Back in the early 1960s, the philosopher Hannah Arendt covered the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the notorious Nazi who oversaw the logistics of transporting millions of Jews and other peoples whom the Nazis considered “undesirable” to concentration camps and their deaths. As Arendt spent time observing and studying the case, she was struck by the fact that Eichmann was “neither perverted nor sadistic.” He was, in a terrifying sense, “normal.” This led Arendt to coin the phrase “the banality [or […]