Evil is most readily observed in the actions of human beings, but this fails to translate into an understanding of the nature of evil. It is uncontroversial to brand history’s large-scale genocides and acts of sadistic violence as evil: but to do so tells us nothing of the primary cause of the events, or of the role of human nature. Specifically, the intuitive conclusion that an event such as the Holocaust was an evil act committed by evil people fails to illuminate its primary causes or how to prevent a repetition in the future. Hannah Arendt and Sigmund Freud both seek to dig deeper into what it actually means for a human being to be evil, and to examine the distressing feasibility of large-scale acts of evil. While Arendt explicitly states that her book is not a theoretical treatise on evil, this paper will interpret her writing within a Freudian framework, and examine how her observations in Eichmann in Jerusalem (hereafter referred to as Eichmann, italicized) compare and engage with Sigmund Freud’s theories of evil and character. Freud, in Civilization and Its Discontents (hereafter referred to as Civilization, italicized), characterizes all humans as having a malign tendency toward evil from birth, which over time people learn to repress to varying extents. He also touches on the role that group psychology can play in tempering this repression: inducing otherwise ordinary people to commit acts of evil, without consciously being aware of the diabolical and immoral nature of their actions. While there are substantial observational differences and disagreements over mechanisms of human behavior between the two authors, the normative conclusions are the same. Freud implicitly endorses an argument similar to Arendt’s; that it is our responsibility as humans to actively think for ourselves, examining and suppressing the dormant ability to do evil which resides in all humans.
Freud’s psychoanalytic theories are rooted in the principle that all experiences and characteristics of the human mind are permanent. He extensively analogizes the human brain to the city of Rome: describing modern buildings existing alongside ancient ruins (Civilization, 31-33), just as present thoughts and recent experiences reside alongside previous experiences and states of development. Among Freud’s many controversial notions is that there exists a ubiquitous “inborn human inclination to ‘badness,’ to aggressiveness and destructiveness, and so to cruelty as well” (Civilization, 108). Freud argues that this tendency is present from birth: simply, we all begin as evil manifestations of one force: The Id. Indeed, Freud explicitly states that “all that is evil in the human mind is contained as a predisposition” (Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, p4). In our primitive state, we are governed by two forces: love for our parents and fear of being punished by them. These feelings are internalized at the level of the individual, and a superego develops to take the place of parental supervision (Lecture, Monday March 5th). Only through a process of gradual awareness of self (the ego) and of external consequences and values that are ultimately internalized (the super-ego), does the child learn to become a ‘decent’ or ‘good’ human being. Freud makes the case that just as Roman ruins may decay but do not disappear, the primitive instincts toward aggression which we are born with do not go away. Freud claims that what determines whether one is good or evil is simply the extent to which one suppresses the Id. Thus the superego is characterized as a garrison which “obtains mastery over the individual’s dangerous desire for aggression by weakening and disarming it and by setting up an agency within him to watch over it, like a garrison in a conquered city” (Civilization, p114). Evil, thus, is not a pathological force present in a small number of ‘evil beings.’ Rather, the ability to do evil is present in all humans from birth and what determines whether a baby grows into a wicked human is the extent to which the garrison wrests control of the primal Id. This theory’s common denominator with Arendt’s, as we shall see, is that Evil is characterized as lacking the ‘garrison,’ rather than possessing a unique characteristic of Evil. Simply, Freud and Arendt reckon that we all are potentially evil, but only some fail to wrest control of this inclination to do evil.
The idea that there is a force of evil in all of us is very similar, though different in important ways, from Arendt’s thesis on the banality of evil. An important common characteristic of both authors is that they both abjure evil-doing humans of greater responsibility than is intuitive for most. Arendt’s text, taken as a whole, may be interpreted as encouraging greater reflection on the Nazi regime. Her text is many ways a reaction to the immediate (and entirely natural) reaction of the international community to the Holocaust; which was to characterize all Nazis as inherently wicked monsters who needed to be purged from the Earth and made examples of. Arendt is effectively encouraging readers to take some time to contemplate what can be gleaned from the Eichmann trial. Such a reflective approach to action is characteristic of Arendt’s favored approach: a political philosophy that combines the vita activa and the vita contemplativa (Lecture, March 15th). As stated above, Freud believes this capacity for evil is innate: it is present with us from birth, and even the ‘best’ of men are merely suppressing it–they are not free of it. Arendt makes a similar argument, though perhaps one which attributes a lesser degree of agency over evil actions. In Eichmann, Arendt observes how an otherwise unremarkable and conformist individual can be induced to commit immensely destructive and evil acts, all without any sort of awareness of their actions. Her conclusion is that is that it was not the presence of hatred, but the absence of independent thoughts, that enabled Eichmann to unflinchingly carry out inhumane destruction on a massive scale. Eichmann was not a die-hard Nazi ideologue: “He had no time and less desire to be properly informed, he did not even know the Party program, he never read Mein Kampf” (Eichmann, p33). Arendt draws attention to the fundamental problem that the Eichmann trial raises, “that an average, ‘normal’ person, neither feeble-minded nor indoctrinated nor cynical, could be perfectly incapable of telling right from wrong” (Eichmann, p26). This, in a nutshell, is the ‘banality of evil,’ the phrase Arendt titles her text.
Arendt’s text and political theory can be interpreted as an argument for a robust monitoring mechanism on the latent capacity, that is present in all of us, to commit evil acts. Arendt explicitly makes this case in The Life of the Mind, asking “Could the activity of thinking as such, the habit of examining whatever happens to come to pass or to attract attention, regardless of results and specific content, could this activity be among the conditions that make men abstain from evil-doing or even actually ‘condition’ them against it?” (Lecture, March 15th). Freud proposes a similar argument in Group Psychology and Analysis of the Ego, stating that “Our mind … is no peacefully self-contained unity. It is rather to be compared with a modern State in which a mob, eager for enjoyment and destruction, has to be held down forcibly by a prudent superior class” (p37). Thus, Freud would argue that in the Holocaust, the Nazi regime effectively served a mob, liberating the unrestrained Id in all those who participated, and unleashing evil destruction that otherwise would not have occurred. Both authors are ascribing a common characteristic in man: the ability to do evil. We thus have found the first similarity between the authors: both fervently deny that for most people who ‘do evil,’ there is a nefarious and diabolical force inside of them. People who commit acts of evil are humans just like everyone else, and the forces that induce them to do evil are part of all of us. The authors, in short, posit that there is nothing qualitatively different about evil-doers: they are just humans subject to similar forces as their compatriots, but who go a different route with their actions.
Within the Freudian framework, we may place two essential characters from the Holocaust. Hitler may be characterized as possessing diabolical evil: he was acutely aware of the consequences of his actions and he shrewdly plotted how to take advantage of the unthinking nature of millions of Germans to carry out his acts of premeditated evil. Eichmann on the other hand, was a man who possesses the simple kind of evil: the inability to think, and thus the inability restrain the instinct to aggression. Though neither author explicitly discusses statistics, the normal distribution is a good structure for understanding the banal vs. diabolical breakdown. There are only a handful of extreme individuals capable of diabolical evil: people like Adolph Hitler, Pol Pot, Kim Il Sung, Joseph Stalin. Perhaps the clearest breakdown, most in keeping with the authors’ writing, is the degree of self-awareness and agency over one’s actions: diabolically evil individuals were not swayed by anyone else, whereas banal evil is a manipulation of the thoughtlessness present in so many, such as Eichmann. Arendt’s normative prescription is essentially to induce the unthinking to think, and thus to be inoculated from the calculated manipulation of the diabolically evil, such as Hitler.
Parsing Arendt and Freud on evil is akin to following distinct sets of directions leading to a common destination. The two thinkers take fundamentally different approaches, with Arendt primarily interested in political theory, and Freud primarily interested in a psychoanalytic approach to individual humans. But both are ultimately seeking to gain insight into human behavior at varying levels of organization. The ultimate, general insight that both authors have regarding the nature of evil, is that it is not a result of possessing an ‘evil force’ within oneself: rather, to be evil is to fail to take certain actions. For Arendt, one must think independently and self-reflectively: the source of Eichmann’s evil was a debilitating inability to think critically, outside of superficial moral maxims, recited verbatim. For Freud, the source of evil resides in all mankind: but if everyone is evil, then no one is evil. So he further differentiates: to be evil is to lack the ‘garrison’ restraining aggression. This is a crucial insight, which may be interpreted as a very optimistic case. There is no demon to exorcise from evil people. Rather, there is a mechanism to be implemented. The unintuitive conclusion is that Evil results from a lack, not from a possession. The hope to be found in this conclusion, is that by integration of action and contemplation, large-scale evil may be arrested before developing into as devastating an event as the Holocaust.