these are only three cases, but for anyone familiar with the events of the Capitol Hill Insurrection, they look

Of course, these are only three cases, but for anyone familiar with the events of the Capitol Hill Insurrection, they look to be typical cases for most participants.

Thoughtless and simultaneously horrendous activity are the hallmarks of the banality of evil. What is new about the Capitol Hill Insurrection is the role of social media.

Ethical Fading
It is a commonplace to criticize social media for what is bad about our lives — often enough, on the very platforms criticized.

As a relatively younger philosopher, I tend to think that social media has simply emerged as a second layer of human interaction. It is one that turns on the operations of the first layer, our ordinary face-to-face interactions.

https://mirachiropractic.azurewebsites.net/tuy/oui/video-west-hum-live02.html
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Just as ordinary, first-layer, human interactions are good and bad, so too are second-layer actions. The second-layer duplicates some of the characteristics of the traditional ways that we interact and amplifies them.

This is just the sort of world that we live in now.

As a result, it was entirely predictable that any sort of insurrection would be accompanied by very many images of people taking photos of their activities. Some even live-streamed them.

What matters ethically is that these two levels of human sociality also interact. Social media platforms incentivize their users to act in ways that they otherwise wouldn’t, but which drive engagement on those platforms.

Mr. Fellows, before the insurrection, described himself as “super poor” and he lived in a converted school bus. He was out of work for months and had only infrequent contact with his family.

Just after the insurrection, Fellows reported that his dating app Bumble was “blowing up.”

The self-described Q Shaman was a failed actor who wandered up and down the streets of a suburban neighborhood.

Yet, he joined the QAnon movement to become an influencer. Now, he just finished his part playing a leading role in the insurrection.

These are cases of what Ryan Holiday, the Stoic philosopher and marketing guru, calls “trend jacking.” People are acting on a trend to get more views, likes, and engagement. And some of the people who pile into the new trends get lucky and end up with new lives.

The role of social media in the Capitol Hill Insurrection as I see it, then, is that it incentivizes people to consider an action in terms of its probability to drive views and by that same stroke to disregard the moral dimensions of that action.

It is an example of what researchers call ethical fading.

How To Step Forward
If I’m close to right in the above analysis, then the Capitol Hill Insurrection resulted, at least in part, from the collision between the banality of evil and the incentivizing of ethical fading.

One of Arendt’s lasting legacies is that her insights into the banality of evil have challenged our sense of ethical responsibility. In ordinary circumstances, an agent’s intentions can diminish blameworthiness. If I accidentally spill a drink on you, then the fact that I did it unintentionally diminishes the blame that I bear for the action.

Yet in some cases, especially those where the actions under consideration puncture the fabric of our moral universe, intentions cannot mitigate blame. Regardless of his intentions, Eichmann not only deserved to stand trial, but was also rightly convicted and punished (Eichmann in Jerusalem, 324–5).

One lesson, perhaps, from the Capitol Hill Insurrection is that banally evil actions are often incentivized by our new forms of social communication. The recent steps by large firms to limit the reach of pernicious influencers on their platforms are praiseworthy.

I also worry that our present path forward is to rely on the goodwill of these firms, which are by their nature unelected and so do not, even in principle, represent the will of the people.

This time their “self-regulated” platforms allowed for the coordination of actions that resulted in tragedy. Next time, we might face a moral catastrophe of unspeakable proportions. Perhaps the time has come for the representative regulation of the platforms that have incentivized so much in our lives already.

I’ll leave you with a final quote from Arendt about the banality of evil which might now be incentivized more fervently in our world than in any period prior.

Eichmann was not Iago and not Macbeth, and nothing would have been farther from his mind than to determine with Richard III “to prove a villain.” Except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement, he had no motives at all (321–22).

Thank you for reading and I hope you learned something.

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Sebastian Purcell’s research specializes in world comparative philosophy, especially as these ancient traditions teach us how to lead happier, richer lives. He lives with his wife, a fellow philosopher, and their three cats in upstate New York.