I think back on my past and all the evil actions I have taken have all been fed by very low self-worth and insecurity.
When you think of yourself as below everyone else, trying to bring them down to your level with malicious acts can feel like quite reasonable. You're "punching up" so you can feel a sense of righteous justification.
It's only looking back that I realize I wasn't nearly as weak as I thought.
Another TV show that played with this concept well is "30 Rocks", with the main protagonist dreading to go to her high school reunion because she was a nerdy girl mocked by the high-school bully, As the episode go on, she realize that she was the bully, everyone was terrified of her and her extremely cruel remarks, including her friend who was afraid of her, turning the whole 'underdog nerd' trope on it's head.
On a more serious note, this is also why I'm wary of the "punching up" or "punching down" rethoric, because it's often easy to downplay any form of violence as justified retribution.
It's a perfect show. There are so many hilarious lines. My favorite has to be when tracy says "don't make me show you the back of my hand" and then on his hand is written "please be nice to me".
My second favorite show of all time (second only to Arrested Development). Many shows have memorable/quotable lines, but 30 Rock has more memorable lines per season than many shows do in their entire run. It is rapid fire on another level.
My favorite that I use on a regular basis, from Tracy: "I can't change! I'm like a chameleon -- always a lizard."
This. You don't even need the "punching up" justification, sometimes low self worth itself can be enough to rationalize behavior. Something like "I'm a loser anyway, so of course I do things that losers do". This is bad!
Kaczynski called out low self-esteem as one of several foundational components in the psychology of his hated enemies (“leftists”), whom he believed to be the primary scourge of society (ironic, coming from a mass murderer). Modern analysis of incel culture also places low self-esteem at the center of the problem.
Tangental but it's interesting to read Kaczynski's bio after listening to a podcast about the Zizian cult over the weekend, some very clear parallels in personality type.
You ruin any point you’re trying to make with the unnecessary “inkwells” remark. That word is also used to denigrate and dehumanise. Also, it’s brainless in general.
If you haven't heard of Peep Show but you enjoyed Succession you should know that Jessie Armstrong, the creator and showrunner of Succession, was previously one half of the Jessie Armstrong and Sam Bain pair responsible for Peep Show.
I find the similarities between the two shows fascinating: in particular the way they both revel in how flawed their central characters are.
This is a good read for fans of the the show. I don’t think the central premise of redefined evil holds up, but it’s a fun read and the analysis of their characters is spot on.
It is hard to see many people empathizing with Mark when he routinely makes such terrible decisions. You want him to win, but even hearing his rationalizations -some of his actions are insane.
I think this is an important point - it's very easy to find oneself slipping into the protagonists' viewpoints, in a lot of media the protagonist is 'good', we see the story unfold from their viewpoint, then sympathise and empathise with them, even when they make mistakes, their motivations were pure, and what’s unfolding isn’t due to problems with them exactly.
But in shows like this, in quite a lot of sitcoms with more cringey aspects, the protagonist is not necessarily a good person and they are often undone by their own pettiness, selfishness etc. Certainly in UK comedy anyway. Look at Fawlty Towers, The Office... Blackadder to a certain extent.
So when the article says this -
> It’s natural when experiencing any story to identify and sympathize with the protagonist.
Yes and no - this is something that creators can play with and may make deliberately jarring. See 'Lolita' for an extreme example. The article even brings up Walter White, saying - "we are drawn to root for the primary subject of the story". If you're still rooting for Walter by the end of Breaking Bad... were we watching the same show?
By that point I was hoping Jessie got out of it all alive, because while he was clearly a dumbass with questionable morals, nobody deserved what he was going through, and the abuse he'd put up with at the hands of Walt among others.
Walt was still fascinating to watch and maybe I approved of or disliked some of his individual actions, and we definitely had deep insight to his character by then, but I don't think I'd describe myself as rooting for him or experiencing his story in a particularly sympathetic way. I wasn't experiencing the story through him by then as I might have been early on, if that makes sense.
Hopefully this came across but I'm definitely not always rooting for either Tony Sorprano or Walter White.
Like you say, you experience the story through these dubious characters. Especially on multiple watch throughs you can really come to despise them but the series are so well made that the writers can bring you round multiple times.
There's something about the cognative disonence of how most people experience life there.
I was once told that most people that do bad things just convince themselves that what they're doing is actually OK.
So someone that steals from cars blames the car's owner for leaving it unlocked. That rings true for me. They're not sociopaths, they're bending their reality to justify their actions.
That's obvious criminality but I think that almost everyone is doing something like that to some extent.
For example, just look at the popularity of fast fashion that's almost certainly made with slave labour. At this point in time I don't think anyone buying from Shien[1] or Temu[2] could be in any doubt. They must know, they just don't care. They're still just everyday people.
I wrote a response to this many times, you write some good points. I like how you can keep disconnected and non judgemental while somehow making it appear that both ordering from Temu and grand theft auto are similarly bad.
Seinfeld also dipped into this, IIRC. it was one of the reasons the series finale ended up w/ all of the main characters in jail and having all of their terrible behavior called out.
I place it in the category of “cringe humor,” and by that standard it’s more cringey than Seinfeld and curb - especially because of the first person shots. It is a great show! Well worth a watch.
I always refer to it as cringe humour too but for the reason that it makes me physically cringe seeing how they humiliate themselves in social situations - Like NO MARK PLEASE DONT DO THAT! DONT ACT ON THAT IMPULSE PLEASE! kinda thing.
I was completely sold when I think it's in the first episode Mark is walking past some lads who accuse him of being a "paedo" and he hurries off thinking to himself "You're not a paedo. You're definitely not a paedo." as they've finally said something bad that doesn't apply to him.
> To Arendt, that was the scariest thing of all – that such evil could be perpetrated by so banal an individual.
My takeaway from Eichmann was not that Eichmann _wasn't_ a horrible person. It's very clear that he is horrible, that he had full knowledge of what he was doing. Her characterization of him was actually comical. Totally irreverent of the man. (and, made the book quite a fun read)
But I think Eichmann made a deeper point. "Banality" described his self-conception. The way his place in society was created for him, and the way he used it, not even to justify and rationalize his actions, but to simply allow himself to work without thinking towards the evil that transpired. The way that Nazi society created a mechanism by which he could, by default and without effort, continue working, in spite of obvious evidence of cruelty. In fact, seeing the gas vans up close was disturbing to Eichmann, as it would be to anyone.
She generalized the mechanism beyond the Nazis (the controversy of the book was that it pointed out how closely the Jews of Europe assisted Eichmann with his work).
It is these "default", "without effort" positions that we take, in all of our daily lives, that ultimately are evil. Although Eichmann was a particularly stupid and egregious example, we all have little sayings that we say to ourselves that allow us to ignore the cruelty and evil that happens in front of our face as a result of the structures we find ourselves in.
And therefore: that it is our moral duty to see what's in front of us and reject wherever possible the "default" or "passive" position. Eichmann was notable because of his utter inability to do that. Nothing more. So, I think I disagree with the author, the root of evil is cowardice.
> In fact, seeing the gas vans up close was disturbing to Eichmann, as it would be to anyone.
And the gas vans (and chambers) were already an deliberate effort to make mass murder more palatable to those committing it.
In the early stages, the Holocaust was done not with gas, but with bullets. But the Nazi leadership found that their troops could not stomach mass shootings, not even the SS. Many started to drink too much, or started to talk too much. A few reveled in it - which in turn was something the leadership could not stomach: they had framed the actions to themselves as distasteful but crucial to ensure the survival of the German people, they did not want it to be executed by homicidal maniacs.
Thus, gas chambers: the person pressing the button doesn't have to see people die, and the disposal of the bodies can be outsourced to local labor, even to future victims.
There are present-day analogies here as well. First the detachment of fighter pilots, even more extreme with (predator) drone pilots, where dropping bombs on cars, buildings, the occasional wedding, became an actual 9-to-5 job.
Once the focus shifts to autonomous drones, I guess we'll get the next stage of that detachment, for the software engineers that developed those things. You can write a cool tech blog about how you designed the training pipeline for your killing machine...
I'd prefer to have "evil" as a word removed from language as an archaic symbolic reference to bad things that some people think that other other people do under the influence of malevolent supernatural beings. Redefining evil as something else is still clinging to the religious connotations like a baby to their nappy - for a reason: it's because it elevates my/our value systems from a mere subjective one to that a presumed spiritual realm, and therefore objective of sorts.
But the hard truth is that value systems are objectively subjective, and people can be confused, ignorant, frustrated, angry, insane, devoid of empathy, people we don't like, or our enemies - but not evil. It's time to let that term into the dustbin of history.
So, you need the supernatural connotations in order to explain that Hitler was bad? Feel free, but to me the problem is the anti-intellectualism of it. Because "evil" is a self-sufficient explanation, which doesn't explain any of the real reasons for the rise of Nazism and cloaks the fact that ethnic cleansing and genocide are very much human behaviors, which history has sadly proven again and again. We're not getting to grips with it by calling it "evil" (or "Evil!!" even), which is mere name-calling, essentially. Name-calling of others that is.
Is much added with this talk of evil? Peep Show seems largely the same sort of tragicomic tale of hubris and human frailty that we see in Shakespeare or even all the way back in Ancient Greece.
The article refers to the banality of evil in realation to Eichmann. There's actually been quite a bit of historical push back on this assertion, which in some ways has been used to rehabilitate Eichmann's image as a bureaucrat. Eichmann while not the chief architect, was definitely partly responsible for the Holocaust's "success" and actively climbed the nazi hierarchy by finding a niche to fill - exterminating jewish people.
I always thought "the banality of evil" wasn't about minimizing the horror of his actions. It's not saying "what he did wasn't so bad," but "these horrible actions were done not by an obvious villain, but by someone personally unremarkable."
In addition to the push back there's the fact that Hannah Arendt -- who coined the phrase "banality of evil" -- was also a lover of Martin Heidegger.
Heidegger was an enthusiastic Nazi and Arendt also defended him. Some people see the "banality of evil" book as essentially being a defense of Eichmann.
It should be in all standard encyclopedias, but it's certainly in Britannica and Wikipedia. Usually I like to cite Wikipedia, but I'll add Britannica in case people have conspiracy theories about Wikipedia. And you can read more about their romance in the other sources. The Slate article discusses her use of antisemitic sources in her books.
And people just ignore a number of very convincing anecdotes told to Lanzmann from Benjamin Murmelstein, someone who would know, including one with Eichmann personally helping trash the inside of a Vienna synagogue on Kristallnacht.
Would love to have a look at that show based on that description. Alas, as is the way in 2025, no streaming services here have it, looking for it on Amazon was not helpful either (and offered some embarrassing suggestions instead).
In that case it would be evil not to look further afield. I only trust large American media companies of course, so in this regard I would look to RDDT ( https://www.nyse.com/quote/XNYS:RDDT ) for guidance at this so-called "megathread":
> nor in the exaggerated cartoony manner of other comedic anti-heroes
I'm not sure I understand the focus on realism here.
I mean, there's absolutely nothing in any scene of The Thick of It that looks at all realistic to me. But it captures the essence of incompetence, corruption, and opportunism so completely that reading actual news stories inescapably brings to mind scenes from that series.
I wish there were a somewhat acceptable, though controversial, way for us to distinguish between good and evil like how success is defined by disposable wealth. You can argue that society does not see it that, but there is no absolute way to denying it.
> way for us to distinguish between good and evil like how success is defined by disposable wealth
Above a certain point, disposable wealth turns very readily to evil if it's not accompanied by social responsibility, a point made by some extremely woke dude in the Bible.
“Evil” is not a medical diagnosis but the classical understanding of evil does overlap quite strongly with the so-called “dark triad” of personality disorders of antisocial personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder and machiavellianism.
It’s quite startling how often characters in sitcoms tend to demonstrate traits of these three disorders and for a long while I wondered why.
Then I realized the answer is very simple: it’s really funny (when it’s not happening to you).
This article really makes sense.
I think back on my past and all the evil actions I have taken have all been fed by very low self-worth and insecurity.
When you think of yourself as below everyone else, trying to bring them down to your level with malicious acts can feel like quite reasonable. You're "punching up" so you can feel a sense of righteous justification.
It's only looking back that I realize I wasn't nearly as weak as I thought.
Another TV show that played with this concept well is "30 Rocks", with the main protagonist dreading to go to her high school reunion because she was a nerdy girl mocked by the high-school bully, As the episode go on, she realize that she was the bully, everyone was terrified of her and her extremely cruel remarks, including her friend who was afraid of her, turning the whole 'underdog nerd' trope on it's head.
On a more serious note, this is also why I'm wary of the "punching up" or "punching down" rethoric, because it's often easy to downplay any form of violence as justified retribution.
I wish the show were called "30 Rocks" now, and was about gemstones.
Finally the series that we've been waiting for in which the protagonists are 30-somethings and actually happy?
Or a romantic comedy where the protagonist gets proposed thirty times with different rings.
Oh that's even better, it could be about relationships and letdowns.
you might like Steven Universe
"30 Rocks from the Sun."
30 Rock is one of the funniest and smartest TV shows of all time.
It's a perfect show. There are so many hilarious lines. My favorite has to be when tracy says "don't make me show you the back of my hand" and then on his hand is written "please be nice to me".
My second favorite show of all time (second only to Arrested Development). Many shows have memorable/quotable lines, but 30 Rock has more memorable lines per season than many shows do in their entire run. It is rapid fire on another level.
My favorite that I use on a regular basis, from Tracy: "I can't change! I'm like a chameleon -- always a lizard."
Reminds me of “The Bully and the Beast” by Orson Scott Card.
This. You don't even need the "punching up" justification, sometimes low self worth itself can be enough to rationalize behavior. Something like "I'm a loser anyway, so of course I do things that losers do". This is bad!
> If Peep Show has any sort of singular thematic message, it’s that low self-esteem is the root of all evil.
Interestingly this is a similar conclusion that the Unabomber came to in Industrial Society and its Future:
https://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/classes/188/materials/In...
Kaczynski called out low self-esteem as one of several foundational components in the psychology of his hated enemies (“leftists”), whom he believed to be the primary scourge of society (ironic, coming from a mass murderer). Modern analysis of incel culture also places low self-esteem at the center of the problem.
Tangental but it's interesting to read Kaczynski's bio after listening to a podcast about the Zizian cult over the weekend, some very clear parallels in personality type.
Is the CIA involved again like it was with MKUltra in Kaczynski's case ?
Ah the "society made me a killer/rapist" defense!
Incels usually narrow it down to women whom are expected to have sex with them because men are owed sex.
[dead]
Indiscriminate murderer, sure. Mass murderer ? Doesn't fit the bill.
One of his bombs was on a plane with 78 people but it malfunctioned
So mass murder was definitely the intent
I intended to be a billionaire, but alas, nobody would call me a billionaire
Yeah but de facto he only killed three people. Which is three too many, don't get me wrong.
You ruin any point you’re trying to make with the unnecessary “inkwells” remark. That word is also used to denigrate and dehumanise. Also, it’s brainless in general.
What is an inkwell? I haven't seen the OP mentioning that word. Sorry, I'm not familiar with the vernacular. Is that another word for incels?
First result: https://incels.wiki/w/Inkel
Another breadcrumb towards a deep hole.
If you haven't heard of Peep Show but you enjoyed Succession you should know that Jessie Armstrong, the creator and showrunner of Succession, was previously one half of the Jessie Armstrong and Sam Bain pair responsible for Peep Show.
I find the similarities between the two shows fascinating: in particular the way they both revel in how flawed their central characters are.
As someone who loves peepshow I might have to finally give succession a go!
He also wrote a very good first series episode of Black Mirror, "The Entire History of You".
And likewise their new comedy movie taking the piss out of tech bros, Mountainhead.
This is a good read for fans of the the show. I don’t think the central premise of redefined evil holds up, but it’s a fun read and the analysis of their characters is spot on.
Yeah, I never empathized with Mark and Jez so his thesis falls apart for me. Maybe he’s the baddie?
It is hard to see many people empathizing with Mark when he routinely makes such terrible decisions. You want him to win, but even hearing his rationalizations -some of his actions are insane.
I think this is an important point - it's very easy to find oneself slipping into the protagonists' viewpoints, in a lot of media the protagonist is 'good', we see the story unfold from their viewpoint, then sympathise and empathise with them, even when they make mistakes, their motivations were pure, and what’s unfolding isn’t due to problems with them exactly.
But in shows like this, in quite a lot of sitcoms with more cringey aspects, the protagonist is not necessarily a good person and they are often undone by their own pettiness, selfishness etc. Certainly in UK comedy anyway. Look at Fawlty Towers, The Office... Blackadder to a certain extent.
So when the article says this -
> It’s natural when experiencing any story to identify and sympathize with the protagonist.
Yes and no - this is something that creators can play with and may make deliberately jarring. See 'Lolita' for an extreme example. The article even brings up Walter White, saying - "we are drawn to root for the primary subject of the story". If you're still rooting for Walter by the end of Breaking Bad... were we watching the same show?
Well… part of what made Breaking Bad so good was the artful way it manipulated your feelings for Walter.
By the end I was back rooting for him.
I wanted his plan to rescue Jessie (and to an extent Skyler) to work. It felt like a partial atonement[1] and allowed to show wrap up satisfyingly.
I feel the same way the same way about Tony Soprano. A terrible person with terrible behaviour but I still root for him at the end.
1. Of course nothing would really atone for his actions in reality but narrative isn’t reality.
By that point I was hoping Jessie got out of it all alive, because while he was clearly a dumbass with questionable morals, nobody deserved what he was going through, and the abuse he'd put up with at the hands of Walt among others.
Walt was still fascinating to watch and maybe I approved of or disliked some of his individual actions, and we definitely had deep insight to his character by then, but I don't think I'd describe myself as rooting for him or experiencing his story in a particularly sympathetic way. I wasn't experiencing the story through him by then as I might have been early on, if that makes sense.
Hopefully this came across but I'm definitely not always rooting for either Tony Sorprano or Walter White.
Like you say, you experience the story through these dubious characters. Especially on multiple watch throughs you can really come to despise them but the series are so well made that the writers can bring you round multiple times.
There's something about the cognative disonence of how most people experience life there.
I was once told that most people that do bad things just convince themselves that what they're doing is actually OK.
So someone that steals from cars blames the car's owner for leaving it unlocked. That rings true for me. They're not sociopaths, they're bending their reality to justify their actions.
That's obvious criminality but I think that almost everyone is doing something like that to some extent.
For example, just look at the popularity of fast fashion that's almost certainly made with slave labour. At this point in time I don't think anyone buying from Shien[1] or Temu[2] could be in any doubt. They must know, they just don't care. They're still just everyday people.
1. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/clyg7n1d85go.amp
2. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-67752413.amp
I wrote a response to this many times, you write some good points. I like how you can keep disconnected and non judgemental while somehow making it appear that both ordering from Temu and grand theft auto are similarly bad.
No one has mentioned Grand Theft Auto but you. I’m not sure why you’ve brought that up, it’s completely unrelated to the conversation.
> So someone that steals from cars blames the car's owner for leaving it
> unlocked. That rings true for me. They're not sociopaths, they're bending
> their reality to justify their actions.
Thse are your words,
Isn't a stolen car Known as GTA or "Auto theft" ?
I was rooting fot Gus so badly. I just wanted Walter to die by the end of it.
Seinfeld also dipped into this, IIRC. it was one of the reasons the series finale ended up w/ all of the main characters in jail and having all of their terrible behavior called out.
You don't see any of yourself in the pair? I found a lot of their neurotic behaviour relatable.
Butter the toast, eat the toast, shit the toast... God, life's relentless.
That’s because it reads like a PR piece. Gauging interest or preseeding a reboot or rerelease.
That’s not how British tv works
Probably put together by someone who likes a logo in the foam!
by that logic, the Ribbonfarm articles about The Office was also an attempt at rebooting a series.
(Jez)
I place it in the category of “cringe humor,” and by that standard it’s more cringey than Seinfeld and curb - especially because of the first person shots. It is a great show! Well worth a watch.
I always refer to it as cringe humour too but for the reason that it makes me physically cringe seeing how they humiliate themselves in social situations - Like NO MARK PLEASE DONT DO THAT! DONT ACT ON THAT IMPULSE PLEASE! kinda thing.
If you like cringe humor, you might 'enjoy' the web tv show "2Kawaii4Comfort" on YouTube, about late teens/young adults going to an anime convention.
It's very well written, and it's the first time I've physically reacted that much to the awkwardness of fictional characters.
Ah nice thank you. This looks like something I might enjoy indeed. Cheers
I was completely sold when I think it's in the first episode Mark is walking past some lads who accuse him of being a "paedo" and he hurries off thinking to himself "You're not a paedo. You're definitely not a paedo." as they've finally said something bad that doesn't apply to him.
it is truly excruciating
My summary when recommending it to others has always been that Mark has no dignity and Jez has no shame.
This is a much longer (and well worth the read) development of basically that.
> To Arendt, that was the scariest thing of all – that such evil could be perpetrated by so banal an individual.
My takeaway from Eichmann was not that Eichmann _wasn't_ a horrible person. It's very clear that he is horrible, that he had full knowledge of what he was doing. Her characterization of him was actually comical. Totally irreverent of the man. (and, made the book quite a fun read)
But I think Eichmann made a deeper point. "Banality" described his self-conception. The way his place in society was created for him, and the way he used it, not even to justify and rationalize his actions, but to simply allow himself to work without thinking towards the evil that transpired. The way that Nazi society created a mechanism by which he could, by default and without effort, continue working, in spite of obvious evidence of cruelty. In fact, seeing the gas vans up close was disturbing to Eichmann, as it would be to anyone.
She generalized the mechanism beyond the Nazis (the controversy of the book was that it pointed out how closely the Jews of Europe assisted Eichmann with his work).
It is these "default", "without effort" positions that we take, in all of our daily lives, that ultimately are evil. Although Eichmann was a particularly stupid and egregious example, we all have little sayings that we say to ourselves that allow us to ignore the cruelty and evil that happens in front of our face as a result of the structures we find ourselves in.
And therefore: that it is our moral duty to see what's in front of us and reject wherever possible the "default" or "passive" position. Eichmann was notable because of his utter inability to do that. Nothing more. So, I think I disagree with the author, the root of evil is cowardice.
> In fact, seeing the gas vans up close was disturbing to Eichmann, as it would be to anyone.
And the gas vans (and chambers) were already an deliberate effort to make mass murder more palatable to those committing it.
In the early stages, the Holocaust was done not with gas, but with bullets. But the Nazi leadership found that their troops could not stomach mass shootings, not even the SS. Many started to drink too much, or started to talk too much. A few reveled in it - which in turn was something the leadership could not stomach: they had framed the actions to themselves as distasteful but crucial to ensure the survival of the German people, they did not want it to be executed by homicidal maniacs.
Thus, gas chambers: the person pressing the button doesn't have to see people die, and the disposal of the bodies can be outsourced to local labor, even to future victims.
Much easier on the conscience.
There are present-day analogies here as well. First the detachment of fighter pilots, even more extreme with (predator) drone pilots, where dropping bombs on cars, buildings, the occasional wedding, became an actual 9-to-5 job.
Once the focus shifts to autonomous drones, I guess we'll get the next stage of that detachment, for the software engineers that developed those things. You can write a cool tech blog about how you designed the training pipeline for your killing machine...
I'd prefer to have "evil" as a word removed from language as an archaic symbolic reference to bad things that some people think that other other people do under the influence of malevolent supernatural beings. Redefining evil as something else is still clinging to the religious connotations like a baby to their nappy - for a reason: it's because it elevates my/our value systems from a mere subjective one to that a presumed spiritual realm, and therefore objective of sorts.
But the hard truth is that value systems are objectively subjective, and people can be confused, ignorant, frustrated, angry, insane, devoid of empathy, people we don't like, or our enemies - but not evil. It's time to let that term into the dustbin of history.
Objectively, Hitler was just ideologically assertive
So, you need the supernatural connotations in order to explain that Hitler was bad? Feel free, but to me the problem is the anti-intellectualism of it. Because "evil" is a self-sufficient explanation, which doesn't explain any of the real reasons for the rise of Nazism and cloaks the fact that ethnic cleansing and genocide are very much human behaviors, which history has sadly proven again and again. We're not getting to grips with it by calling it "evil" (or "Evil!!" even), which is mere name-calling, essentially. Name-calling of others that is.
· Lies to a woman about accidentally killing her dog to try to sleep with her (also tries to burn the dog corpse and dispose of it)
And then claims it’s a barbecue turkey, and eats it in front of her in an attempt to save face.
If you haven't watched Peep Show, you absolutely must watch Peep Show.
Is much added with this talk of evil? Peep Show seems largely the same sort of tragicomic tale of hubris and human frailty that we see in Shakespeare or even all the way back in Ancient Greece.
The article refers to the banality of evil in realation to Eichmann. There's actually been quite a bit of historical push back on this assertion, which in some ways has been used to rehabilitate Eichmann's image as a bureaucrat. Eichmann while not the chief architect, was definitely partly responsible for the Holocaust's "success" and actively climbed the nazi hierarchy by finding a niche to fill - exterminating jewish people.
I always thought "the banality of evil" wasn't about minimizing the horror of his actions. It's not saying "what he did wasn't so bad," but "these horrible actions were done not by an obvious villain, but by someone personally unremarkable."
Yes. There a tendency to ascribe charisma to the perpetrators of evil. You see this in the fascination with true crime.
The reality is far more boring; these horrific actions were perpetrated by someone that occasionally had bad breath.
> which in some ways has been used to rehabilitate Eichmann's image as a bureaucrat
Well that was clearly never Arendt's intent. Have people actually tried to interpret her work to rehabilitate Eichmann?
In addition to the push back there's the fact that Hannah Arendt -- who coined the phrase "banality of evil" -- was also a lover of Martin Heidegger.
Heidegger was an enthusiastic Nazi and Arendt also defended him. Some people see the "banality of evil" book as essentially being a defense of Eichmann.
Can you supply some sources for this?
It should be in all standard encyclopedias, but it's certainly in Britannica and Wikipedia. Usually I like to cite Wikipedia, but I'll add Britannica in case people have conspiracy theories about Wikipedia. And you can read more about their romance in the other sources. The Slate article discusses her use of antisemitic sources in her books.
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Hannah-Arendt
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Martin-Heidegger-German...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannah_Arendt
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Heidegger
https://www.openculture.com/2017/05/the-love-letters-of-hann...
https://slate.com/human-interest/2009/10/troubling-new-revel...
It’s in Wikipedia
And people just ignore a number of very convincing anecdotes told to Lanzmann from Benjamin Murmelstein, someone who would know, including one with Eichmann personally helping trash the inside of a Vienna synagogue on Kristallnacht.
Would love to have a look at that show based on that description. Alas, as is the way in 2025, no streaming services here have it, looking for it on Amazon was not helpful either (and offered some embarrassing suggestions instead).
In that case it would be evil not to look further afield. I only trust large American media companies of course, so in this regard I would look to RDDT ( https://www.nyse.com/quote/XNYS:RDDT ) for guidance at this so-called "megathread":
https://www.reddit.com/r/Piracy/wiki/megathread/movies_and_t...
It's free on YouTube.
I have categorized Peep Show as "social horror". This article nails the point in even harder.
Today I learned the adjective "elite-coded". Also "autological".
Do you have to live quite so relentlessly in the real world?
> nor in the exaggerated cartoony manner of other comedic anti-heroes
I'm not sure I understand the focus on realism here.
I mean, there's absolutely nothing in any scene of The Thick of It that looks at all realistic to me. But it captures the essence of incompetence, corruption, and opportunism so completely that reading actual news stories inescapably brings to mind scenes from that series.
I found The Thick of It very realistic, having travelled quite a few corporate realms. That show made me re-think my involvement in society.
On the topic of evil, this sketch from Mitchell and Webb stayed with me for years.
Are we the baddies?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ToKcmnrE5oY
Every villain is the hero in their own story, after all.
I wish there were a somewhat acceptable, though controversial, way for us to distinguish between good and evil like how success is defined by disposable wealth. You can argue that society does not see it that, but there is no absolute way to denying it.
> success is defined by disposable wealth
Are you sure?
> way for us to distinguish between good and evil like how success is defined by disposable wealth
Above a certain point, disposable wealth turns very readily to evil if it's not accompanied by social responsibility, a point made by some extremely woke dude in the Bible.
HN Karma
Did you miss the day they taught ethical calculus in maths class?
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No more or less evil than our one
Yes, as requested by the comment I replied to. Acknowledging the existence of a thing is not equivalent to condoning it.
And, as popularly imagined, substantially more fictional.
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I’ll tell you what, that crack is really moreish.
please Jez, don’t talk about crack!!
The twins! The fucking twins. I’m always on about them
I'll never forgive Orange if they've wiped the twins!
A pill, a nipple, bit of fried halloumi, lovely ..
So they were the baddies?
Different show.
Chance'd be a fine thing, a fine thing indeed!
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“Evil” is not a medical diagnosis but the classical understanding of evil does overlap quite strongly with the so-called “dark triad” of personality disorders of antisocial personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder and machiavellianism.
It’s quite startling how often characters in sitcoms tend to demonstrate traits of these three disorders and for a long while I wondered why.
Then I realized the answer is very simple: it’s really funny (when it’s not happening to you).
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Thass a bad miss.
(Admittedly, the next show)