When we stop thinking, we enable harm. Elizabeth Minnich warns that systemic evils don’t need monsters — “it takes all of us” through everyday compliance.
What makes ordinary citizens complicit in extraordinarily harmful systems? In this WhoWhatWhy podcast we talk with moral philosopher Elizabeth Minnich, who delivers a timely warning about collective thoughtlessness.
Building directly on her experience as Hannah Arendt’s long-time teaching assistant, Minnich reverses Arendt’s famous “banality of evil” thesis.
Where Arendt observed how unremarkable Nazi bureaucrat Adolf Eichmann appeared during his trial — a conventional man simply “doing his job” — Minnich argues the true danger lies in the “evil of banality”: the way unthinking adherence to clichés, career preservation, and social conformity creates the conditions for extensive harm.
Minnich distinguishes between “intensive evils” committed by individual “monsters” and “extensive evils” that require widespread participation across society.
The latter takes time to normalize but becomes vastly more dangerous when implemented through systems that depend on ordinary people simply following orders and avoiding uncomfortable thoughts.
As Minnich powerfully states, “For extensive evils, when they’re setting in and when they have set in, it doesn’t take monsters. It takes all of us.”
The conversation examines how modern technology might accelerate both harm and resistance, with disinformation functioning as a form of violence that “remakes reality.”
When language is degraded to a mere exchange of “worn coins” rather than thoughtful communication, we become vulnerable to manipulation.
Most unsettling is Minnich’s analysis of how even highly educated professionals readily compromise principles to protect their institutions and careers — a phenomenon illustrated by the recent behavior of prestigious law firms that have prioritized self-preservation over ethical responsibilities.
As our democratic institutions face unprecedented challenges, Minnich’s insights illuminate how thoughtlessness, not monstrosity, may pose the greatest threat to our collective future.
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[00:00:00] Jeff Schechtman: Welcome to the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m your host, Jeff Schechtman. In a digital age where algorithmic recommendations shape our choices, where corporate culture rewards compliance over conscience, and where tribal identities increasingly determine our moral boundaries, what does it mean to truly think for ourselves, and what happens when we don’t? My guest today, Dr. Elizabeth Minnich, explores these questions in her expanded edition of The Evil of Banality, on the life and death importance of thinking. Drawing on her experience as Hannah Arendt’s teaching assistant, Minnich examines how seemingly innocuous forces, careerism, racial conformity, and unquestioning acceptance of conventional wisdom can enable systems of harm that none of us would choose individually. What makes this work so compelling isn’t just its historical insights, but its uncanny relevance to our present moment. As the Trump administration takes controversial steps to consolidate executive power and employs divisive rhetoric targeting vulnerable groups, Minnich’s analysis helps us understand how democratic institutions can be eroded not through dramatic coups, but through the quiet compliance of ordinary people in positions of trust. As we navigate a landscape of weaponized misinformation, automated decision systems, and increasingly polarized discourse, Minnich’s analysis of how thoughtlessness enables harm offers a powerful lens for understanding our contemporary challenges. Dr. Elizabeth Minnich received her doctorate from the New School under Hannah Arendt’s direction and now serves as professor of moral philosophy at Queens University and senior scholar at the Association of American Colleges and Universities. It is my pleasure to welcome Dr. Elizabeth Minnich here to the WhoWhatWhy podcast. Elizabeth, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you, Jeff. It’s wonderful to be here with you. Well, it is a delight to have you here. Thank you so much. I want to talk first about the turning this notion on its head, the idea of the banality of evil and your construct
[00:02:24] Elizabeth Minnich: of the evil of banality. Talk about that first. I’m going to assume that people have some sense of the context, but let me give a little bit for the banality of evil. It’s a phrase that we tend to encounter in the media a fair amount these days, but I’m not sure how much we think about it. It does come from Hannah Arendt. It comes from her book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, a report on the banality of evil when she was reporting on Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem for crimes against humanity, Eichmann having been what has been called the engineer of the final solution of the Nazi attempted genocide of the Jews. Hannah Arendt went to cover his trial and she was struck by how ordinary the man in the dock was. Then there’s a great deal to say about how that reads and how we decode it now, but what she saw was a slender, nervous, twitchy, bespectacled man in a suit who was trying very, very hard to be as good a witness as she observed later he had tried to be a good engineer under the Nazis, which is to say a man who given a role, a slot, a job, something that gave status and identity, did everything he could to inhabit it fully with no question. He did what was asked of him, so he tried as hard to be a good witness as he did to be a good engineer of a genocide. That’s extreme. It’s not true that we’re all like that, as sometimes people like to say. In any case, what Arendt was trying to understand and what I’ve been trying to understand for decades since has issued in this book, and it’s now in its expanded edition because of our own times and some reasons, is how somebody who is basically, as you put it so well, Jeff, conventional, inhabiting, autopilot, cliches, doing our jobs, getting through our days with more or less indifference to what’s going on around us, more or less close attention to what’s going on, more or less real thoughtfulness. How such a person, perhaps we ourselves, could in fact enable what I call in the book extensive evils, which is to say those that take over a whole society, a whole polity, a whole time in history, as the genocide did, as the system of slavery in the United States did, and many others around the world,
[00:05:30] Jeff Schechtman: where such things have become normal. Talk about that difference between extensive evil
[00:05:35] Elizabeth Minnich: and intensive evil. Yes, this is really key. When you’re trying to understand how on earth things such as a whole system based on the enslavement of other human beings is possible, what I found is that what comes to mind, most people’s minds, and you find it in our various writings about it and so forth, is what I now call intensive evil. What comes to mind is monsters do monstrous things. We get a couple of names and we say this person is doing it. People will say Hitler in Germany. It’s harder to pick one with enslavement, but we will picture a terrible overseer and a particularly cruel and greedy owner of a plantation. We will say this is monstrous. This is extraordinary because it’s so big and it breaks our moral categories. It’s clearly wrong. Problem is when you’re talking about what I now call extensive evils, ones I keep using as examples, you’re talking about something that is throughout the whole society that could not happen without hundreds, even millions of people enabling it. As it sets in, they set in slowly. It takes time to overturn a whole order, to normalize what shocks people when they’re outside of it, ordinary people. It takes time. It sets in. You have to undo all kinds of things and change all kinds of meanings. Extensive evils are the ones that require a lot of people set in slowly over time, get consolidated slowly over time. Even if there’s a coup to begin with, they have to be spread throughout and then require the work pretty much the whole society. Not just the people who do the work, but there are a lot of people who actually do the work of harm, but in fact the whole society has to be complicit because it has to be normalized.
[00:07:45] Jeff Schechtman: To what extent is all of this on steroids today as a result of technology, the way in which distraction is so much a part of life today, the way in which algorithmic decisions are made, the way in which we are less connected in many cases to the decisions we make
[00:08:08] Elizabeth Minnich: and the directions that we move in? It’s a very pressing and important question, Jeff, because it seems to me what also, as we think our way through it, many of us try and think our way through it, it may suggest ways that we can work against the takeover, the normalizing of things that are actually shockingly harmful and promise more harm and more normalization of harm. If we can understand something about the situation of social relations, technologically mediated and fractured and intensified and so forth, we might be able to. What you’re doing is important. For example, what people who step up and don’t shut up and use these very powerful tools of various kinds and quality of connection, people who can use them to keep thinking and inviting other people to keep thinking, not just turning off, not just getting frightened, not just backing, not being indifferent, not explaining away, not waiting to see what happens. Waiting to see what happens is very dangerous when these things are setting in because it takes time and by the time it crosses several lines, it’s too late.
[00:09:32] Jeff Schechtman: And does it take less time today because things move so quickly and is that a positive or a
[00:09:38] Elizabeth Minnich: negative? That’s again, it’s a very good question. I want to say, of course, the potential for how quickly is dramatically upped, but I’m not really sure because, I mean, we will see. We have had, I hope we won’t see, I take that back. We will see as we try and keep a normalized system of based on the potential to do great harm by ever more concentrated power at the top. We’ll see whether it took less time to become a sort of total system. I’m not sure. Everything’s happening very fast now on the one hand. Simultaneously, people are speaking up and communicating and forming groups and the organizations that we have, we’re fortunate in the United States. We have a lot of seasoned political organizations that are variously getting to work. I get a billion emails, I’m sure you do too, every day from somebody who’s doing something, organization. So I can see it going both ways is what I’m trying to say. And every time one of these systems sets in, whether by a coup, a dictator, a slow process, something that’s built into a social order, like sexual abuse goes on for millennia. It’s a little different each time because these are historical events and they’re going to be different. I do want to say that when you ask that question, despite my careful answers here, because of course it’s complicated and I’m by no means a media expert by no means. Of course, I want to say that I think we’re at greater risk of fast movement because there’s so much superficial communication. And that’s where the cliches, the banalities, the conventions, the memes, the things that people are already comfortable with, don’t stop and think, just kind of trade back and forth thoughtlessly, a lot of energy, but not really being knocked back and saying, no, wait, we have to think this through. Something is really happening. Of course, we’re more connected and it’s more superficial and it’s more unremitting. So it’s hard not to think that things could move more quickly and maybe further, faster.
[00:12:00] Jeff Schechtman: Faster, but maybe not set in to the same degree that the superficiality becomes a positive in some respects, that things get worse faster, but they also get better faster, that we’re constantly moving, that even if it hits bottom, we’ll move out of it faster. What the consequences are and what it’s like when we do that is, of course, the open question.
[00:12:26] Elizabeth Minnich: Indeed, and how much harm has been done before and so forth. But I think that’s, that’s, I would agree with you, Jeff. That’s why I was mentioning, you know, that the organizations we do have and sort of where many people are connected a lot. I don’t, and the speed with which people can be contacted and moved into action and sometimes quite often, as I pay attention is obviously you do, and I’m sure your listeners do. There’s a lot of thoughtfulness that can be shared. People say things that make me stop and think every day if I’m, you know, when I get connected. So we have, it is like we have more of everything. What I’m not sure about is how much affect both of these aspects of our hyper-connectivity, and a lot of it’s superficial, but a lot of it isn’t too, or it makes possible what isn’t. I’m not sure how far it goes to either aspect. Cracking through established patterns of careerism, low-level greed, and status, which are the three things I found across time and across cultures and phenomena. Regularly, I found them in play. Keeping people from actually taking action. Even when they had begun to think more carefully and to get it, of what was happening and having a need to do it. People will not do a lot of things that we, nobody, I’m not exempting. People will not do things that we know we should do and that are right. If it might jeopardize something about their career, you know, your job. You’re just on the cusp of getting a promotion. Do you really want to make waves? Do you want to risk being out of sync with your team? Do you want to have to maybe move into a different kind of work? Do you want to lose your status? I mean, look what’s been happening in Congress with people flipping, absolutely, from negative to choose your way of framing it, being exceedingly agreeable to this administration. We already know on the record what they think of it, and they flip. Why? They don’t want to lose their jobs. They don’t want to lose their status. They don’t want to lose their money. This crosses, it’s just, it was, that was in some ways the hardest part of this work for me, Jeff. For extensive evils, when they’re setting in, and when they have set in,
[00:15:18] Jeff Schechtman: it doesn’t take monsters. It takes all of us. I guess the other part of it that adds to it today that we also have to consider within the context of speed is the degree of disinformation that’s out there and the normalization of that disinformation, or as you talk about the normalization of dishonesty and the erosion that that has with respect to our capacity to think
[00:15:41] Elizabeth Minnich: and analyze and contextualize. Indeed, both of these dishonesty and repetitive insults that become labels, and I think I really, the speed with which we get disinformation and the huge volume of it and the shamelessness of it, that and the lying, I would want to say that what that does is to further sever us from reality, the complexities, the context, the relationalities, you know, the worlds in which we actually have to act and make choices and maybe take risks on occasion, sometimes enjoy our pleasures too. When the ground underneath you keeps being changed, we’re creatures of mind. If you change my sense of, you know, the reality of who my friends are and who I should distrust and fear, and you change it regularly and with these superficial, catchy things, and then change it again tomorrow, and then the next day say, no, you know, that was a mistake. I end up, if I get anxious, which we tend to if things keep changing on us, you’re not knowing what’s real. And what that does is make us turn around and keep our eyes on the ones that are spewing this stuff, because where else are we going to look? It’s a very good way to get the full attention of a lot of people, to be the one who’s defining and redefining reality and who’s dangerous and who isn’t, what’s safe and what isn’t, and to keep changing it. If people can say that’s dangerous, they can work around it.
[00:17:27] Jeff Schechtman: Goes to this notion of lying and disinformation almost as a form of violence that you talk about.
[00:17:34] Elizabeth Minnich: Yes, I equate them because both of them are about remaking reality. Violence is, in many ways, an impatience with reality. I don’t like that. I will do what I need to change it. I will violate it. Lying does the same thing. I don’t like it. I’m going to use whatever I can to change the reality. I’ll tell you a lie and then another lie and more information. Both of them, what they do is destroy realities. And that’s a very dangerous thing. It’s difficult enough
[00:18:09] Jeff Schechtman: to stay in touch with, is it? Talk about this notion that you discuss of internal dialogue as a way of clarifying, as a way of getting in touch with deeper moral ideas.
[00:18:24] Elizabeth Minnich: Thank you for seeing that, remembering that from the book, Jeff. That’s very important. Thinking is, according to Socrates and Hannah Arendt and a fair number of other very interesting people that we’re wise to listen to and think with, is a kind of internal dialogue. The interesting thing about, several things are interesting about that. One is we can think with ourselves. I can start thinking something and then I can think to myself suddenly, oh no, that’s wrong. Or there you go again. Or, oh please don’t do that. I don’t want to think about that. There’s always this doubleness. We’re conscious creatures, conscientia. We think with ourselves. That gap is what makes us aware, not just awake, but aware. We can think about our own thinking, which is really, we can lie to ourselves. That’s fascinating. That’s fascinating. I mean, it’s troubling, but we do more or less often do little lies, big lies to ourselves. When we’re thinking, things are always open to being reopened. We talk about a one-track mind. We already know this. We can get on one track and we can follow it and we won’t get off. Then we’re liable. We don’t know where we’re going. That can be very dangerous, as we know. We worry about that. That’s just really a one-track mind. Watch out for him. We have to be able to get off the train and look around and see where we’re going and make choices. We are capable of doing that by thinking, by listening to our own other voices. It’s from that doubleness, that awareness, it’s more than double. Of course, we can have multiple voices from all of our thinking friends. Somebody will come in and say, no, no, you don’t want to do that. You’ll recognize a friend of yours who always says that. We’ve got lots of thinking friends. That’s what keeps us awake and aware. From that awareness is what conscience comes from. Conscience can only arise if we can think about ourselves, if we’re aware of ourselves. Consciousness practiced through thinking enables conscience. When we’re not thinking,
[00:20:41] Jeff Schechtman: we’re capable of anything. We’re also capable of lying to ourselves.
[00:20:45] Elizabeth Minnich: Yes, yes, we are. We are. We can be busily trying to shut down the part of us that knows it’s a lie. Then we narrow our ability to think. We become not our own friend. There are things we can’t think about. We do a kind of violence to ourselves. We lessen ourselves. We are then, I’m afraid, capable of being more dangerous to other people, too, because that doubleness, that awareness, that being startled back into thought. When you see somebody, you might just have heard say inadvertently, but you see them and then you think, oh, didn’t mean to do that. If you’ve been lying to yourself, maybe you’ve been lying to yourself, I’ve been lying to myself, that I’m not mean the way my little sister might say I was. I don’t think I am. I’m not mean. Well, then I’m no longer going to notice it. It’s that kind of violence again. It changes reality, but what it does is to make us less. It closes us in. When we’re like that, we’re not responsive to reality and we’re capable of doing very small. As I found, as I read people’s testimony, people who really were the doers of great harm, torturers, for example, I read some of them and some people from ISIS. I read all kinds of people. What you find is regularly repeated. You don’t think about it. You just get the job done. That’s a quote from a man called Prime Evil, who worked under apartheid in South Africa. He said, when you’re alone, you’re by yourself. You can go deep, he says. You can go very deep, very dark, very dark indeed. He said, it’s not like you stop and think.
[00:22:34] Jeff Schechtman: You’re getting the job done. Notice the stop and think. Talk about the role of language and the way we manipulate language, the way we use language to accomplish some of these ends in seemingly a banal way, but it turns out differently oftentimes. Well, language is so
[00:22:54] Elizabeth Minnich: extraordinarily complicated and important. If you read a poet, you write a poem yourself, or you have an extraordinary experience and you’re looking for words in which to express this experience because you want to tell somebody about it. Again, somebody else, there’s this doubleness. I want to make this into a good story. When we do that kind of refreshing, of renewing of our language, we look into its resources and what we want, the right word that feels right and that captures it and that will be apt and move people. That’s languages, the living enactment of our thinking, of our minds, now in communication. The doubleness now is our own doubleness, but also other people. The richness of possibility is there. Language is, of course, infinite. New words emerge all the time and we change them. Wonderful, growing, rich, changing, creative. That’s the wonder of language. The opposite, of course, is banal, cliche, repetitive, often, in fact, chance, which can be fun at maybe a sports event, but they’re not about communicating anything there except enthusiasm or the opposite. It’s not thinking. It’s a kind of action. It’s blunt. If you go then all the way over to the deadening ones where people are, what we’re doing with each other is just handing worn coins back and forth. I say certain things to you. It tells you who I am. I’ve proved that I’m one of the group and you return to me the necessary phrases and words to affirm what I said and maybe rearrange it a little bit, but we’re staying within our game. The language then becomes… It’s not the product of thinking and our moving into the rich resources of language to stay attentive and open to the world, to ourselves, to each other. On the contrary, it’s the way we avoid it. I use cliches and conventions and people use sometimes technical language precisely to stay within an enclosure of thought, not to be startled. We can just go round and round and round. We think we’re thinking and we think we’re communicating. We’re just trading things we already know. In that state, again, we’re capable. One, our life is less intense and less interesting and less open, but we’re also potentially dangerous. I want to come back to
[00:25:40] Jeff Schechtman: where we began in talking about how this extensive evil will lead over time to the kind of awful, intensive evil that you talk about and that there is a direct relationship between feeding into this
[00:25:56] Elizabeth Minnich: intensive evil. It feeds into intensive evil and it is also fed by it. They absolutely do work together. It’s not uncommon with the extensive evils that are started abruptly like something violent, like a coup, but then have to set in. You will have great harm done early on. Actually, this was Machiavelli’s advice to the prince. He says, if you’re going to do great harm, do it up front quickly. He says, chop off their heads in the town square. Frighten people with it. That may not be. No, that will be received as intensive evil at that point. This is madness. This is crazy. This is horrifying and people will be terrorized. That’s why we talk about terrorism so much. Then you can start, once you’ve planted that kind of fear, using an instance of what looks like extraordinary harm, extraordinary, shocking harm to terrorize, to say, oops, things have changed. Just shut your mind off. This is terrifying. Then you can proceed to do the slower things that totalize and normalize. You have many people harming other people and they aren’t monster. It’s people doing their jobs and supplying the slave ships. They’re just selling things to the slave ships. They’re not enslaving anybody, but they’re part of this system that makes it possible. Intensive can keep the fear up. It’s the main point. Once totalizing has set in, then it can be used at will. There are moral monsters. I was saying it doesn’t require moral monsters. There aren’t enough moral monsters to dominate 200 million people. 200 million people are not moral monsters, but there are moral monsters involved. When they’re
[00:28:10] Jeff Schechtman: empowered, they will do those things. It is also something that potentially creates moral monsters, that there are those that may not have become moral monsters, but the kind of atmosphere we’re talking about creates them or at the very least gives them license. Yes, exactly. There’s a poem
[00:28:29] Elizabeth Minnich: I was trying to remember the other day. It’s Charles Olson, but I’m really not sure whose poem it is. One part of it is, I’m not going to get the poetry of it right, I’m afraid. Wars are started so that the murderers amongst us can go ahead and kill that baby. You don’t have to get into motivation for that, but the observation is apt. There will be release. Again, early on, when a totalizing effort is underway, it is trying and people are opposing it more or less. When it’s underway, people who are drawn to that kind of extraordinary, intensive harm doing, but might never have done it for various reasons. It is the compulsion. They’re not mad in the old-fashioned, insane sense, but they are drawn to it. Those are the people who are likely to show up, amongst the people who are likely to show up, to provide the violence that an emerging order that will dominate totally has to have to go
[00:29:42] Jeff Schechtman: with those lies and the disinformation. Somehow, the leaders of those emerging orders, the monsters that are the leaders, somehow have an instinct for finding those people,
[00:29:52] Elizabeth Minnich: for bringing those people out. It’s fascinating. That’s one word for it. There are people who will find such a person, too. I’m afraid we have to say, then, the boundaries here are also blurry. I remember reading at one point, I don’t think she wrote a memoir, maybe it was an interview, with a woman who had… ISIS had come in and taken over, and she was initially horrified. There was a job offered in the morality patrols, where women and others would arrest women who were improperly covered or doing something they were no longer allowed to do under this totalizing, religiously framed administration. She took that job because it was a job, and she hadn’t had a job before. It gave her some… This is her words, I’m not making this up. It gave her some standing, gave her some power in her family she’d never had, and she did that job for a while. Then one day, she heard her best friend had been picked up and was tortured, and she and her best friend managed to escape. This is how she was talking about it. Later, she finally got really, truly what she was doing, but she had moved into it because it was there, and it offered those things that are so tempting. Finally, we’ve been talking about a lot
[00:31:26] Jeff Schechtman: of this in a more abstract sense. Talk about how you see this all, or parts of this, playing out in the world we inhabit today, in the reality of what we’re experiencing.
[00:31:41] Elizabeth Minnich: Well, it’s difficult to pick any specific, isn’t it? Because there’s… things are coming at us from so many different directions, and from the sort of blatantly shocking, ought to frighten you, like, let’s reopen Alcatraz, right? That’s also a distraction, potentially, from the bigger, more structural and systemic things that are going on. So it’s hard to pick. I find, however, the thing that keeps coming to my mind, that sort of accretes these meanings, is the law firms. You have an incredibly prestigious, wealthy, status, etc. law firm. Several. I’ll pick one, because one caught my attention early on, and I kept reading about it. And then you have a classic racketeer move. You threaten them, if you’re in the administration. They were threatened, this law firm, with something that would harm their wealth, their status, their careers. The reaction is to defend the law firm that offers those things, greed, to money, lots of money, status, careers. Breaking the law, basically paying extortion money to the people who threatened you, giving donating services, pro bono services, so-called, worth a whole lot of money. That’s also called bribery and extortion. You’re not serving the law when you do that. You are serving, precisely, but it’s right there. Can’t give up this stuff. This is good stuff, and it’s our job. That’s what I call, also, the enclosure of thought. You’re inside this bubble. The responsible thing, the necessary thing, the moral thing to do is to protect this one thing without taking responsibility in a very fraught moment for all that that speaks and does in the world. Risks, yes. I wouldn’t downplay that for a moment, but that was such a glaring example from people who are not desperate for jobs, not starving, don’t have to have that job or their child’s going to go without, so quickly, they decide that what they must do is save the firm. That’s classic.
[00:34:12] Jeff Schechtman: Dr. Elizabeth Minnich, her book is The Evil of Banality on the Life and Death Importance of Thinking. Elizabeth, I thank you so very much for spending time with us today.
[00:34:22] Elizabeth Minnich: Thank you, Jeff. You’re very interesting to talk with. I appreciate it.
[00:34:26] Jeff Schechtman: Thank you, and thank you for listening and joining us here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I hope you join us next week for another WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m Jeff Schechtman. If you like this podcast, please feel free to share and help others find it by rating and reviewing it on iTunes. You can also support this podcast and all the work we do by going to whowhatwhy.org/donate.
