BANALITY OF EVIL IN THE 20TH AND 21ST CENTURIES

Abstract

The article returns to Hannah Arendt's elaborations on the banality of evil, her attempts to formulate the concept. From letters exchanged between Arendt and Karl Jaspers, we can understand her aim to show that the unprecedented evil of the unprecedented political phenomenon of totalitarianism did not have any diabolic magnitude, highlighting its dangerous relation with a state of denial of mental capacities. The banality of evil is the condition of people's entanglement in an ideological or governmental system that conceals awareness of the evils committed. This is a totalizing, simplistic view that reduces the complexity of reality. Faced with a context in which many moving variables are intertwined that make understanding difficult, a simplistic diagnosis is given for which a consequently false solution is presented. Finally, we seek to indicate the fortune of the concept, remembering that the totalitarian elements and their characteristics – intolerance, resentment, economic crisis, racism, demands of democracy, mass society, mob, strength of the leader – are still present. Furthermore, mention is made of new threats of dulling our minds, highlighting, however, Arendt's dedication at the end of her life, to the insistence on understanding our life of the mind.