Jeff Schechtman talks with authors, journalists, newsmakers and opinion shapers, and sheds light on the issues of the day, from local stories to national and international headlines and ideas.
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Jeff Schechtman talks with authors, journalists, newsmakers and opinion shapers, and sheds light on the issues of the day, from local stories to national and international headlines and ideas.
When Thinking Stops, Evil Spreads: The Danger in Our Everyday Compliance
Talk Cocktail
34 minutes 57 seconds
5 months ago
When Thinking Stops, Evil Spreads: The Danger in Our Everyday Compliance
When we stop thinking, we enable harm. In this WhoWhatWhy podcast Elizabeth Minnich warns us that systemic evils don’t need monsters — “it takes all of us” through everyday compliance.
I 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.
Talk Cocktail
Jeff Schechtman talks with authors, journalists, newsmakers and opinion shapers, and sheds light on the issues of the day, from local stories to national and international headlines and ideas.
