Leadership Lessons From The Great Books

Hello, my name is Jesan Sorrells and this is the Leadership Lessons

from the Great Books podcast episode number

153.

What. Responsibilities do civil service bureaucrats

have to society and culture? Where does

free will, autonomy and needing to pay your mortgage run up

against or bump up against ethics and morals?

Who judges the criminality and deviance of actors who were

quote unquote just doing what they were told and quote unquote following

orders? And what responsibility do

individuals have in checking the power of the government

by standing a thwart bureaucratic control and yelling

stop? These and many

others are some of the questions

that the post World War II Nuremberg Trials of

members of the Nazi government of Germany

sought to answer in order to reassemble

a world broken by war and shocked into silence

by the presence of concentration camps.

But the answers to these questions, provided to a generation

of Americans and accepted by a couple of generations afterward

and as quote unquote, just the way things are,

are now in our time, well over 80

plus years after World War II being

deconstructed, particularly as the post World War II

liberal world order is falling apart or is being

reassembled, depending upon your perspective everywhere in the

West. The COVID 19

pandemic of course, brought many of these questions to the forefront in

the United States and globally now, particularly for the last

three generations of people, Gen Xers, Millennials and Gen Zers

who have never stared the atrocity of the concentration camps

directly in the face and whose only connection to that world

is through grainy black and white films or through

boomer generated hagiographies produced over

the last 30 years. Confronting the

terror of bureaucratic disinterested insistence on

compliance and the ruthless application of state power

to those who would rebel is new for us

living now, but would have been very familiar

to the pre World War II generations that

eventually had to deal with the consequences of all of that

at Nuremberg. To

wit, today on the podcast we will be introducing an

authority who wrote most of her work in direct and vehement

opposition to all forms of totalitarianism, both

fascism and communism. She was

unapologetically philosophical during a post World

War II era where women, and in particular

Jewish women, were just finding their feet in the

space of political and social philosophy.

Today we will be looking at the

major themes and exploring the life of the author

of Eichmann in Jerusalem Report on the

Banality of Evil by Hannah Arendt

Leaders look up. We are losing

by leaps and bounds the lessons of of

Nuremberg to our detriment

in the west and today we are going

to look at Eichmann in Jerusalem, a report on the Banality of

Evil and we will be reading excerpts

from from the book. You can get a PDF

copy of this book online. I would recommend

picking it up and checking it out

now. To pick up from Eichmann in Jerusalem

a report on the Banality of Evil. We're going to pick up

in the first chapter of the

report and then we'll talk a little bit about

Hannah Arendt and her background here.

And I quote for it was history.

That as far as the prosecution was. Concerned, and that means the prosecutor

in the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in the

1960s. For it was the history that as far as the prosecution

was concerned, stood at the center of the trial. It is not

an individual that is in the dock at this historic trial and not the Nazi

regime alone, but anti Semitism throughout history.

This was the tone sent by Ben Gurion and faithfully followed by Mr.

Hausner, who began his opening address, which lasted through three

sessions with Pharaoh in Egypt and Haman's decree, quote

to destroy, to slay and to cause them to perish. Close quote

he then proceeded to quote. Ezekiel, quote and when I

the Lord passed by thee and saw thee polluted in thine own blood, I said

unto thee in thy blood live, explaining that these words

must be understood as, quote the imperative that has confronted this nation

ever since its first appearance on the stage of history, close quote

it was bad history and cheap rhetoric. Worse, it was clearly across

purposes with putting Eichmann on trial, suggesting that

perhaps he was only an innocent executor of some mysteriously

foreordained destiny, or for that matter, even of anti

Semitism, which perhaps was necessary to blaze the

trail of the blood stained road traveled by this people

to fulfill its destiny. A few sessions later,

when Professor Salo. W. Barron of Columbia University had testified to the

more recent history of Eastern European jewelry, Dr. Servetius

could no longer resist temptation and asked the obvious questions

why did all this bad luck fall upon the Jewish people? And don't you

think that irrational motives. Are at the basis of the fate of

this people beyond the understanding of a human

being? Is there not perhaps something like the

spirit of the history which brings history forward without the influence of men?

Is not Mr. Hauser basically in agreement with the school of historical law

in allusion to Hegel? And has he not shown that

what the leaders do will not always lead to the aim and

destination they wanted here? The intention was to destroy

the Jewish people and the objective was not reached and A new

flourishing state came into being. The argument

of the defense had now come perilously close to the newest and

anti Semitic notion about the Elders of Zion set forth in all

seriousness a few weeks ago, earlier in the Egyptian national assembly by

Deputy Foreign Minister Hussein Zulfikar Sabri.

Hitler was innocent of the slaughter of the Jews. He was a victim of the

Zionists who. Who had, quote, compelled him to

perpetrate. Crimes that would eventually enable them to achieve their aim, the

creation of the State of Israel. Close quote.

Except that Dr. Sevatius, following the philosophy of history

expounded by the prosecutor, had put history in the place usually

reserved for the Elders of Zion.

Despite the intentions of Ben Gurion and all the efforts of the prosecution,

there remained an individual in the dock, a person of flesh

and blood. And if Ben Gurion did not,

quote, care what verdict is delivered against Eichmann,

it was undeniably the sole task of the Jerusalem court

to deliver one. When you read

Eichmann in Jerusalem, you realize that

there are two very important. People that are at the center

of this report. One obviously

is the person being reported. On and his trial.

That would be Adolf Eichmann. But the other important

person is Hannah Arendt.

Hannah Arendt was born Joanna Arendt on October 14,

1906 and she died December

4, 1975. And in case you don't know anything about

her, she was a German and American

historian and philosopher. Now, she

described herself vociferously as

a philosopher and she

also described herself later on, at least initially, sorry, she described

herself as a philosopher. But as the course of her career

in writing and in letters and in teaching unfolded,

she referred to herself more, or thought of herself more

as a political philosopher. Her works

cover a broad range of topics, but she is best known for

for those works dealing with the nature of wealth, power and evil,

as well as politics, direct democracy, authority, tradition,

and of course, what we're going to cover today,

totalitarianism and tyranny.

Hannah Arendt was raised in a politically

progressive Jewish but secular family

and her mother was an ardent social democrat in

Germany in the 1920s and in the 1930s. As a matter of fact,

Aren't was once interviewed by a German program

in a German language only interview that you could find the link

to in the show notes below. The player of the podcast

episode or sorry, the podcast player you're listening to for this

episode. And in that interview she was asked about her childhood

and she was. She said that she was surprised the first time

she was exposed to a anti Semitism in Germany.

And that her mother effectively put a

stop to anti Semitic incidents in school that would occur

with her between Hannah and.

And adults, but between Hannah and children.

Hannah recalled, she was sent out basically to

forge and figure out how to deal with those anti Semitic incidents

on her own. After

completing the secondary education in Berlin, Arendt studied

at the University of Marburg under Martin Heidegger.

And she was deeply influenced by

Heidegger and deeply influenced by Karl

Jaspers. Martin Heidegger, just so that, you know, was

a German philosopher and theologian.

He ran into some problems

when he vociferously and

pretty much wholeheartedly went in on becoming

a part of the National Socialist Party under Hitler.

And spent a lot of his years in post war Europe

and in America running around apologizing. Well, not really apologizing,

running around justifying that decision.

Arendt was deeply in love with Heidegger. Matter of fact,

there's a lot of indication in her biography that he was probably her

first serious love affair. And he was significantly older,

older than her at the time. And this love affair

began when he or she was his

student at the University of Marburg.

In 1933, Arendt was

briefly imprisoned by the Gestapo for performing

illegal research into anti Semitism. And this was during

the period of time when Germany was beginning to lock

down most of its Jewish population and

was beginning to really turn the crank

and put pressure on Jews. This pressure, of course,

would culminate in the development of

auschwitz in the 1940s,

when Germany finally declared war on everybody in Europe

and invaded France. Hannah at that time had

escaped to France and there she was detained as an alien.

When Germany invade. She escaped the clutches

of the Nazis and made her way back to the United

States. In 1941, when she

landed in the United States, she did not speak any English. And she taught herself

over the course of a couple years how to do that. By the way. She

was a native German speaker, obviously, but she was also

fluent in French and in English. She

became a writer and editor and worked for the Jewish Cultural

Reconstruction. She also became an American Citizen in

1950 with the publication of

the Origins of Totalitarianism. In 1951, her

reputation as a thinker and a writer was established and an

entire series of political philosophical works

followed. She taught at many American universities

while consistently declining tenure track appointments. She

didn't want to be locked down. She had an inherent mistrust of

institutional and of institutional authority.

During the course of her career, she had many friendships and she got involved in

many controversies, including the controversies that we are going to talk

about today that cover her reporting on the

trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in the

1960s. She was

also consistently buried for many, many years. Her husband

died before she did, and she died suddenly of a heart

attack in December of 1975, leaving her

last work, the Life of the Mind, unfinished.

If you want to talk about a giant of the

20th century, an intellectual giant of the 20th century,

you probably would do well to include

Hannah Arendt in your list of giants of

political and philosophical thought of the

20th century. So just in case you

don't know anything about Adolf Eichmann,

let's go ahead and pick up from Menality

of Evil, a report on the

Menality of Evil by Hannah Arendt. Let's go ahead and pick up with

her description of Adolf

Eichmann. And I quote,

he was born on March 19, 1906

in Solingen, a German town in the Rhineland famous for

its knives, scissors and surgical instruments. 54

years later, indulging in his favorite pastime of writing his memoirs, he

described this memorable event as follows.

Quote Today, 15 years in a day after May 8,

1945, I began to lead my thoughts back to that 19th of March of the

year 1906, when at 5 o' clock in the morning I entered life on

earth in the aspect of a human being. The

manuscript has not been released by the Israeli authorities. Harry Mulish

succeeded in studying this autobiography for half

an hour, and the German Jewish weekly Der

Aufbau was able to publish short excerpts from it.

According to his religious beliefs, which had not changed since the Nazi period

in Jerusalem, Eichmann declared himself to be a got gluber,

the Nazi term for those who had broken with Christianity, and he refused

to take his oath on the Bible. This event was

to be ascribed to a higher bearer of meaning,

an entity somehow identical with the movement of the universe,

to which human life in itself devoid of higher meaning, is

subject. The terminology is quite suggestive

to call God a hoheran sinister meaning

linguistically, to give him some place in the military hierarchy, since the

Nazis had changed the military recipient of orders, the

Belfenschlemflanger, into a bearer of orders,

a befel strager, indicating as in the ancient bearer

of ill tidings, the burden of responsibility and of importance that

weighed supposedly upon those who had to execute orders.

Moreover, Eichmann, like everyone connected with the Final Solution, was

officially a bearer of secrets, a guy high

mainunstragger as well, which as far as self

importance went, certainly was nothing to sneeze at.

But Eichmann was not very much interested in metaphysics, remaining

singularly silent on any more intimate relationship between

the bearer of meaning and the bearer of orders, and proceeded

to a consideration of the other possible cause of his existence.

His parents and I quote, they would hardly

have been so overjoyed at the arrival of their firstborn

had they been able to watch how in the hour of my birth, the

norn of. Miss. Miss.

The norn of misfortune. There it is.

In spite of the norn of good fortune, was already spinning

threads of grand grief and sorrow into my life. But a kind

impenetrable veil kept my parents from seeing into the future.

Close quote. The

misinformation or the misfortune. Sorry, started soon enough. It

started in school. Eichmann's father, first an accountant for the tramways

and electricity company in Solingen, and after 1913, as an official

of the same corporation, Austria in Linz, had five children,

four sons and a daughter, of whom only Adolf, the eldest, it seems. Was unable

to finish high school or. Even to graduate from the vocational school for engineering

into which he was then put. Throughout his life, Eichmann

deceived people about his early, quote, unquote misfortunes by hiding behind the more

honorable financial misfortunes of his father in Israel. However, during

the first sessions with Captain Abner Lest, a police examiner who was to

spend approximately 35 days with him and who produced

3564 typewritten pages from the 76 recorder

tapes, he he was in an ebullent mood, full of enthusiasm about this

unique opportunity, quote, to pour forth everything I know,

and by the same token, to advance to the rank of the most cooperative defendant

ever. His enthusiasm was soon dampened, though never

quite extinguished, when he was confronted with concrete questions based on

irrefutable documents. The best proof of his initial boundless

confidence, obviously wasted on Captain Less, who said to Harry

Mulish the quote, I was Mr. Eichmann's father confessor. Close quote

was that for the first. Time in his life he admitted his early disasters,

although he must have been aware of the fact that he thus

contradicted himself on several important entries in all his official

Nazi records. Well,

the disasters were ordinary, since he, quote, had not exactly been the most

hard working pupil, close quote or, one may add, the most gifted.

His father had taken him first from high school and then from vocational school long

before graduation. Hence the profession that appears on all his

official documents, construction engineer, had about as much connection with

reality as the statement that his birthplace was Palestine, or that he was fluent in

Hebrew and Yiddish, another outright lie Eichmann had loved to tell both

to his SS comrades and to his Jewish victims. It was in

the same vein that he had always pretended that he had been dismissed from his

job as a salesman for the Vacuum Oil Company in Austria because of membership of

the National Socialist Party. The version he confided to Captain

Less was less dramatic, though probably not the truth either. He had been

fired because it was a time of unemployment when unmarried

employees were the first to lose their jobs. This explanation,

which at first seems plausible, is not very satisfactory because he lost his

job in the spring of 1933, when he had been engaged for a full two

years to Veronica or Vera Liebel, who later became his wife.

Why had he not married her before, when he still had a good job? He

finally married in March 1935, probably because bachelors in the SS,

as in the Vacuum Oil Company, were never sure of their jobs

and could not be promoted. Clearly

bragging had always been one of his cardinal vices.

While young Eichmann was doing poorly in school, his father left the tramway and

electricity company and went into business for himself. He bought a small mining enterprise

and put his unpromising youngster to work in it as an ordinary mining

laborer, but only until he found him a job in the sales department of the

Oberstresscheikken Electrobrau company, where Eichmann

remained for over two years. He was now about 22 years old and without

any prospects for a career. The only thing he had learned, perhaps, was

how to sell. What then happened was what he himself called his first

break, of which, again, we have two rather different versions.

In a handwritten biographical record he submitted in 1939 to win a promotion in

the SS, he described it as follows. Quote I worked during the years of

1925 to 1927 as a salesman for the Austrian Austrian

Electrobrau Company. I left this position of my own free will as the Vacuum

Oil Company of Vienna offered me the representative, the representation for

Upper Austria. The keyword here is

offered since, according to the story he told Captain Les in Israel,

nobody had offered him anything. His own mother had died when he was 10 years

old and his father had married again A cousin of his stepmother, a man who

he called uncle, who was president of the Austrian Automobile Club and

was married to the daughter of a Jewish businessman in Czechoslovakia had used his connection

with the general director of the Austrian vacuum oil company, a Jewish Mr. Weiss,

to obtain for his

tame, for his unfortunate relation a job as a traveling

salesman. Eichmann was properly grateful.

The Jews and his family were among his private reasons, quote

unquote, for not hating Jews.

Then we're going to move on a little bit as he moved through the vacuum

oil company and we're going to skip ahead

for whatever reasons. The year 1932 marked a turning point in his life.

It was in April of this year that he joined the National Socialist Party and

entered the SS upon an invitation of Ernst Kaltenbrunner,

a young lawyer in Linz who later became chief of the head office for Reich

Security, the Reichstagshire

heisChenwat, or the RSHA as I shall call it

henceforth. In one of those whose six main

departments, Bureau 4, under the command of Heinrich Mueller, Eichmann

was eventually employed as the head of section B4. In court.

Eichmann gave the impression of a typical member of the lower middle classes. And this

impression was more than borne out by every sentence he spoke or wrote

while in prison. But this was misleading. He was rather de

classe son of a solid middle class family and it

was indicative of his come down in social status that while his father was a

good friend of Kaltenbrunner's father, who was also Linz lawyer, the

relationship of the two sons was rather cool.

Eichmann was unmistakably treated by Kaltenbrunner as his social

inferior. Before Eichmann entered the party and the SS, he

had proved that he was a joiner. And May 8, 1945, the official

date of Germany's defeat, was significant for him, mainly because it then dawned upon him

that thenceforward he would have to live without being member of something

or the other. I sensed that I would have

to live a leaderless and difficult individual life.

I would receive no directives from anybody, no orders and

commands would any longer be issued to me. No pertinent ordinances

would be there to consult. In brief, a

life never known before lay

before me. One of the things that jumps out.

To you about Eichmann and

Arendt is their

weird parallels. They were both from

the same generation of Germans.

You know, Eichmann was born in. In. In 1906,

as was Aaron, actually. They were only separated by

birth by only about six months.

They both came up during the exact same time in Germany

and yet they had fundamentally different lives.

Hannah Arendt was raised as an

intellectual in a Jewish

subculture in Germany that was operating

at its moral, philosophical and some would even say its

theological height. There's a quote from

her. She said this about her upbringing quote. My early intellectual

formation occurred in an atmosphere where nobody paid much attention to

moral questions, we were brought up under the assumption

Das morlische verstett Schick van Scheblest.

Moral conduct is a matter of course,

close quote. That idea that moral

conduct is a matter of course

influenced how Arendt would look at her

contemporary, her social peer,

Adolf Eichmann, when he was eventually put

in the dock after being kidnapped in Argentina

by the Mossad. The

getting of Eichmann is a whole other. A whole other

episode. And we may cover that at some point in time in the. In the

future. What I really want to focus on today, or we should focus on today,

is one of the main themes, one of the main ideas in Eichmann in

Jerusalem. And the main idea, the first main idea that really jumps out to us

about this book is this idea of reportage.

For those of you who maybe are too young to

understand or experience this word, reportage is

what individuals as diverse as Hunter Thompson, all the way

to Joan Didion and of course James Baldwin and Hannah

Arendt engaged in in the middle part of the 20th century

in America. 20th century journalism in

America, from Walt Duranty all the way to the

folks who brought us the Pentagon Papers, used to be about

investigative journalism. Now investigative

journalism, the kind that we no longer have, even though we

have the Internet, that journalism was deep,

well researched, and journalists went out and sought

to understand the nature of the situation that they were

investigating in order to report on that situation back to the

public. Investigative journalist reports were long,

detailed and in depth. But then there's

reportage. And reportage was different. Reportage was where

the, the reporter or

the writer, usually a person with some writing

chops, usually a person of some fame, maybe a

novelist or even a political theorist like Arendt,

would be invited by a journalist

organization to turn their,

their skills in novel writing, their skills in essay writing,

their proven skills in political theorizing to

a particular topic that a pure journalist maybe wouldn't be

able to handle. And this is what Hannah Arendt was engaged in. She was engaged

in reportage around the Adolf Eichmann trial.

She was sent by the New Yorker in 1961 to cover the

Eichmann trial. And of course, her original reporting was published in

the New Yorker in the 1960s,

1962, 1963, that is

when about when her reporting, her reporting came out.

Now the thing you got to understand about Hannah Aaron, the thing that influenced

her reportage and influenced how she developed

her reporting around Eichmann's trial, was that

she never saw herself As a political leftist,

she also never saw herself as politically Jewish.

She instead saw herself primarily as an individual going to

report on an event that had happened to.

To another. Another individual, and

she and a group of individuals. And being set apart

from the atrocities

of World War II, she was able to

prioritize political oversight, social

questions. This consistent

prioritization of the political over the social was one of the

many, particularly in her reportage, in her books and even in

her political essays and philosophies, was one of the things that

consistently got her into trouble and generated

controversy around her all the way from her first book, the

Origins of Totalitarianism, all the way to

Eichmann in Jerusalem.

Because of the nature of how Aaron

interpreted her own existence. She

was. She was. She was deeply

interested in the surroundings of the trial of

Adolf Eichmann. And she attempted in her reportage to

explain how ordinary people, and this is one of her core ideas,

became actors in totalitarian systems. This

was considered by some to be an apologia. And

this was where the phrase was coined, the banality

of evil. Arendt,

quite frankly, when she went and saw Eichmann in the

dock, was shocked by how normal looking a

bureaucrat Adolf Eichmann was. Yes,

Arendt was locked up by the Gestapo. And yes, she first heard about

Auschwitz living in America as a refugee in

1943 and was stunned by

the fact of Auschwitz. Yes, she helped

many organizations establish

and resettle Jewish refugees in the State of Israel.

No, she did not think of herself as a Zionist

per se, but she did think of herself as someone who supported

the Jewish people and as an individual Jew,

not as a representative of humanity, not as a representative

of the German state, but as a representative of the

Jewish people. And she was still

shocked by how normal a bureaucrat Eichmann

was in the dock. He was not, much to her

surprise, a slavering monster. Nor was he

a cold, calculating sociopath like Goebbels or even

Heinrich Himmler. He was fundamentally,

and this is the. Thing that we all still struggle with and this is why

we will be. Reading the Banality of Evil probably for the remainder of

this century. He was fundamentally a

nobody from nowhere.

Back to the book. Back to Eichmann in

Jerusalem, a report on the Banality

of Evil. And I pick up here from the

postscript and I quote, there

is, of course, no doubt the defendant and the nature of his acts as

well as the trial itself raised problems of a general nature which go far

beyond the matters considered in Jerusalem. I have attempted to

go into some of the Problems in the epilogue, which ceases to be simple

reporting. I would not have been surprised if people had found my treatment

inadequate. And I would have welcomed a discussion of the general

significance of the entire body of facts, which could have been all the

more meaningful the more directly it referred to the concrete events.

I also can well imagine that an authentic controversy might have arisen over the

subtitle of the book. For when I speak of the banality of

evil, I do so only on the strictly factual level,

pointing to a phenomenon which stared one in the face at the trial.

Eichmann was not Iago and not Macbeth, and nothing

would have been farther from his mind than to determine, with

Richard iii, quote, unquote, to prove a villain.

Except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal

advancement, he had no motives at all. And

this diligence in itself was in no way criminal. He certainly would never have murdered

his superior in order to inherit his post. He merely, to put the

matter colloquially, never realized what he was doing.

It was precisely this lack of imagination which enabled him to sit for months

on end facing a German Jew who was conducting the police interrogation,

pouring out to his heart the man, or pouring

out his heart to the man and explaining again and again how it was that

he reached only the rank of Lieutenant colonel in the ss and that it had

not been his fault that he was not promoted

in principle. He knew quite well what it was all about. And in his final

statement to the court he spoke of the reevaluation of the values

prescribed by the Nazi government. 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 with the best will in the

world one cannot extract any diabolical or demonic profundity from

Eichmann, that is still far from calling it commonplace.

It surely cannot be so common that a man facing death, and moreover standing

beneath the gallows should be able to think of nothing but what he has heard

at funerals all his life, and that these lofty words should completely

be cloud the reality of his own death. That such remoteness from

reality and such thoughtlessness can wreck more havoc than all the evil instincts

taken together which perhaps are inherent in man. That was, in

fact the lesson one could learn in Jerusalem. But it

was a lesson neither an explanation of the phenomenon

nor a theory about it,

seemingly more complicated, but in reality far simpler than examining the

strange interdependence of thoughtlessness. And evil is the question of what kind

of crime is actually involved here. A crime, moreover, which all agree is

unprecedented. For the concept of genocide, introduced explicitly

to cover a crime unknown before, although applicable up to a point, is not fully

adequate for the simple reason that massacres of whole peoples are not

unprecedented. They were the order of the day in antiquity.

And the centuries of colonialization, imperialism provide plenty of examples of

more or less successful attempts of that sort of sort. The

expression administrative massacre seems better to fill the bill.

The term arose in connection with British imperialism. The English deliberately

rejected such procedures as a means of maintaining their rule over India.

The phrase has the virtue of dispelling the prejudice that such monstrous acts can

be committed only against foreign nation or a different

race. There is the well known fact that Hitler began his mass

murders by granting mercy deaths to the quote, unquote incurably ill,

and that he intended to wind up his extermination program by doing away with, quote

unquote, genetically damaged Germans heart and lung patients to start.

But quite aside from that, it is apparent that this sort of killing can be

directed against any given group, that is that the principle of selection

is dependent only upon circumstantial factors. It is quite

conceivable that in the automated economy of the not too distant future,

men may be tempted to exterminate all those whose intelligence

quotient is below a certain level.

In Jerusalem, this matter was inadequately discussed because it is actually very difficult

to grasp jurisdictiously. We heard the

protestations of the defense at Eichmann was, after all, only a tiny cog in the

machinery of the Final Solution and of the prosecution, which believed it had

discovered in Eichmann the actual motor. I myself attributed

no more importance to both theories than did the Jerusalem court, since the whole cog

theory is legally pointless, and therefore it does not matter at all what order

of magnitude is assigned to the cog named Eichmann. In its

judgment, the court naturally conceded that such a crime could be committed only by a

giant bureaucracy using the resources of government. But insofar as

it remains a crime, and that, of course, is the premise of for a trial,

all the cogs in the machinery, no matter how insignificant, are in court

forthwith transformed back into perpetrators, that is to

say, into human beings. If the defendant

excuses himself on the ground that he acted not as a man, but as a

mere functionary whose functions could just as easily have been carried out by anyone else,

it is as if a criminal pointed to the statistics on crime which set

forth that so and so Many crimes per day are committed in such and

such place, and declared that he only did what was

statistically expected, that it was mere accident

that he did it and not somebody else, since, after all,

somebody had to do it. Of course,

it is important to point, it is important to the political and

social sciences that the essence of totalitarian government, and perhaps

the nature of every bureaucracy, is to make functionaries

and mere cogs in the administrative machinery out of men, and thus

to dehumanize them. And one could debate long

and profitably on the rule of nobody, which is

what the political form known as bureaucracy

truly is.

So we will cover that idea of the rule of

nobody from nowhere and tie it into

the upcoming rule, at least in the west, of

all of us, by the wonderful

vicissitudes of large language model

algorithms in our next episode, where we will talk

with Tom Libby and Harvey Seifer

about the banality of

evil. But just to introduce,

Just to keep with the theme of this particular episode, where we're really focusing on

introducing the themes of the book,

I think the larger idea here, the larger

leadership lessons that we can take from Eichmann in

Jerusalem, are these.

So if we look at Hannah Aaron,

right, if we look at her as a writer, we look at her as a

political theorist. If we look at her as a woman,

probably she would not describe herself as a feminist. She never used that

language. She probably thought it was mostly ridiculous

because she had never been withheld, at least not in her

estimation, ever been withheld, or been.

Or been pushed back or not been allowed to enter any place where a man

was allowed to enter. Much like Zora Neale Hurston

before her, she probably would have looked askance

at being called a feminist.

But if you look at Hannah Arendt's work and you look at

her, particularly her reportage here on Eichmann, on the

Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, the last trial

of Nuremberg, Hannah Arendt was consumed

by thinking and writing about the threats to human freedom

presented by scientific abstraction and bourgeois

morality. Intellectually, she was an

independent thinker, a loner, and not a joiner, separating

herself from schools of thought and even attempting. To separate herself from

ideology. What this means is,

while it made her unique when the New Yorker called her up in

1961 and probably correctly sent

her to Jerusalem, it also virtually guaranteed that there was

going to be a controversial controversy of some kind, based on

some conclusion that she were to draw from

staring at Eichmann finally as. Again, as a

person who had been arrested by the Gestapo, finally staring at

Eichmann in the face.

And this is the thing that we don't

get right. We particularly don't get

it. 80 years away from the horrors of World War

II. What is it like to actually

look at your perpetrator?

Not of a small crime, not of a robbery or murder.

And I don't want to minimize those crimes because they do impact people. But

when we're talking about state level criminality,

those crimes are minimal. What is it like

to stand in the dock and stare at this

person and realize

that they're just another human being,

they aren't Satan himself. And

yes, in your mind you might have built them up and they'll do until Satan

gets here. But then Satan turns

out to be just a little ruffled

man. And not just any kind of little ruffled man,

a little ruffled thoughtless man.

This was Eichmann's true crime. He was not a critical thinker.

He was eager to conform and eager to comply with little

thought to rebellion and little consideration

of the knock on effects of his actions. Not only

did he not want to think think, not only was he lacking

curiosity about himself,

he was unable to think.

He had no theory of mind,

not just theory of mind about other people, but theory of

mind about himself.

This of course does not obviate his responsibility

or his accountability for the actions he took.

This is one of the unique features of being human beings, right?

We expect other human beings to be accountable

and accept consequences for the actions they take. Which is why

AI is going to be so horrific by the way,

if we truly do let the genie all the way

out of the bottle and begin to allow it to make decisions

for us. Because there will be an appeal to

nobody from nowhere. LLMs don't

have a mind. They have no theory of mind. Thus we do not expect them

to accept consequences for their actions. Thus any actions

that they quote, unquote take from their quote, unquote decision making will just

be called natural.

Just like we don't expect the wind or the

hurricane or the tornado or the storm

to pay out the insurance. When it destroys

your house, your property or kills your family.

We just say it was an act of God and move on.

But Eichmann was not God, by the way.

Eichmann was not God in the way that Stalin was not God.

Hitler was not God. Goebbels was

not God. Mao was not God.

Pol Pot was not God. The members of the Khmer

Rouge were not God. Saddam

Hussein was not God. And the

Ayatollahs in Iran, no matter how religious

sounding the name Ayatollah is are not

God.

Thus they cannot commit acts of

God.

Eichmann should unsettle us as leaders. His presence in the

world should unsettle us as leaders, particularly if we merely

favor uncritical action from our leaders and from

ourselves. If we merely want people to just do things and get stuff

done. He was, as

Arendt wrote, terribly and terrifyingly

normal.

Arendt examined 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

there's a tie in here to both 1984 and to

animal Farm, which we will be covering here on the

show coming up shortly.

Why is it that certain people just can't

critically think? They can't critically walk through

what's happening. They can't critically question motives

or have empathy for others.

Eichmann shrouded his actions in bureaucratic

morality, and he, and even Aaron

noted this. Spouted mindless cliches.

He was smooth brained in his approach to

critical thinking. He was about as sharp as a

marble or bowling ball. He

was the ultimate example. His. His bureaucratic morality and mindless

cliches were the ultimate example of what

Winston, the character Winston, becomes at the close of

the story or the book, the novel 1984 by George

Orwell. He was a compliant automaton,

spouting newspeak or Hitlerisms, whatever you want to call

it, and desperately seeking to be understood, understood

and of course, given grace that he does not deserve

when caught. Leaders.

There's some lessons here, some cautions and some

massive red flags that you should be paying attention to,

particularly as you hire people, as you fire people,

and even as you promote people, most especially,

especially as you promote people, in particular

in bureaucratic agencies where

thoughtlessly filling out the box and being compliant

and not rocking the boat is more

important than actually engaging

with reality, with

courage.

So by reading Eichmann in Jerusalem, what problem are we seeking

to solve as leaders? What problem that is

bedeviling us? Are we seeking to use this book as a resource, as a

guide, as a map to the territory,

to be able to help us figure out what actions to take,

what posture to take, or even what mindset to have

when we're approaching not only leadership but also other

aspects of our lives? What problem

are we looking to Eichmann in Jerusalem, a report on the

banality of evil to solve?

Well, I think the biggest problem that we are looking for this

book to solve is the problem of never forgetting.

We are, as I have said repeatedly during this episode today,

we are currently in 2025. And of

course, because this is a podcast and it's audio, and it will live on the

Internet until I take it down, or in perpetuity,

whichever comes first, at some point in the future,

someone will hear this, and you will

be able to count the years, the decades,

and maybe even, dare I say, the centuries

after World War II. And as the decades have

rolled by, as the decades have increased, from staring at the horrors

of the concentration camps or the firebombing of Dresden

or the firebombing of Tokyo, or even

the nuclear holocaust at

Nagasaki and Hiroshima,

as we have moved far away from that, as it

fades into historical memory, as the people

who actually fought it have now all

died and only their voices recorded and otherwise

remain. And soon those will fade.

We have a new generation of people in the world who

have, and I don't think we estimate this

correctly, who do not have one iota of

emotional connection to any of these

events. Just like there

are people who are being born now who have not one iota

of emotional connection to the events of September 11,

one iota of emotional connection

to the events of

1989 at Tiananmen Square, not one

iota of emotional connection to the

events of the Iraq wars or the Afghanistan

wars. There are people being born

right now and living right

now who will view all of this and listen to all of this

as mere history and wonder what

all the trouble was.

Never forget is the motto around the Holocaust. But never

forgetting, like I said, means sometimes not remembering correctly.

And the past was just as complicated and just as

multifaceted as the present is. With just as many human

foibles, sins, and problems we experience

in the current age, the

individual will always have trouble critiquing the

society, whether that

society is the society of the 1930s in Germany,

the 1970s in America, or the

two or the 2000s. Globally.

Courage has always been in short supply. Apply

the challenge represented by the outcome of both the Nuremberg trials and

the trial of Adolf Eichmann. And this is the big

challenge, by the way. The big challenge is that secular

human justice is no replacement for our deep need,

our deep human need for some type, some

method, some way of cosmically

reassembling the universe and

inserting back to it what is right and what is

just. This is why, ever since

2010, the calls from the social justice warriors,

the changing of speech, the altering

of the social contract between people in

America and between groups of people in America

has been so far fraught with

problems. We actually don't have a good conception

of what justice means, particularly if we don't have

religious language to describe it. If we don't have the

correct language, we can't actually describe what we want.

And secular humanism at a philosophical level

only partially slakes our thirst.

Secular human justice doesn't have room for forgiveness

or restoration, bringing people back together in

community. It only has room for

judging based on facts, making a

determination based on the facts at hand, and

then rendering a punishment and then calling

that justice.

In the west, as we round up towards 80

plus years since the horrors of the Holocaust were thrust upon

us, and we round up on 90 plus years past

pogroms, gulags and the secret police of communism,

we realize, I think, or we are going to have to teach

a new generation of people to realize that

all of these methods, all of these,

these tools are merely, not merely, but they

are somewhat politics just taken

up by other means. With

the distance that we have of approaching a century

from the original events that set us on this

path, antisemitism is on the rise. And that's to

disturbing. As well as an increasing in

leveraging of bureaucratic morality and

mindless cliches in order to justify

state violence. And by the way, this is not a critique of the

left from the right or a critique of the right from the left. This is

a critique of human beings

using these tools

in order to engage in politics,

in order to accomplish political ends.

It's almost like giving a four year old a

knife and expecting them

to cut the cheese rather than cut

themselves. And only by a miracle do they

avoid losing some fingers. And we call that a

victory. You

got to take the knife away from the four year old.

And I think that's the biggest solution, right? You have to take the knife of

politics by other means away from people who do

not have the education and the knowledge and the

emotional connection to utilize it correctly. Or another way

of saying this is we have failed

in our responsibility in the west to mature people

into being serious adults.

Serious adults do not cotton antisemitism

in any form. Serious adults do not

cotton pogroms, nor do they cotton

gulags or thought policing or cancel

culture. Serious adults do

not cotton behavioral tracking

or large language models that are currently

being used to outsource our minds so that

we can sit around and watch more Netflix.

But we don't have that. And that's the hardest part, right?

We don't have that because we've abdicated. In a different direction.

And thus I must come to the conclusion that there is no solution

to these problems. Because they are problems of the human condition.

They are problems of human sin. Whether that sin is

laziness or violence. Whether that sin is pride

or lust of power. Whether that sin is greed for

material resources or

avarice and jealousy. Because someone else has something

that you do not. And these

problems, these problems of human sin.

All coming together in the collision between

Adolf Eichmann and Hannah Arendt.

All these problems cannot be eliminated by

political means. It's the wrong

tool. Politics is, and justice is, and

the law is. They are the wrong tools

to accomplish a spiritual goal.

And, well,

that's it for me.