Evil as a System: The Right to Think
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We wrestle with Hannah Arendt's monumental warning about totalitarianism. It's not about monsters, it's about what happens when ordinary people stop thinking.

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SAM:  Hey there, welcome back to 7 Minute Books. I'm Sam, and today we're talking about Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism. Sophie, what made you want to tackle this one?

SOPHIE:  Morning, Sam. This book is a heavyweight that explains the twentieth century, and it's still relevant today.

SAM:  It is. So where does she even start?

SOPHIE:  With the nineteenth century. She sees three pillars.

SAM:  Which are?

SOPHIE:  Antisemitism, imperialism, and the breakdown of the nation-state.

SAM:  Alright.

SAM:  Let's start with antisemitism.

SOPHIE:  Okay.

SAM:  She says modern antisemitism is political, not religious.

SOPHIE:  Why?

SAM:  Because Jews were the court Jews, tied to the state as financiers.

SOPHIE:  So when the state crumbled?

SAM:  They became scapegoats.

SOPHIE:  That's a good point.

SAM:  Yeah.

SAM:  Then imperialism.

SOPHIE:  What about it?

SAM:  The colonies were where Europe suspended the rule of law.

SOPHIE:  And the master race idea?

SAM:  It was born there and came home.

SOPHIE:  That's terrifying.

SAM:  Yeah.

SAM:  And the third pillar is the mass society.

SOPHIE:  After the war?

SAM:  Yes. Millions of people became stateless.

SOPHIE:  So they lost the right to have rights.

SAM:  Exactly. That phrase is the most fundamental thing.

SOPHIE:  It is.

SAM:  Yeah.

SAM:  So these conditions create a vacuum.

SOPHIE:  For totalitarian movements.

SAM:  But totalitarianism isn't a normal dictatorship.

SOPHIE:  How is it different?

SAM:  A tyrant wants power. Totalitarians want to remake reality.

SOPHIE:  Through ideology?

SAM:  And a science of history.

SOPHIE:  So any horror is justified.

SAM:  Yes. And then you add terror and isolation.

SOPHIE:  To break people down.

SAM:  And the camps are the end itself.

SAM:  They kill the legal person, then the moral person, then the individual person. Until you're a living corpse.

SOPHIE:  That's the banality of evil.

SAM:  Right.

SAM:  My takeaway is that evil is a system, not a personality type.

SOPHIE:  The whole library is at 7minutebooks.com/app, with over 6,000 fiction and nonfiction titles you can read or listen to in any language. It's $2.99 a month, $9.99 a year, or $19.99 lifetime.

SOPHIE:  The point of Arendt is that thinking for yourself is a moral act. We'll see you in the next one.