Ordinary Evil

History shows that evil is often less a grand design than the byproduct of ordinary negligence. Hannah Arendt called it the “banality of evil” — Eichmann sending millions to death not out of demonic hatred but bureaucratic obedience. Psychologists like Stanley Milgram demonstrated how everyday people, given orders, would administer lethal shocks rather than resist authority. The Stanford Prison Experiment, led by Philip Zimbardo, echoed the same lesson: without thought, without deliberate resistance, human beings slide into cruelty like it was second nature. Laziness — of mind, of will, of conscience — is the common soil in which atrocity grows.

Viewing a (current) YouTube media video of government agents carrying out raids driven by political agenda, I could only see people locked inside the machinery they serve, and in that recognition, something darker stirred. Not just the violence of the action, but the quiet surrender of thought, the moment when a human being becomes an extension of gears and edicts, an agent without agency. The loop does not merely close on the victims but panopticon-like on the executors, each motion reinforcing the machine’s inertia, each gesture stripping away the possibility of refusal. It is not one person’s decision, nor one order barked into a chain of command — it is the gradual erasure of alternatives, until obedience itself feels like necessity, until thought is no longer required. The orbit of evil feeds on this, an orbit that neither escapes nor collapses but circulates endlessly, binding the participants in a rhythm they mistake for purpose. Watching them, one cannot help but see not only the cruelty inflicted but the hollowness cultivated, the emptiness masquerading as duty, and behind it all the harder truth — that the machinery now thinks in their place.