Fascism is Our New Normal: Terribly and Terrifyingly Ordinary
On the Banality of Evil
Fascism: I talked about this two weeks ago. I talked about the word normalization and what's normal. Here’s the thesis for today: Evil in general, but fascism in particular, relies on the ordinary - on ordinary people who just want to go about their lives and not think too much about politics or the civic square. Fascism doesn’t rely on super villains. There are those, and we can name them. We can talk about them. There are people who are really, really nefarious; people who wake up in the morning with evil intentions. There's no doubt. I have no doubt in my mind. But there's way more ordinary people who are not super villains. What fascism does is it asks ordinary people to be part of a larger system, a system that demonizes certain leaders and says that they're worthy of death. A system that looks at certain groups of people and says they're not actually human and they deserve to be expelled or to die. You'll go along with that. And it happens over time.
Here’s Hannah Arendt talking about Eichmann: “The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him. And that many were neither perverted nor sadistic; that they were and still are terribly and terrifyingly normal.”