I’m starting to believe in evil.
I‘ve been trying to figure out what I meant by the above tweet. I‘ve never read Hannah Arendt but we did watch the 2012 film “Hannah Arendt“ the other day. I don’t know if I mean her observations on the “banality of evil.” Maybe a little, but that doesn’t entirely capture it.
I wrote it after watching the elderly man in Buffalo who was pushed by police and cracked his skull on the pavement. One cop tried to stop and see if he was okay. Another pushed him forward, a nonverbal “keep walking.”
An entire phalanx of police ignored him. They walked over his body as blood poured out of his ear and onto the sidewalk.
Then, literally minutes later, I saw a second video. A man in Manhattan was also on the ground, blood pouring out of some other part of his head and onto the pavement.
There were police who were adjacent, and maybe someone had already called an EMT, but no one was obviously helping him.
And so while I still don’t completely understand what I watched in those two videos, the only thing I could think to say was, “I am starting to believe in evil.” To which someone replied, “Hitler wasn’t enough to convince you?” Which is when I thought of Hannah Arendt.
The problem with evil is that like any abstract concept, it’s of limited value. We can name evil when we see it, and we should, but naming it doesn’t help us understand it.
The concept of evil suggests a primordial force, the devil on one side of the shoulder fighting to win our soul, angel on the other. Evil isn’t an external force, it is a social dynamic, and it requires a few conditions to “work” at scale.
Having had a few more days to mull over these images we are all seeing, I have a few additional thoughts. They are a work in progress.
First, I am struck that there are and probably always will be a certain proportion of the population that wants to inflict physical harm on others.
It’s not really about ideology, racism, right/wrong, or public safety. They just like doing it. Psychologists and evolutionary biologists will, I am sure, have much deeper things to say about this than I do.
But if we can accept that that is true, we can try to think about what to do about it. People in this category will tend to be drawn to professions or institutions where their taste for violence or harming others is legitimate.
So we should expect to see a disproportionate number of people like this chose to become police. We might also expect to find them in other professions where they are in positions of power relative to vulnerable people (e.g., children, patients, the disabled, the incarcerated).
And to make it more difficult to think that I am reflexively “anti-police” or this is a left/right thing, let me name some of those some of those other professions: priests, nuns, teachers, doctors, nurses, prison guards.
In case what I am saying is controversial, let me be clear: the majority of people in all of these professions DO sign up for the right reasons. However, they will also attract people who seek opportunities to abuse others. We know this.
Often, abuse can be subtle. We see it on most flagrant display any time we put people in institutions, be they care homes for the disabled or laundries for fallen women.
However, most people are not like this, and that is why society functions pretty well, most of the time. Evil scales when people with a taste for inflicting harm are given permission, are empowered by a second group of people, which is most of us.
Most of us, when we see evil, freeze. We do absolutely nothing about it. I actually think I am one of these people, at least in a small way. I say this because there was an incident that made a really big impression on me when I was in my early twenties.
I was somewhere in France on a train platform. I observed a train conductor yelling at an African woman who had a large box of dried fish that she was trying to bring on the train. He was screaming at her, unleashing a torrent of racist rage. Everyone on the platform watched.
He took her box. He kicked it across the platform. It exploded. She was completely quiet, head bowed, gaze averted. She went and tried to pick up the contents of the property that had just been destroyed. No one helped her.
In that moment, I wanted to jump in and defend her, but I could perceive many things at once. First, I was far more shocked and outraged than any of the French people around me. Second, I was aware of my own status as an outsider, a foreigner.
Third, it happened so fast that unless I had reacted immediately, instinctually, there was no time to react at all.
I am still ashamed to this day that I didn’t follow my first instinct, which was to run down the platform, physically place myself between the officer and the African woman, and yell back at him.
Here is the primary reason I did not do that—and this is probably the most important thing I will say on Twitter today––I did not do that because it happened so fast and was so extreme and so unexpected, that I did not even understand what I was seeing.
Sure, I had the *instinct* that I should intervene, but there was some process happening in my brain, and again, some of this is probably deep evolutionary stuff, that I just froze.
The images of Americans with their cracked skulls bleeding on sidewalks? When I first saw them Wednesday night, in a similar way to what happened on that French train platform, it was so extreme and so sudden, it was almost like my brain couldn’t quite process the image.
And it struck me that if that minority of people with a taste for violence ever suddenly came into power, or did something so outside the norm, we barely understood it, the vast majority of us would freeze. And that my friends, is how evil scales.
I haven’t read her book, but I have a feeling this is exactly what @sarahkendzior and others have been trying to tell us since 2016 (and before).
@sarahkendzior Since our president came into office, he’s been providing us almost daily with images and stories of things so bizarre and outside the norm, we can barely understand them.
Everything he does is “not normal.”
Everything he does is “not normal.”
@sarahkendzior And a lot of people and institutions that we might have imagined would recognize what was and is happening and speak out haven’t—they froze. Congress, in particular congressional Republicans, froze.
@sarahkendzior Many in the media froze (it is telling that one of the biggest offenders is our “paper of record.” @nytimes has had 3 1/2 years and they still fundamentally don’t get it.)
@sarahkendzior @nytimes Now, 2020 is not 2016, and I think the people in the streets and the journalists telling their stories, they are not freezing. They are mobilizing to save our democracy.
@sarahkendzior @nytimes And for that, they are paying a terrible price. ICYMI, here is a thread of hundreds of atrocities and constitutional violations against largely peaceful protesters. In many cities, police are aiming for the head and eyes:
@sarahkendzior @nytimes Local police forces across the country have been trained by FEMA, a federal government agency, on how to mount exactly this type of response:
@sarahkendzior @nytimes The police in Buffalo who did this? Well, turns out they attended that 3-day FEMA training course on crowd control.
@sarahkendzior @nytimes “Fifty-seven resigned in disgust because of the treatment of two of their members, who were simply executing orders,” said John Evans, PBA president.
OK, Hannah Arendt. Now I am listening. investigativepost.org/2020/06/05/pol…
OK, Hannah Arendt. Now I am listening. investigativepost.org/2020/06/05/pol…
@sarahkendzior @nytimes Given the public mobilization George Floyd’s murder ignited, and watching the violent police response, it has become clear to me the protesters cannot fail.
@sarahkendzior @nytimes Where “success” means, at a minimum, ensuring that police are held to account
@sarahkendzior @nytimes And that is what I mean when I say that sometimes there are things more important than public health.
@sarahkendzior @nytimes I’ve written more on those above threads about what failing might mean and the trade off between protesting and fighting #COVID19, so won’t here. I appreciate all my followers and any passersby for allowing me the space to try to grapple with all of this in public.
@sarahkendzior @nytimes Grappling with what is happening to our country, in public, is one of the most important things any of us can do right now. If we can do it in the streets, we should. If we can’t do it there (and I can’t), we can do it here. That’s good and important, too.
@sarahkendzior @nytimes And so while these are not remotely complete or sufficient solutions, I want to wrap this thread with two observations about ways that when we are presented with abnormal situations, we can “not freeze” but rather take the right action, in the moment, when we need to.
@sarahkendzior @nytimes First, I think we can train ourselves how to respond more quickly to evil when we see it. And by evil I mean violence that, because it is outside of the norm, our brains have a hard time processing. Hoping @evolutionarypsy might have concrete ideas.
@sarahkendzior @nytimes @evolutionarypsy (We should also get better at responding to violence that is *within* the norm. Normal violence is hard to respond to because it has become so ubiquitous or accepted, we can no longer see it—it is considered normal. This in part what I think the protesters are helping us unmask.
@sarahkendzior @nytimes @evolutionarypsy Evil is more urgent than normal violence, because it is always on the brink of becoming normalized. Once normalized, it becomes harder to see, and thus harder to fight. But that does not mean we should tolerate normal violence.)
@sarahkendzior @nytimes @evolutionarypsy We train people how to respond in emergencies, be they EMTs or firemen. Some people are naturally better at doing this, but I think we can all become better at knowing how to react with training.
@sarahkendzior @nytimes @evolutionarypsy That white girl who jumped in front of the black boy who was protesting? I’m sure she trained to do it. I’m sure she was prepared to do it. And if not, training is how we get more of that kind of thing. We train, we prepare, we plan, so that when the moment comes, we are ready.
@sarahkendzior @nytimes @evolutionarypsy Second, this is the time to listen to ALL marginal voices. However, I am not saying “all marginal voices matter.” 😉 What is happening right now is about combatting police brutality against the African-American community and we must not dilute that.
@sarahkendzior @nytimes @evolutionarypsy I said above that society usually functions pretty well most of the time because the majority of us are not sociopaths, sadists, extremists, or people who otherwise have a taste for inflicting violence or causing harm.
@sarahkendzior @nytimes @evolutionarypsy However by “functions,” let me be clear. It functions well for the MAJORITY. It does not, has never functioned well for people from marginalized communities, for people who are vulnerable.
@sarahkendzior @nytimes @evolutionarypsy It dawned on me that if I am right, if a certain proportion of our population has a taste for violence, and if they are disproportionately drawn to professions where they can get paid to legitimately exercise that violence (remembering that violence is not only physical)...
@sarahkendzior @nytimes @evolutionarypsy Then who is going to know the most about these people? Who are going to be intimately acquainted with how they work? Who will best recognize them when they see them? BIPOC, LGBTQ, and disabled people. People who as children were abused by them (be they priests or parents).
@sarahkendzior @nytimes @evolutionarypsy This is why we have always been the canaries in the coal mine, the heralds.
@sarahkendzior @nytimes @evolutionarypsy This is why we are the FIRST victims when a fascist regime comes to power.
@sarahkendzior @nytimes @evolutionarypsy This is why we felt an existential threat the day after Trump won, when the right laughed at us for being snowflakes.
@sarahkendzior @nytimes @evolutionarypsy So, support the people in the streets because they cannot fail. Vote like your life depends on it, because it does. Listen to BIPOC, LGBTQ, and disabled people and victims of abuse. And train so you’re ready to react when the time comes.
@sarahkendzior @nytimes @evolutionarypsy Because the only thing we need for democracy to fall and fascism to prevail, besides the evil that is always there among us, besides the majority of us who will freeze when they see it, is a leader who gives them permission. A leader who is one of them.
