meet, he became a traveling oil salesman. After joining the SS, he coordinated the trains needed to carry out murder

Adolf Eichmann was an unremarkable man before he joined the Nazi party in 1932. He was mediocre in school and to make ends meet, he became a traveling oil salesman. After joining the SS, he coordinated the trains needed to carry out murder on an unimaginable scale. For his leading role, he was convicted of crimes against humanity and executed on June 1, 1962.

Hannah Arendt, a Jewish philosopher who fled Germany during the war, covered his trial. What struck Arendt was that Eichman needed no great evil intention to perform catastrophically evil deeds. In her now-classic Eichmann in Jerusalem she observes:

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
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[one] cannot extract any diabolical or demonic profundity from Eichmann, that is still far from calling [his actions] commonplace (323).

The difficulty that Arendt identified is a specific case of what psychologists now call proportionality bias, the misconception that for something to have tremendous consequences it must also have a proportionally tremendous cause.

In coining the phrase the “banality of evil” to describe Eichmann, what Arendt had in mind was not that Eichmann was an ordinary criminal, but that his evil actions did not follow from proportionally great evil intentions. He was simply following “superior orders” (329).

The Jewish Shoah in the twentieth century is undoubtedly a singular event. It has no legitimate points of moral comparison. What Arendt can teach us about the Capitol Hill Insurrection turns instead on the causes of evil actions. She can deliver a lesson in moral psychology to help us understand what happened.

In a line, what we witnessed in the Capitol Hill Insurrection was the confluence of the incentivizing effects of social media and the banality of evil.

If that’s at least partly right, then a lesson for hope follows: we as a society have the ability to prevent future actions like these. Let’s start with the lack of proportionally evil intentions.

Thoughtless Actors
To be clear, my purpose is not exculpatory. Five people died in the Insurrection. It also appears that some actors had in mind to cause real harm, hoping perhaps to murder Vice President Mike Pence or Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. Apparently, the president was pleased with the events, though he disavows causing them deliberately.

Yet many of the participants appear to have exhibited a form of banal evil — a thoughtlessness in going along with actions that foreseeably resulted in serious harm.

A “Capitol Terrorist,” as she is described on social media, actively participated in the Insurrection. Later, she cried when she learned that she could no longer fly on airplanes because she was labeled a terrorist.

The “zip-tie guy” apparently had no intention to kidnap anyone. He said that his purpose was to “flex his muscles.” He stated:

The intentions of going in were not to fight the police. The point of getting inside the building is to show them that we can, and we will.

The severity of his actions seems to have escaped him entirely.

Perhaps the most explicit evidence for this thoughtlessness can be found in Mr. Fellows’ replies to reporters. He’s a 26-year old male from upstate New York, who drove down to take part in what at the time was billed as the DC protests. He states that he has “no regrets” because

I didn’t hurt anyone, I didn’t break anything. I did trespass though, I guess.

Though he did conclude his interview with a reporter asking:

Do you think I’m going to go to federal prison? …. I was told federal prison is not fun.

The sheer thoughtlessness of his actions explains, in part, why Mr. Fellows thought it prudent to record and post almost all his actions on social media.