Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil by Hannah Arendt - Introduction w/Jesan Sorrells

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.