Imagine that you had to flee your country to save yourself from the dangers of Nazism.
You now live in the United States, where you have a respectable career in the field of philosophy and teaching. Suddenly, in 1961, something happens that creates great expectations around the world: the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi in charge of organizing the transfer of Jews from all over Europe to Auschwitz, will be televised.
Few Nazis are left alive and you want to see that man firsthand, you want to understand what kind of person could have done so much harm to millions of people. Psychiatrists recognized as Theodor Adorno affirm that the Nazis have an unhealthy personality, that they despise generosity, that they admire strength and cruelty ... They are monsters, they say. But you, and thousands of people, wonder why so many apparently normal German citizens have actively or passively collaborated in the Holocaust. You want to understand it.
To find answers, the German-born Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt moved to Jerusalem, where she followed the Adolf Eichmann trial live as a reporter for The New Yorker. He captured the conclusions he reached in a series of articles and in his well-known book Eichmann in Jerusalem. There he claimed that the Nazi Adolf Eichmann was not the personification of evil, but the personification of how easy it is to do evil. He denounced that the one whom everyone considered to be an intrinsically evil being - whom the psychiatrist who examined him during the trial described as "a completely normal man" - was in fact a gray man who blindly obeyed the orders of his superiors and that, simply , had given up exercising his moral sense. The worrying thing was, according to Hannah Arendt, that anyone could look like him, that is, anyone could behave like a Nazi.
His thesis aroused the indignation of a part of public opinion, because the scientific theses of the moment did not contemplate that evil was within the reach of anyone. His work has changed the way we understand evil, and lately he has gained special interest in the rise of populist and nationalist movements in western countries.
For Arendt, the true origin of totalitarianism in modern times must be sought in solitude and the loss of identity that people suffer as a result of the lack of trust in traditions, religions, family structures and solid social customs, which helped until little to organize and give meaning to our lives. To compensate for this loss, we look for someone who gives security and meaning to our existence, and our need to belong to coherent communities leads us to embrace movements that promise to return certainties to our lives.
Arendt points out that humans prefer a coherent life that offers meaning and identity, even if it is riddled with lies, to a confused and disordered reality.
Almost parallel to Eichmann's trial, the results of the experiments carried out by Stanley Milgram, now considered classics in the history of social psychology, were known. They saw how absolutely normal people, when they submit to the authority of another person, are able to be cruelly gratuitous with others.
"Normal people, simply doing their job, and without particular hostility on their part, can become the agent of terrible destruction.
Even when the destructive effects of his work are patently clear and
When asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources to resist authority. ”22
A few years later, Philip Zimbardo carried out one of the most famous experiments in the history of psychology: the Standford Prison experiment, which also wanted to investigate the mechanisms that enhance the ability of people to do good or evil. In this experiment, his students took on the role of prisoners or guardians. Although the study was supposed to have lasted six weeks, they ended up closing it in six days, due to the emotional trauma experienced by the participants: the guards became sadistic, the prisoners showed passivity and depression. “We can assume that most people, in most cases, are moral beings. But imagine that this morality is like a gear shift that sometimes comes to a standstill.
When this occurs, morality is disconnected. If the car is on a slope, both he and the driver rush downhill. In other words: what determines the result is the nature of the circumstances, not the skill or the intentions of the driver, "said Zimbardo.