of little ruffled man,
a little ruffled thoughtless man.
This was Eichmann's true crime. He was not a critical thinker.
He was eager to conform and eager to comply with little
thought to rebellion and little consideration
of the knock on effects of his actions. Not only
did he not want to think think, not only was he lacking
curiosity about himself,
he was unable to think.
He had no theory of mind,
not just theory of mind about other people, but theory of
mind about himself.
This of course does not obviate his responsibility
or his accountability for the actions he took.
This is one of the unique features of being human beings, right?
We expect other human beings to be accountable
and accept consequences for the actions they take. Which is why
AI is going to be so horrific by the way,
if we truly do let the genie all the way
out of the bottle and begin to allow it to make decisions
for us. Because there will be an appeal to
nobody from nowhere. LLMs don't
have a mind. They have no theory of mind. Thus we do not expect them
to accept consequences for their actions. Thus any actions
that they quote, unquote take from their quote, unquote decision making will just
be called natural.
Just like we don't expect the wind or the
hurricane or the tornado or the storm
to pay out the insurance. When it destroys
your house, your property or kills your family.
We just say it was an act of God and move on.
But Eichmann was not God, by the way.
Eichmann was not God in the way that Stalin was not God.
Hitler was not God. Goebbels was
not God. Mao was not God.
Pol Pot was not God. The members of the Khmer
Rouge were not God. Saddam
Hussein was not God. And the
Ayatollahs in Iran, no matter how religious
sounding the name Ayatollah is are not
God.
Thus they cannot commit acts of
God.
Eichmann should unsettle us as leaders. His presence in the
world should unsettle us as leaders, particularly if we merely
favor uncritical action from our leaders and from
ourselves. If we merely want people to just do things and get stuff
done. He was, as
Arendt wrote, terribly and terrifyingly
normal.
Arendt examined the question of whether evil is radical or
simply a function of thoughtlessness. A tendency of ordinary people to
obey orders and conform to mass opinion without a
critical evaluation of the consequences of their actions. And
there's a tie in here to both 1984 and to
animal Farm, which we will be covering here on the
show coming up shortly.
Why is it that certain people just can't
critically think? They can't critically walk through
what's happening. They can't critically question motives
or have empathy for others.
Eichmann shrouded his actions in bureaucratic
morality, and he, and even Aaron
noted this. Spouted mindless cliches.
He was smooth brained in his approach to
critical thinking. He was about as sharp as a
marble or bowling ball. He
was the ultimate example. His. His bureaucratic morality and mindless
cliches were the ultimate example of what
Winston, the character Winston, becomes at the close of
the story or the book, the novel 1984 by George
Orwell. He was a compliant automaton,
spouting newspeak or Hitlerisms, whatever you want to call
it, and desperately seeking to be understood, understood
and of course, given grace that he does not deserve
when caught. Leaders.
There's some lessons here, some cautions and some
massive red flags that you should be paying attention to,
particularly as you hire people, as you fire people,
and even as you promote people, most especially,
especially as you promote people, in particular
in bureaucratic agencies where
thoughtlessly filling out the box and being compliant
and not rocking the boat is more
important than actually engaging
with reality, with
courage.
So by reading Eichmann in Jerusalem, what problem are we seeking
to solve as leaders? What problem that is
bedeviling us? Are we seeking to use this book as a resource, as a
guide, as a map to the territory,
to be able to help us figure out what actions to take,
what posture to take, or even what mindset to have
when we're approaching not only leadership but also other
aspects of our lives? What problem
are we looking to Eichmann in Jerusalem, a report on the
banality of evil to solve?
Well, I think the biggest problem that we are looking for this
book to solve is the problem of never forgetting.
We are, as I have said repeatedly during this episode today,
we are currently in 2025. And of
course, because this is a podcast and it's audio, and it will live on the
Internet until I take it down, or in perpetuity,
whichever comes first, at some point in the future,
someone will hear this, and you will
be able to count the years, the decades,
and maybe even, dare I say, the centuries
after World War II. And as the decades have
rolled by, as the decades have increased, from staring at the horrors
of the concentration camps or the firebombing of Dresden
or the firebombing of Tokyo, or even
the nuclear holocaust at
Nagasaki and Hiroshima,
as we have moved far away from that, as it
fades into historical memory, as the people
who actually fought it have now all
died and only their voices recorded and otherwise
remain. And soon those will fade.
We have a new generation of people in the world who
have, and I don't think we estimate this
correctly, who do not have one iota of
emotional connection to any of these
events. Just like there
are people who are being born now who have not one iota
of emotional connection to the events of September 11,
one iota of emotional connection
to the events of
1989 at Tiananmen Square, not one
iota of emotional connection to the
events of the Iraq wars or the Afghanistan
wars. There are people being born
right now and living right
now who will view all of this and listen to all of this
as mere history and wonder what
all the trouble was.
Never forget is the motto around the Holocaust. But never
forgetting, like I said, means sometimes not remembering correctly.
And the past was just as complicated and just as
multifaceted as the present is. With just as many human
foibles, sins, and problems we experience
in the current age, the
individual will always have trouble critiquing the
society, whether that
society is the society of the 1930s in Germany,
the 1970s in America, or the
two or the 2000s. Globally.
Courage has always been in short supply. Apply
the challenge represented by the outcome of both the Nuremberg trials and
the trial of Adolf Eichmann. And this is the big
challenge, by the way. The big challenge is that secular
human justice is no replacement for our deep need,
our deep human need for some type, some
method, some way of cosmically
reassembling the universe and
inserting back to it what is right and what is
just. This is why, ever since
2010, the calls from the social justice warriors,
the changing of speech, the altering
of the social contract between people in
America and between groups of people in America
has been so far fraught with
problems. We actually don't have a good conception
of what justice means, particularly if we don't have
religious language to describe it. If we don't have the
correct language, we can't actually describe what we want.
And secular humanism at a philosophical level
only partially slakes our thirst.
Secular human justice doesn't have room for forgiveness
or restoration, bringing people back together in
community. It only has room for
judging based on facts, making a
determination based on the facts at hand, and
then rendering a punishment and then calling
that justice.
In the west, as we round up towards 80
plus years since the horrors of the Holocaust were thrust upon
us, and we round up on 90 plus years past
pogroms, gulags and the secret police of communism,
we realize, I think, or we are going to have to teach
a new generation of people to realize that
all of these methods, all of these,
these tools are merely, not merely, but they
are somewhat politics just taken
up by other means. With
the distance that we have of approaching a century
from the original events that set us on this
path, antisemitism is on the rise. And that's to
disturbing. As well as an increasing in
leveraging of bureaucratic morality and
mindless cliches in order to justify
state violence. And by the way, this is not a critique of the
left from the right or a critique of the right from the left. This is
a critique of human beings
using these tools
in order to engage in politics,
in order to accomplish political ends.
It's almost like giving a four year old a
knife and expecting them
to cut the cheese rather than cut
themselves. And only by a miracle do they
avoid losing some fingers. And we call that a
victory. You
got to take the knife away from the four year old.
And I think that's the biggest solution, right? You have to take the knife of
politics by other means away from people who do
not have the education and the knowledge and the
emotional connection to utilize it correctly. Or another way
of saying this is we have failed
in our responsibility in the west to mature people
into being serious adults.
Serious adults do not cotton antisemitism
in any form. Serious adults do not
cotton pogroms, nor do they cotton
gulags or thought policing or cancel
culture. Serious adults do
not cotton behavioral tracking
or large language models that are currently
being used to outsource our minds so that
we can sit around and watch more Netflix.
But we don't have that. And that's the hardest part, right?
We don't have that because we've abdicated. In a different direction.
And thus I must come to the conclusion that there is no solution
to these problems. Because they are problems of the human condition.
They are problems of human sin. Whether that sin is
laziness or violence. Whether that sin is pride
or lust of power. Whether that sin is greed for
material resources or
avarice and jealousy. Because someone else has something
that you do not. And these
problems, these problems of human sin.
All coming together in the collision between
Adolf Eichmann and Hannah Arendt.
All these problems cannot be eliminated by
political means. It's the wrong
tool. Politics is, and justice is, and
the law is. They are the wrong tools
to accomplish a spiritual goal.
And, well,
that's it for me.