What Hannah Arendt Can Teach Us About The Capitol Hill Insurrection
When the Banality of Evil Meets Social Media
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 … [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.
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.
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.