Western tradition mistakenly assumes that the greatest evil of mankind arise from selfishness. In our century evil has proven to be more radical, than was previously thought. We now know that the truest evil has nothing to do with selfishness, or any such undrestandable, sinful motives. Instead, it is based on the following phenomenon: MAKING HUMAN BEINGS SUPERFLUOUS as human beings.
The entire concentration camp system (world war II) was designed to convince the prisoners THEY WERE UNNECCESARY, before they were murdered. In the concentration camps men were taught that punishment was not connected to a crime, that work produced no results. The camp is a place where every activity and human impulse is senseless. Where in other words, senselessness is daily produced anew. To summarize: if it is true that in the final stage of totalitarianism an absolute evil emerges, absolute as it no longer relates to human motives.
THE GRATEST EVIL IN THE WORLD ARE THE ACTIONS COMMITED by "nobody´s", commited by men without motives, without convictions, BY HUMAN BEINGS, WHO REFUSE TO BE PERSONS. It is a phenomenon that Hannah Arendt calles the banality of evil. She wrote a paper: Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963), she coined the phrase "the banality of evil" to describe Eichmann. She raised the question of whether evil is radical or simply a function of THOUGHTLESSNESS, A TENDENCY OF ORDINARY PEOPLE TO OBEY ORDERS AND CONFORM TO MASS OPINION, without a critical evaluation of the consequences of their actions and inaction.
Since Socrates and Plato thinking is thought to be engaged in the silend dialog between "me and myself". In refusing to be a person one utterly surenders a single most defining human quality, that of being able to think for one´s self, to feel his conscience, consisiquently means that one is NO LONGER CAPABLE OF MAKING MORAL JUDGEMENTS. This inability creates the possibility for ordinary men and women to commit evil deeds in a gigantic scale: to participate in the decay of our civilization, poverty, destruction of the enviroment... the like of which one has never seen before.
The manifestation of wind of thought is not knowledge, but the ability to tell right from wrong and considering our world society as a whole (including all the living beings and the enviroment) and beeing aware that by doing nothing, one is also partcipating and responsible.
The trick is to make one fell seperated from others...
Martin Niemoeller:
"First they came for the Communists but I was not a Communist so I did not speak out. Then they came for the Socialists and the Trade Unionists but I was not one of them, so I did not speak out.
Then they came for the Jews but I was not Jewish so I did not speak out.
And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak out for me."
Even if one seperates others from family, friends from acquaintances, a nation from other nations, a particulal religion, from other religions, one is participating in the root cause of human suffering today!
Arendt's essay, "On Violence", distinguishes between violence and power. She maintains that, although theorists of both the Left and Right regard violence as an extreme manifestation of power, the two concepts are, in fact, antithetical. Power comes from the collective will and does not need violence to achieve any of its goals, since voluntary compliance takes its place. As governments start losing their legitimacy, violence becomes an artificial means toward the same end and is therefore, found only in the absence of power. Bureaucracies then become the ideal birthplaces of violence since they are defined as the "rule by no one" against whom to argue and therefore, recreate the missing links with the people they rule over.
Every time one says, "Ah, I do not want problems, I prefer peace quiet, that`s why I go along. It is how it is, I can not change it." Every time we are the ones who enable everything that is happening in the human society, peace by peace, little by little. Of course it is necessary to choose how to act wisely, a way to be constructive and not destructive, but to do nothing is to be the responsible and guilty one, with a mask. If one feels as an individual, that he/she is unimportant that, not worthy, that one can not do anything, that one is only following orders and rules... every such individual de-humanizes ones self and strips himself of the essence of being a human being! But not of the responsibility! Even when one distinguishes between private and public spheres, between the family and the "rest of the world", between my friends and others (that is the point where "others" automaticly somenthing less, a lesser being)... exactly that is where ones borders humanity lay, and where one ceases to be a human and becomes nothing more than a machine.
Every time one says, "Ah, I do not want problems, I prefer peace quiet, that`s why I go along. It is how it is, I can not change it." Every time we are the ones who enable everything that is happening in the human society, peace by peace, little by little. Of course it is necessary to choose how to act wisely, a way to be constructive and not destructive, but to do nothing is to be the responsible and guilty one, with a mask. If one feels as an individual, that he/she is unimportant that, not worthy, that one can not do anything, that one is only following orders and rules... every such individual de-humanizes ones self and strips himself of the essence of being a human being! But not of the responsibility! Even when one distinguishes between private and public spheres, between the family and the "rest of the world", between my friends and others (that is the point where "others" automaticly somenthing less, a lesser being)... exactly that is where ones borders humanity lay, and where one ceases to be a human and becomes nothing more than a machine.
