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Ep 16 - The Path to Mass Evil, with Dr Michael Hardiman
5 Plays8 days ago
Dr Hardiman is a Psychologist, Philosopher, Educator, and Author who has published books on topics such as Childhood trauma, addiction, ideology, and Mass evil. What is evil? Thats a trickier question than you may think. It seems we have always known the word, and have some images of evil doers or evil deeds in mind. However, what is evil goes a tad deeper.. It's a question about the concept of evil, what are we saying when we use that word. How does evil manifest, and can we as individuals do anything to guard against doing evil ourselves? Join us and find out!
To find out more about Dr Hardimans work check out his website here
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Transcript
Intro
Introduction to Philosophacery and the Concept of Evil
00:00:17
Daithi Flannery
Hello and welcome back to Philosophacery. Today we are going to have a discussion about evil. Now this one might be hard to have a bit of crack around, but we'll do our best.
00:00:31
Daithi Flannery
um Before this discussion, I asked people a question, a simple but a kind of a heavy question, and that is, what is evil? And here's what they said. Evil is subjective and highly dependent on context.
00:00:44
Daithi Flannery
Evil is the absence of love Evil is things that make you recoil in fear. Evil is malicious intent to defy human nature and cause egregious, unnecessary suffering.
00:00:58
Daithi Flannery
Evil is the disregard for consequences sacrificed to desire or impulse. It's the gratuitous corruption of nature. Evil is Netanyahu starving children.
00:01:11
Daithi Flannery
It's Sharia Muslims. It's paedophile priests. It's the Irish government. Evil is a matter of there being an absence of caring or empathy, but by an intentional agent an intentional agent that could try to care, but doesn't.
00:01:28
Daithi Flannery
Evil is the active pursuit of misery. Evil is something that wills pain for its own sake. Evil is not absence, it's action. And one friend offered a philosophical reflection, which I've shortened considerably, but which I think is excellent.
00:01:43
Daithi Flannery
Evil is subjective because all concepts such as evil are subjective perspectives on the other. What's evil to you might not be evil to me. Norms in the end are cashed out subjectively, but they work their way into intersubjective norms.
00:01:57
Daithi Flannery
We tend to personify evil because it makes the world easier to understand. So what are we really talking about when we talk about evil? Is it a force in the world like gravity?
00:02:08
Daithi Flannery
Is it something we can capture in a genie's lamp or a Pandora's box? Is it something we can be exercised from by a priest? Or is it something which runs through the heart of every person?
Introducing Dr. Michael Hardiman and His Perspectives on Evil
00:02:21
Daithi Flannery
Now to discuss the topic of evil, we have somebody who has taught a lot about evil doing and how humans manage to do evil on a mass scale. We have psychologist, author, educator, and philosopher, Dr. Michael Hardiman.
00:02:38
Daithi Flannery
How are you, Mike?
00:02:40
michael
Well, hi, Dahi. That is a very good introduction. ah yeah i I'm struck immediately by the variety of the different answers that people give and the ah range of thinking from philosophically looking at it from the point of view of the notion of subjectivity, which of course is very important to give examples of it.
00:03:03
michael
So I suspect really that just to start off that piece that nearly everybody has some comprehension or some idea that they hold about evildoing or even itself as a concept and i often think about and you know from our previous conversations how we frame things tend to influence what we do with them and how we react in the world with them so whatever our understanding or non-understanding of evil doing will affect where we see it and how we see it and i think that's a
00:03:36
michael
One of the things I think that struck me when I began to investigate this subject more thoroughly.
00:03:42
Daithi Flannery
Why? Why did you begin to investigate this, Mike? I mean, most most people run away from evil or at least turn away from it. Maybe that's part of the problem. but But you've leaned into it and you've looked a lot into it. You've written books on it.
00:03:54
Daithi Flannery
Why?
00:03:55
michael
Yeah. Well, that's a really good question. i don't think that my primary interest was actually an evil. My primary interest came from my interest in suffering.
00:04:06
michael
And I think that you the moment that you engage with human suffering, you will you will need to draw a line eventually back to its source. And once you begin to draw a line back to the source and follow a path to the source of human suffering, you begin to engage and to bump up against evildoing.
00:04:26
michael
But most of my career was spent, in fact, focusing on suffering. I mean, my work as a psychotherapist, as a counselor, and that even goes back further, right back into my teenage years.
00:04:37
michael
I, as a young person, i had quite ah I witnessed a lot of suffering as a young person. And I think these formative experiences tend to influence what we end up doing in our lives.
00:04:49
michael
I think James Hillman talks about the soul's code, that there's nearly a code in the human being that you can see in their childhood. It's not not deterministic in the sense that, you know, bad things happen, so whatever, but more or less some people can remember that even as a young person, they had,
00:05:06
michael
and a deep curiosity or passion about something and for lots of different reasons um that i don't need to go into i i had a great empathy and a great care for the problem of suffering and that's what led me into the field of psychology and i spent most of my career in that path and so my concern and my efforts and my productive years were spent and i still have productive years but those the main focus was on
00:05:21
Daithi Flannery
Okay.
00:05:34
michael
What do we do to alleviate suffering, particularly suffering that has happened as children, in formative suffering, trauma, um all the stuff that goes on that anybody born in the 50s and 60s in Ireland will have actually traversed through during the years. They would have witnessed a lot of it because I think the suffering that children went through during those periods was very real.
00:05:58
michael
and So I spent most of my time and my effort then trying to understand how that manifests itself in adult adulthood and what can be done about it. So my my my my focus was very much on the victims. I don't like the word victim. I prefer to use the word casualty.
00:06:15
Daithi Flannery
Mm-hmm.
00:06:16
michael
The casualties of suffering and trauma and how do people recover and how do people flourish and how do people heal. And that was the vast bulk of my career really. in all my early writing my my work my books on that were about that.
00:06:32
michael
That led me then, we'd say then, there was a period of time then that led me onto the subject of addiction and I spent about a decade focusing very much on the power of addiction in the human psyche and how it how it damages people and that then creates the victim's surrounding people who are addicted as well as the addict themselves.
00:06:51
michael
So spent a number of years really focusing on that and did lot of work around that, wrote on that. And then i i think I began to feel, it wasn't that I was stagnating, but I just felt like, okay I can spend a lot of time focusing on the survival, on the healing, on the recovery, but I want to look at what's doing it, what's causing it, where does it come from?
00:07:15
michael
And that brought me then into the field of looking at human evil. And psychology as a as a discipline, I think is weak when it comes to this issue.
00:07:26
michael
And I think the reason it's weak is because I think it has been profoundly impacted by an ideological understanding of human nature that actually gives, I think it tries to bypass evil. And that's why evil is not a subject that people who want to talk too much about.
00:07:42
michael
It doesn't smell right for a lot
Theories of Evil: Privative vs. Dualist
00:07:44
michael
within the academic world because it's because it has such a such a connection to religion.
00:07:46
Daithi Flannery
Yeah.
00:07:50
michael
And so it's like, if we could find other words for it, then you know we find it. and and and And we can talk about Judaism and the prevalent view of evil in a few minutes, but essentially it I think philosophy was a better gateway.
00:08:04
michael
So I went back and studied philosophy and went through the formal training in philosophy over a decade period of a decade and then wrote my PhD on the subject of evil, particularly mass evil, which is because when people think of evil, and this is where we talk about the word evil, people tend to think about monstrous evil, the monstrous, the bad, the really, really horrible, awful. i mean, this is why people love crime thrillers. I mean, people, serial killers, robbing children and
00:08:38
michael
killing them and strangling them and drowning them, burying them in the forest and the way the forces would have to try and get them. And it's a kind of fairytale narrative nearly, which is the bad guys are out there, but the good guys are going to get them. It's that kind of, and it's very deep in our psyche that that that's yeah we see it like that.
00:08:55
michael
But evil is much more complex and most evil, as Hannah Reinh said, is caused by people who never decided whoever to be go to that if thats really grabbed
00:09:08
Daithi Flannery
Yeah. i I've talked to a friend of mine aba about evil and I asked him the same same question. He's studying neuroscience. So he's very much a science-based person.
00:09:21
michael
Yes.
00:09:22
Daithi Flannery
And he immediately said, oh, it's an archaic concept that has no use but pretty much in in today's world.
00:09:27
michael
Yeah.
00:09:29
Daithi Flannery
And that's kind of the the attitude ah that you're describing there.
00:09:31
michael
this
00:09:33
Daithi Flannery
but but you think it has use.
00:09:34
michael
Yes.
00:09:36
Daithi Flannery
our Do you think it has use or do you think it's there's a truth to it? You know what I mean? Because those things are different. That it's useful to describe things like this or...
00:09:43
michael
I think I
00:09:46
michael
I think both.
00:09:47
Daithi Flannery
Both, okay.
00:09:47
michael
I think it has use and I think there is a truth in it, yes.
00:09:51
Daithi Flannery
Okay.
00:09:51
michael
Now, here's the thing, because we're back now to the use of language, but what's the, you know, the does evil refer to a concept that has truth, validity?
00:10:06
michael
does it is it is ah Is it something that we can say means something verifiable that we can say, yeah. This, in some ways, this has really got to do with the way we use language. I can choose to use the word evil or somebody else can use the word wicked.
00:10:22
michael
Nobody is in denial that humans can be very destructive. So when we use the euphemism like destructive or violent or aggressive or whatever, that's all good and fine. But but evil brings something of the morality in into it that's a little bit different.
00:10:40
michael
And the reason evil is not used very much the way people talk about it, is that I think that there's an ideological bias against that. I think when we talk about destructiveness and violence and aggression, I think subconsciously even, we fact that we can feel like we're maybe more in control of it.
00:10:59
michael
We can do something about that. We can treat that. We can you know we can we can fix that. And that comes from the more privation or privative understanding of human evil as the absence of the good.
00:11:12
michael
So if we can see that, then we know that if we put in the good things, then evil will disappear. And that's one of the great fantasies of a lot of modern thinking, that if we put a lot of good things into the world, evil will disappear.
00:11:25
michael
In other words, evil is not real. evil Evil is only the reaction, the absence of the good. that's the That's a primitive theory of evil that grew up through Catholicism, through Christianity, um because the presence of evil in the world...
00:11:44
michael
I don't know whether we're getting to the weeds here on the two different theories of evil that have emerged.
00:11:48
Daithi Flannery
ah Yeah, let let let's tell people the difference between the privative and the dualist theories, yeah.
00:11:48
michael
I don't know whether you're for that. Okay. Generally, when we're looking at whether evil has validity, we ask the question, is real? we we we We can see then, you go back to the history and say, well, how did human thinking evolve around human evil? What were systems of thinking?
00:12:06
michael
So basically, you would go back to the narrative of the fall, the human being, Adam and Eve, the metaphor of that, but particularly in the West,
00:12:20
michael
fundamentally our way of framing issues of good and evil come through the Christian tradition, which has a secular version, which was embraced through the Enlightenment.
00:12:31
michael
And the the difficulty that was facing the theologians and the thinkers of that time was that it became very, very difficult to justify the level of evil that existed in the world if it had been created by benevolent, omnipotent, good, loving creator.
00:12:49
michael
so this this produced a tremendously difficult intellectual puzzle for the people who wanted to hold on to the fundamental piece that god created the world and created male female created the animals created all the rest of that and that god loves that this is his creation and that we are his children and he loves us and he's the ultimate of beauty of creativity of intelligence is all bound up in the divine You say, right, if that your fundamental ground being is the divine, which is benevolent and good omniscient, how then do we explain the levels of suffering and pain and tragedy and destruction that's in the world?
00:13:29
michael
So that's a terribly difficult philosophical problem. You've got square that away somewhere. So st Augustine would have been the one that really more than anybody fought with this and came up with a solution.
00:13:43
michael
It took another 1,200 years after that for Leibniz to call this this this argument theodicy. And theodicy is the is is the the system by which you justify the existence of God in the face of evil.
00:13:59
michael
And so what Augustine did, he produced quite a neat solution here, which ah which I don't think works, but his neat solution was that evil is simply the privation of the good.
00:14:11
michael
You cannot have evil without good. And it's the corruption of the good that is the definition of evil. That's the privative view. It's the privation of the good. And the best metaphor used for explaining that is the notion of light and darkness.
00:14:27
michael
So we say, and when we think about goodness and evil and good, then people think the light and the darkness. And that kind of metaphor is used in songs, in prayer, and you know and even in the creation myth, the darkness hovered over and the deep. And it's all around. Darkness is all around.
00:14:44
michael
But when you actually think about this, and the reason why that metaphor is used is that light has substance. Light has, you cannot get light without substance.
00:14:55
michael
Sunlight is the nuclear explosions or whatever in and the sun. When you light a candle, you're burning the wax. it It's energy. It is a positive energy that exists, and it exists through the combustion of the atoms and molecules. I'm not a scientist, but that's, you know I mean.
00:15:13
michael
And that's light. When you blow out the light, you have darkness. Darkness has no substance. There is no substance called darkness. So this is the metaphor that helps people to understand a privy ah privation view or the privative theory of evil is that evil is simply the absence of the good.
00:15:31
michael
And once we hold on to that, that means that the ground of all being is the good. this was And this solved the theodicy problem.
00:15:43
michael
The dualist view, so the dualist view said, nah, evil is way too powerful than that.
00:15:43
Daithi Flannery
And the idea...
00:15:51
michael
And so they came up with, the based on the the Eastern philosopher Mani, the Manichian heresy, which is that there's two worlds.
00:16:01
michael
There's a good world and there's an evil world. And the Manichaeans thought that the evil world belong in the flesh because and that the good world belong in the spirit. So anyway, anyway they so asceticism and all the rest of that became part of that. But but fundamentally, as concept, what they were saying was, no, there's two worlds. There's a good world and there's an evil world and evil is real. And so that began the notion of dualism.
00:16:25
michael
And so certain theologians then took that and took that on board and went back to the the the story of the fall. And the fall meant that evil entered the world and evil was real. It wasn't just the absence of the good now because and therefore human beings who were born with original sin. There was a fundamental flaw in human nature now that was not just the absence of good, but a disposition or a predisposition to sin.
00:16:54
michael
So this is where all of the sacraments then have to be created. They have to create a whole kind of methods and and systems in order to save the human being. So the salvation doctrine, redemption, all of that, from a religious point of view, came into the world. And that's a huge path in Christendom.
00:17:11
michael
But all of this changed then during the Enlightenment when Max Weber and his pals demystified the world and Nietzsche told us that God was dead. was a gradual diminution of the power of Christianity as an explanatory system.
00:17:26
michael
So we're left then. Well then, okay, what do we do with human evil then if this is simply the situation? so then But the two views still existed, the privative view and the dualist view,
00:17:38
michael
came and took on secular clothes.
Historical and Metaphorical Interpretations of Evil
00:17:41
michael
They are now dressed up in a secular clothes and the the high priest of the privac of view was our old friend Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the Romantic, the noble savage.
00:17:52
michael
This notion that in this ideal, there was an idyllic world and only until until the Enlightenment rationalism and science and all of that stuff just ruined it all for everybody.
00:17:57
Daithi Flannery
Thank you.
00:18:04
michael
private property and people became greedy and selfish and horrible and all the rest of that. fundamentally, human beings are good. And John Stuart Mill and utilitarians came on board as well. And the Enlightenment had it. And this was the Renaissance and the Enlightenment were periods of enormous positivity and optimism about human beings.
00:18:27
michael
So that has affected every single strand of modern Western civilization. That thinking, that fundamental core thing, it's in education, it's in psychology, it's in therapy, it's in and in our system, that we don't want to think there's something, anything really fundamentally wrong with a human being that can't simply be fixed by social change.
00:18:49
michael
The privative view of human evil leads us into social engineering and social construction.
00:18:56
Daithi Flannery
Okay.
00:18:56
michael
Alongside this then, we had Hobbes, Tooth and Claw, we had people who said, no, it's it's not that simple. And then you had Freud,
00:19:08
michael
came along then and and his understanding, which was that man is beer is a very civilized animal, essentially. We have developed capacities for goodness, but we are still aggressive and narcissistic and and fierce.
00:19:23
michael
And his later work, Civilization and His Discontents, that's it that civilization is a problem for the human animal. we will find that we have instincts that are constantly destructive.
00:19:36
michael
They call this the death instinct. So, and then evolutionary psychology came along on top of that. So evolutionary psychology in the 70s and 80s, maybe 80s and 90s, evolutionary psychology was gaining ground in the academy because it made a lot of sense, which was that human beings are evolved animals with massive possibilities and potential for destruction and violence and that our human history is really good proof for that we're the only animal species that slaughters millions of its own species and and and can and can for all kinds of weird reasons do terrible harm and suffering so
00:20:16
michael
The dualist view, so you've got this psychoanalytic aspect of the dualist view, which is that the human beings, these are called conflict theories of evil, that human being is in a conflict between good and evil. Every human being has a conflict within themselves because they have impulses that lead them into it.
00:20:34
michael
And they're real impulses and they exist. And they're not simply just because you were poor or just because you got hurt or whatever. You have them. They're there. And they're a heritage of your animal ancestry.
00:20:46
michael
So Freud brought that to bear and that and also the invention of the unconscious and understanding. It's interesting, just before we talked just before we started, we were talking about Jonathan Hyatt's idea of freedom.
00:20:59
michael
i don't know whether, you know, and the notion of, you know, we're actually reason, is it's essentially where but you were you talk a little bit about that, though you were you brought that up there.
00:21:09
Daithi Flannery
Okay, yeah, it's ah it's it's it's the notion the notion of free will, you know, and it it is a big topic, I guess, in philosophy, whether we do have free will or not.
00:21:10
michael
Tell me.
00:21:18
Daithi Flannery
um
00:21:19
michael
so
00:21:19
Daithi Flannery
And the the way I've settled on this in my own thinking is I use the metaphor of Jonathan Haidt when he talks about our capability for reason but above our kind of animal instincts.
00:21:33
Daithi Flannery
And he talks about the rider and the elephant, right? so that the human animal is is like an elephant, you know, and it moves through the world with a lot of power, with not a lot of foresight, with not a lot of intuition, because it doesn't have language, it doesn't think rationally.
00:21:53
Daithi Flannery
But then we can we can take that rational human being and we can see them as the rider upon the elephant. So then the rider upon the elephant, you you never have full control over the elephant. I mean, it is an elephant after all.
00:22:08
Daithi Flannery
um So it's going to move through the world. But what you can do is you you can get better at soothing the elephant. You can get better at directing the elephant.
00:22:21
Daithi Flannery
And for me, that's where free will lies in recognizing that we are rider on an elephant. So paradoxically, the first step to realizing that we have free will is realizing that we don't have free will, that we are an animal and that we have to somehow take control and be better riders upon the elephant.
00:22:47
Daithi Flannery
And in that way, we increase our will, our free will and our agency in the world. So that's how I like to see Jonathan Heights rider on the elephant.
00:22:55
michael
Yeah.
00:22:56
Daithi Flannery
I think it explains it well.
00:22:56
michael
Yes, yes, yes. So in some ways, it's ah it's a very useful sort of confirmation of of a dualist understanding of human evil. So whichever one of those we accept. Now, there there are other sort of grades in between, so but we we don't need to get into the weeds on that. We can say that fundamentally, these are two understandings.
00:23:16
michael
That's going to drive how we understand how we go at the problem of human evil. That's the piece. And so that would have been my first foray into deepening understanding of human evil, which takes you into, and you look at the people who, you look at people who have before us, the the the right a lot of ah lot of the issues around evil were not actually approached within the academy. They were approached in literature. Joseph Conrad, The Heart of Darkness, Shakespeare's Iago, you know, Bobby Dick.
00:23:49
michael
These are, you know, and then, of course, the great the great moral philosopher is Dostoevsky. and his his focus there. If you want to get a good understanding of human evil in terms of a theory of evil, then Brodus Karamazov pits the two together in the most wonderful way, and and then crime and punishment, of course, as well. so So there's an enormous and and rich source of understanding of evil if without having to go into the field psychology at all, just by reading some of this.
00:24:21
Daithi Flannery
Mm-hmm.
00:24:22
michael
And I can remember Reading The Lord of the Flies. There were two books when I was 16 years of age that have really touched me in relation to the subject. And it's so strange, this whole thing with Hillman's thing about the soul's code, that I came back 40 years later to revisit this in a different way.
00:24:38
michael
the Lord of the Flies, the notion that and you know turning away from this utopian view of the beautiful island and actually the really messy, horrible parts of human nature showing themselves.
00:24:50
michael
instead of the boy's own version, which I thought was really, and the other one that I read was All Quiet on the Western Front. And All Quiet on the Western Front really touched me because I can remember very clearly, and this goes back to the, because we'll be talking about ideology a little while, and the role ideology plays in evil.
00:25:10
michael
When the main character carries his friend back, and his friend dies and he carries him for miles and he dies, and then he's on furlough and he goes back This is two years. He's two years into the war and he goes back to his village and the schoolmaster is shouting the same ideological slogans to the students, getting them ready to get tugged out, to dress up, to go to the f front. to go to the front And it's just so poignant the way it's written. And I can remember identifying with this young man, even though I was only 16, he was probably, but they get the character it was probably about 19, I'd say, 1920, having seen the absolute horror of what this person was screaming at them as ideologically pure.
00:25:53
michael
So it's, it lay there dormant for a long time and then it then it emerged and i started studying ideology and the relationship between evil and ideology so yeah so the dualist understanding the uh privative understanding you probably can guess already which way i'm actually going on this one uh i so for me evil is real it's a positive force the people who hold on to this is one guy and nozick he's a moral philosopher and he talks about it in mathematical terms he said if you think about positive and negative
00:25:55
Daithi Flannery
Yeah.
00:26:25
michael
The primitive view is you look at the X and Y axis and there's a zero and from zero up to the top is all good. So you can't get even zero is the is the even is there in the zero, but it doesn't go down to the negative.
00:26:41
michael
In other words, when he says it does, evil is a positive force of negativity in the world and that exists. And I think that that model and the person I could quote, I'm going to read a quotation because I think i agree, if that's all right.
00:26:56
michael
and
00:26:56
Daithi Flannery
Absolutely. Yeah.
00:26:57
michael
Because there's one from Solzhenitsyn. And if you want to talk about somebody who might understand something about human evil, I think Solzhenitsyn is a good man because oftentimes the buzzword now is lived experience, you know.
00:27:10
Daithi Flannery
yeah
00:27:10
michael
So if you want to talk about somebody who understands the lived experience of of of evil, Solzhenitsyn is a very good source for that. But he says, the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart.
00:27:29
michael
Even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains an uprooted small corner of evil.
00:27:40
Daithi Flannery
I hear yin and yang in that.
00:27:42
michael
Absolutely. Yeah. So you're not demonizing somebody. This is the, and then then the older version of the the demonology would be the demon is the total depravity of man. That was a, I think that was, what's his name?
00:27:56
michael
One of those tea and origins the Geneva guy, you know, very strict Protestant, can't remember, it'll come to mind. um Yeah. The total depravity, the theology of total depravity was a part of strict Protestantism.
00:28:13
michael
No. So I think Solzhenitsyn pictures here. So that's.
00:28:16
Daithi Flannery
Okay. Okay. So, so going forward with, with you're you're not of the privative view.
00:28:19
michael
Yeah. Yeah.
00:28:24
Daithi Flannery
You don't think that evil is simply the absence of good.
00:28:24
michael
No.
00:28:28
michael
No.
00:28:29
Daithi Flannery
Evil is actually something that's in the world. it's It's a force in the world that we have to deal with.
00:28:32
michael
Yeah. Yeah. Yes.
00:28:35
Daithi Flannery
And it's ah it's a force. it's It's a capacity that's inside all of us.
00:28:39
michael
Yeah. Yeah.
00:28:40
Daithi Flannery
Okay. Okay. Okay, do we have a definition that we can use to come back to going forward?
00:28:44
michael
Okay. so this takes us then to the issue of like, what are we actually talking about in terms of what is this? We know it's real. What is it? So we can take one of two views and philosophers usually try to complicate things. You know, they'll use like...
00:29:01
michael
and use language and you think, oh, God, you know, could you not have just said that a bit easier? you not And part of that is just solipsism. It's just showing off, you know, I mean,
00:29:10
Daithi Flannery
Yes, absolutely, yeah
00:29:12
michael
So there's kind of, there's two two views really. One is called a deontological, which actually just means it's got to do with something before anything happens. It's Kantian understanding that it's a capacity within the human being to to do evil, to create evil. it's ah It's almost like intentionality, but it's not related to its consequence.
00:29:34
michael
In other words, it's there, but we don't relate it to any consequential act. We don't define it by its consequence. so that has to do with disposition uh intention rather than consequence the consequences for you focuses on what's the consequence and i am very strongly influenced by this because i think when we're defining evil we need to define it in some kind of practical terms in terms of what does it do what does it mean to do evil and then when you when you go there, you say, right, can you separate that from other types of behavior?
00:30:11
michael
um Is evil in extreme form? And then, of course, it is. This and this is why it's called evil. This is why we use the word to separate it from bad or wrong or illegal.
00:30:22
michael
We need something that can capture or moral language, we need something that can capture a sense of horror after the awfulness of it. And that's why the word evil suits me. So I'm going back to a conservative philosopher who helped me to understand this, the name of John Keeks.
00:30:37
michael
And he defines evil as causing grave, undeserved suffering, harm, loss another human being. So he's defining evil by its consequence.
00:30:50
michael
Kant talks about it in terms of what your intention is and that it's not it's it's if you it's your motivation that defines whether something is evil or not rather than the consequence of it.
00:31:01
michael
Both of these have a lot of value, but I'm staying with a consequentialist view. And so and this is because when I started earlier on talking about suffering, when you draw the line from suffering back into the evildoer, you're looking at the consequence and then you're drawing, you're going back to see what produced it. So it produces something.
00:31:19
michael
So I'm inclined to do evil by what it produces. Evildoing is what produces grave, undeserved harm and suffering. And that harm and suffering doesn't have to be physical, often is.
00:31:30
michael
So an evil act is one that does that. But let's say that you, that's John Keek's view now, he leaves out intentionality.
00:31:42
michael
for lots of different philosophical reasons where I would put in intentionality. I don't think we can talk about human evil without talking about intentionality. Going back to what you were saying da you about free will, you have to intend this at some level, not you know but there has to be a level of intentionality that you're doing this.
00:32:00
michael
Because otherwise, you know if I go out and I'm haven't slept very well and I drive and I'm very tired and and I've been listening to the radio and there's nice music on and I'm just not thinking of what I'm doing. I'm a bit tired and I drive over cyclists and kill him.
00:32:14
michael
Right, I'm responsible for maybe not taking good enough care about my driving, but I did not intend. That is not an evil act insofar as its consequence that consequence is terrible.
00:32:27
michael
um if But if if the if the the guy that's cycling in front of me is my neighbor whose dog is barking all night long and I hate him because I've asked him a hundred times to shut the dog up and I say, let this for a game of cowboys, i don't he's not going to look after the dog, but I'm going to after him and i drive over him.
00:32:44
michael
That's an intentional lack causing grave suffering and harm. One is evil, one is not. so But there is another piece to this puzzle, and that is maybe I can get somebody else to do evil for me.
00:32:58
michael
Maybe I want to evade the responsibility. And this means that I can actually maybe get somebody that I can influence to do an evil act. And Philip Zimbardo, the psychologist that's famous for the Stanford experiments prison experiment, this was his... and This was his contribution to the conversation.
00:33:18
michael
There's lots of things that he's done that are really helpful and understanding. We can get into it later. about how uh how evil operates in the world but one of the things he adds to this is if you if you use your resources to get somebody else to do it on your behalf if you have power this goes back to the relationship between evil and power if you have power over somebody and you can get them to do this then you're as morally responsible for that as if you did yourself so in other words like if you take somebody and if you have a knife and you stab somebody
00:33:50
michael
that knife is an extension of you. go Heidegger love this. He uses the hammer, you know, I mean, the the two becomes an extension of the individual. It's no longer an external thief. So your knife is your weapon, but it's an extension of you.
00:34:04
michael
Well, if you get somebody else to do it, then they have become the extension of you. And then the knife is the extension of them. So if you use your power to get other people to do evil, you are morally responsible for it.
00:34:17
michael
So our definition of evil then is causing grave, undeserved suffering and harm to a human being or using your power resources to get someone else to do it.
00:34:28
michael
That's our definition.
00:34:30
Daithi Flannery
that's That's a good definition.
00:34:30
michael
Now that's not, yes, but it's not fully comprehensive definition.
00:34:34
Daithi Flannery
Yeah.
00:34:35
michael
And that's really important to, I'm not claiming that that's, but I would say that if you use that as your definition of evil, you're probably covering 80% of evil because I don't know what.
00:34:45
Daithi Flannery
I think so. I think so. um The problem I have with trying to prove intention when viewing evil is...
00:34:57
Daithi Flannery
Israel, to be honest with you. Genocide. Genocide is known as the crime of crimes, so we can call it the evil of evils, the crime of crimes.
00:35:04
michael
Yes. yes
00:35:07
Daithi Flannery
To prove that genocide has taken place, because of clever wording back in 1948, I think, it has to be proved that that there is intent to do all the things, the displacement, the murder, the killing of a ah but of a tribe of people or of a of a certain category of people, then that becomes genocide, if you can prove intent.
00:35:34
Daithi Flannery
But in societies that are very legalistic, and America and Israel are the two top legalistic militaries in the world and that they have lawyers embedded in them, then wording can be put together to make everything sound like it's done for a military logic.
00:35:57
Daithi Flannery
And what this does is it avoids that intent.
00:36:02
michael
Mm-hmm.
00:36:02
Daithi Flannery
So while the consequences can be horrific, which they are, but what's going on right now, children starving, children being murdered, as long as the language that comes from the perpetrators is all about military logic, and you can hear this in Putin as well, is all about military logic, then the accusations of evil or genocide can there be avoided?
00:36:31
Daithi Flannery
And that's why I kind of lean into what you're saying about the consequentialist view, that it's probably more apt if we could say, no, that is genocide because of its consequences, not to do with intention.
00:36:42
michael
Yeah.
00:36:45
Daithi Flannery
so So when when looking at what's happening now in Gaza, I do think the consequentialist view of evil and the consequentialist view of genocide should be taken into account.
00:36:55
michael
Yeah.
00:36:57
Daithi Flannery
But i'm sorry for that brief aside, Mike Nowell.
00:36:59
michael
Not at all. No, no, I think it's a very useful. i think it's very good to tease that out a little bit because intention. Proving intention and having intention are two different things.
Intent and Moral Responsibility in Legal Systems
00:37:10
michael
That's fructose. So we could say, right, I don't actually really believe that they're using the legalistic term, but I think deep down there is intention. but But we and may not be able to prove it.
00:37:22
michael
So this is this is where the whole issue of evil, whether we can prove it or not, is a slightly different piece. But i if we stay within just within the comprehension of evil as as as as cause and grave suffering and harm. And the other piece is, if you know that this is going to be the result,
00:37:40
Daithi Flannery
Yes, there intention there's intention and there's foreseeability.
00:37:41
michael
that That's, that's, yeah, yeah.
00:37:45
Daithi Flannery
Those two things, yeah.
00:37:46
michael
yeah And so if you say, well, we're not really intending it, but we know what's going to happen. Where does our, we still have a moral responsibility for what we're doing.
00:37:55
Daithi Flannery
Yes.
00:37:55
michael
Because this is the consequence of our behavior. But they don't want to get too stuck down in that. But anyway, that's the consequence.
00:38:00
Daithi Flannery
Yep.
00:38:01
michael
So, but okay, so for now, and here we've got, right now we have two fundamental different understandings of evil. I'm coming down on the side of the notion that i evil is a is a positive force in the world in the sense that it's a positive negative force in the world.
00:38:16
michael
It's deeply destructive. It lies in the heart of every human being, its potential is. and the potential to to, and it's about causing grave suffering and harm. So when you find grave get grave suffering and harm,
00:38:28
michael
You draw a line. You go back to the source and say, right, what's happening there? Then we get to the roots. Then we get to understanding what's causing evil. And now we're into a very different conversation, which is there's a whole range of possibilities. And this is my own work on study of evil is that once we go there, now we discover there's a whole template. There's a whole menu of all kinds of ways that that comes about.
00:38:56
michael
And the least... in terms of quantity is a really horrible, selfish, narcissistic, violent human being going down the street and murdering somebody.
00:39:11
michael
That's reported on the news and everybody goes, well, that's just, that's a tiny proportion of the evil in the world.
00:39:18
Daithi Flannery
Yeah.
00:39:21
michael
And yet it's the one that everybody, you know, that that that everybody thinks of.
00:39:24
Daithi Flannery
Yeah. Yeah. It's the picture that we get in our head of of ah the serial killer, as you say, but but that's not actually where the most evil is taking place.
00:39:29
michael
but Yeah, morning I am. Not at all. Not at all. Not by, not a minuscule. Miniscule.
00:39:39
Daithi Flannery
somebody who Somebody who writes a lot about this, and you might be able to tell us why they are so important in your thinking and in the study of evil, is Hannah Arendt.
00:39:49
michael
Yes.
00:39:50
Daithi Flannery
but Why is she so important?
00:39:51
michael
Hannah Arendt. Hannah Arendt more than anybody, although she would say that she never developed a theory of evil. um which is, I think, in and of itself interesting. And it's just it's probably true.
00:40:08
michael
i think one of the reviewers of my book, and I don't want this to come across as arrogant, but one of the things that he did say was that he said that I've managed to explicate theory of evil from Arendt's work.
00:40:21
michael
In other words, like that, that, that, that what was her work and I would say it's in her work. I just explicated, just I teased it out a bit and I found these amazing sort of connections that actually add up to what could be called a theory of mass evil, of mass evil.
00:40:40
michael
But Arendt, Arendt is an absolute rock star when it comes to understanding human evil because of, first of all, her life experience.
00:40:52
michael
It's very rare to find somebody who has the kind of combination of qualities. First of all, she was incredibly intelligent and anybody that reads Kant at 14 and enjoys it has to get out more.
00:41:06
michael
But she had an outstanding intellect.
00:41:07
Daithi Flannery
That's what you are.
00:41:11
michael
That's the first thing. She passionate, passionate intellectual person who wrote a PhD on Augustine and love, I think. it's So really, really interesting human being.
00:41:22
michael
But she was a Jew in Germany and she ex she was exposed firsthand. She was arrested in 1933. She escaped by charmingly as the Gestapo officer who couldn't really, and she got out and she went to France.
00:41:37
michael
And there she was arrested again by the Vichy government and was held in an internment camp in Gurs and the it it was it was very chaotic. The Vici government hadn't fully tied itself in with the Gestapo fully.
00:41:51
michael
So there was an opportunity window to get out and herself and about 200 got out of 7000 people. And most of those then three or four weeks later were actually sent to Dachau and eventually ended up in in Ireland, Auschwitz were exterminated.
00:42:06
michael
So she missed So she understood, she saw it happening. And this is her own personal life experience. She went to America. And then she studied and read and became a very profound... She then felt that philosophy, she wouldn't call herself a philosopher for a long time.
00:42:23
michael
She called herself a political theorist, which is true. And then later on life, she reverted back to embracing philosophy as a title for herself. So she had the life experience, the intellectual depth, the philosophical depth and the political noose, we'll say, and brought them all together in understanding how human beings get lost under totalitarianism and how their morality dies.
00:42:54
michael
and that's the origin of totalitarianism.
00:42:54
Daithi Flannery
Okay.
00:42:57
michael
She talks about, because it's about what is happening to the moral person. Morality was considered to be the thing that saved us from human evil. Conscience, cold the code, the moral code, will, which is your capacity for making choices.
00:43:15
michael
These were the things that actually, the power to make choices, to obey the rules of your conscience, which you decode, the Mara Cohen, and she discovered that that model completely collapsed under totalitarianism.
00:43:32
michael
So she, so so that, and what I've done in the work that I've done on on Arendt, because I bring psychology and history, sociology and everything else in into bear on this, I'm not an Arendtian scholar in that sense.
00:43:44
michael
My focus is simply on her understanding of human evil and all the different dynamics that went on to create What would step stand out as the iconic examples of evil in the world, which would be the Stalinist and the Hitlerian regimes, where human life became completely dispensable.
00:44:01
Daithi Flannery
Mm-hmm.
00:44:04
michael
And this is one of her things about she called radical evil. When the human becomes totally disposable. you are now in hell. this This is it. And how can societies, particularly the German society, the Weimarer, the most intelligent, most well-educated, most sophisticated, most industrialized society descend into murder machine?
00:44:31
michael
How does that happen? and how does And so that that's her understanding. and There were all kinds of evils throughout history, as we know, the slaughter of the Templars, you know all right throughout, we can see all these massacres.
00:44:38
Daithi Flannery
Thank
00:44:44
michael
and and you know But the thing about the Holocaust and the hominomer is we have the information, we have the information, we have all, we we understand the dynamics more clearly because we have all the records, it's recent history.
00:44:59
michael
So this can give us a window into, it's not that it's new, slaughtering people goes back to time immemorial, but how human progress, the other thing about progress, if we talk about Rousseau and human progress, again, the privative view is that it would have an implication that human progress will mean we'll get better.
00:45:21
michael
But it doesn't. It just means we'll get better at being bad. And we'll be better at being good.
00:45:25
Daithi Flannery
yeah
00:45:27
michael
The dualist would say, whatever our potentials, however our capacities.
00:45:27
Daithi Flannery
Yeah.
00:45:31
michael
So the chip that runs your washing machine or that actually helps you the machine that keeps you alive when you're on life support or when you're under anesthetic or whatever. I was under an anesthetic last week.
00:45:43
michael
So and sinces I woke up and I thought, wow, because I, you know, I just was looking at the lights and not it wasn't one of those lights.
00:45:44
Daithi Flannery
Oh, lovely.
00:45:51
michael
It wasn't a near-death experience. Now, it's just, i I just went under and came up and this lovely nurse said, your operation is over. And I just thought what an amazingly wonderful thing that we have in this world.
00:46:02
michael
That's human development. That's human positivity. So the glit chips that are actually keeping that alive are also the ones that send in the missile exactly into the apartment that's slaughtering 15 people.
00:46:14
Daithi Flannery
Yeah.
00:46:14
michael
The problem is not with the chip. The problem is not with the progress. The problem is not with the technology. The problem is with the people who are doing it. So progress.
00:46:20
Daithi Flannery
Yes.
00:46:21
michael
so So Arendt understood this. And so she understood that the Holocaust was the natural progression of industrialized murder.
00:46:33
michael
If you're going to industrialize murder, you can do it very
Totalitarianism and Moral Decay: Insights from Arendt and Browning
00:46:37
michael
efficiently. And that's what the Nazis were able to do. But it gives us a window into, yeah.
00:46:40
Daithi Flannery
I think you've Yeah, no, you've, you've mentioned Zygmunt Bauman in your book as well a couple of times. And that's very much his, his ideas as well as in a following on from that.
00:46:47
michael
Yes.
00:46:51
michael
Yeah, he see he says that rationality, and nowhere throughout the whole Holocaust would rationality not have been at work.
00:47:01
Daithi Flannery
Hmm.
00:47:01
michael
It was completely rational once you once you had accepted the fundamental ideological position.
00:47:10
Daithi Flannery
what What then are the types of evil that you've explicated from like Hannah Arendt's work?
00:47:16
michael
Well,
00:47:16
Daithi Flannery
have you You've broken them down.
00:47:18
michael
I have, yeah. i she She does not spend much time and all, actually, talking about what we consider, what we were earlier talking about, the monstrous man that goes down and work.
00:47:29
michael
She didn't give it as much attention at all because she thought that simple, he's just a bloody savage criminal, primitive, bad-minded. whatever, murderous individual.
00:47:42
michael
We don't have much problem understanding that. That's straightforward. What she was more interested in is people who are not like that, who are engaging in evildoing.
00:47:53
michael
So there are two enormous strands in her thinking. The one that she got most hell for was her development of the concept of the banality of evil.
00:48:04
michael
This was her study of Adolf Eichmann at the Eichmann trial. And she lost friends and people just ah really, they called her a self-hating Jew. I mean, it really, really if it created a storm of certain form, which I can't use on the podcast, but under'm a certain kind of a storm.
00:48:23
Daithi Flannery
Fire away, Mike. Fire away. It's that kind of podcast.
00:48:25
michael
A shit storm.
00:48:27
Daithi Flannery
yeah yeah All right.
00:48:29
michael
Oh my God, yeah, they hated it. When she analysed Eichmann at his trial in Jerusalem, the Mossad and ah sad captured him from Argentina in 1960 and brought him for a trial in Jerusalem, and she actually objected to that.
00:48:33
Daithi Flannery
Yeah. Mm-hmm.
00:48:46
michael
She thought he shouldn't have been brought to Jerusalem. She saw that as a show trial. She thought he should have been brought through fought before the Court of Human Rights in... European criminal court in Germany.
00:48:59
michael
But that aside, anyway, she was asked to cover the trial. And when she saw Eichmann, now a lot of people kind of think that she saw Eichmann and then she made up this notion of the banality of the evil. That's actually not true.
00:49:12
michael
She understood this concept of what she called the banality of evil much earlier on when she was writing origin of tar totalitarianism, where she saw that the ordinary German people who were engaging and collaborating under the the Nazi regime at all levels of society were collaborating with the murder machine.
00:49:32
michael
She saw the be what you call a desk murderers, and the the people who were engaging all that. and But Eichmann became for her the best prototype of that. That's exactly his defense. His defense is I never kid anybody.
00:49:48
michael
I was just doing my job. I was a kind of an advanced administrator. i was asked to administrate this. I was doing my duty to the Führer. And of course, Eichmann, for those who are not familiar with him, if you would think about the number of people you're involved in murdering, would be the most evil human that ever walked the planet because he's directly responsible for organizing the transportation, which was extremely difficult to do, a very complicated job. but And he was fully and totally immersed in doing it, indeed, very well.
00:50:17
michael
to transport all of the European Jews to the dead camps in Auschwitz. and So Eichmann presented himself as this bureaucrat, as this unthinking bureaucrat, and she says about him, when she saw him, she could see nothing monstrous about him, nothing particularly idealistic about him, nothing fanatical about him.
00:50:40
michael
Now, she was wrong about Eichmann. Eichmann was an absolute zealot, a Nazi zealot, but he hid it very, very well. And so the criticism that people make about Arendt was that she made all this up about Eichmann. It's not fair.
00:50:54
michael
She was fooled by his narrative, but because he was representing a form of evil that she called the banality of evil,
00:51:04
michael
because there were certain things she was not aware of. Later on, there's another book called The Diary of the Iquem before Jerusalem by Bethany Stagnett, which was the and that was based on the tapes and the research in Argentina where he met with all the other Nazis and they had recordings of his stuff. And it was clear that he was an absolute dying one Nazi.
00:51:28
michael
Arendt might say he was only showing off. That's that's what she might say, and that he wanted to pretend that he was a zealot, but he wasn't really. He had been a kind of a salesman for his father's, like or a friend of his father gave him a job as a traveling salesman.
00:51:40
michael
And then when he was in in in in, he started working for Mercedes car company, I think, and then tried his hand at rabbit farming in Argentina. And and when when you look at a photograph of Heitman, you know, in in the later years, you think he just looks so harmless.
00:51:55
michael
So your picture of this terrible... ideologically driven Nazi just doesn't fit. So in her study of of of of Eichmann, she saw that one of the fundamental attributes of his was thoughtlessness, that he never thought what he was doing. He never thought through the implications of what he was doing.
00:52:18
michael
So she and But she held him responsible for that, because it's not like he wasn't reasonably intelligent, but he refused to think. he did not That's the whole thing. There's no none so blind as those who will not see.
00:52:31
michael
So she saw that it soothed him suited him to remain thoughtless about what he was doing and not take responsibility for it.
00:52:32
Daithi Flannery
And and
00:52:40
michael
And so...
00:52:41
Daithi Flannery
what do you mean by not thinking there, Mike?
00:52:41
michael
so
00:52:43
Daithi Flannery
Because, because we're not all thinking all the time. What's this thoughtlessness?
00:52:48
michael
Yeah, this is interesting because Arendt has a particular understanding of what thinking is, and she believes that that thinking has a very strong connection to our morality, which she is using thinking in a Socratic form. She was, of course, deeply philosophical and very, very, she was real fan of Socrates, I think, you know.
00:53:07
michael
And Socrates used to talk about the two-in-one conversation, the conversation with yourself. This is the self-reflection on what you're doing. Whereas you can see thinking in terms of problem solving, which is a slightly different thing.
00:53:23
michael
If you look at thinking as a problem solving, you devote your cognitive apparatus to solving the problem. You're not thinking up with the implications of how you're solving it. You're thinking of solving the problem. So she makes this and distinction. and And one of the most fascinating and horrifying descriptions of this is in Christopher Browning's book, Ordinary Men.
00:53:47
michael
Christopher Browning went back and interviewed the Hamburg Order Police who were sent to support the Eidsat Skoppen in Czechoslovakia and in Poland. in poland and This was a ah group of order police. So these these would would be kind of traffic wardens. that they They were older than the other soldiers. They were kind of traffic warden types.
00:54:09
michael
Order police, that's the name. was a battalion of them in Germany in Hamburg, which was the least anti-Semitic city in Germany at the time. So that 500, they were sent in into Czechoslovakia.
00:54:24
michael
And their first job was to slaughter all the Jews in a village called Yosef Rao. And Christopher Browning went back and interviewed them afterwards about how how this worked and how it happened.
00:54:38
michael
And from his view, he could see that some of them were very unwilling to do it. They were given the choice. They didn't have to do it.
00:54:48
michael
But most of them said we will do it, but they did it out of loyalty to each other. They did it, they hated it, they vomited, they cried, they were deeply, deeply upset. And they came back and the commanding officer gave them more whiskey or vodka, not whiskey actually, they didn't do them vodka until they got furloughed into Russia, but anyway.
00:55:11
michael
and Here was a picture that Christopher Browning began to understand something about what Arendt had been talking about, about thoughtlessness, about not, you know, and he went on then to study that further.
00:55:23
michael
And he discovered the the dialogue or the correspondence between the engineers in Germany who were designing the carbon monoxide vans to exterminate in the euthanasia program the germans the nazis practiced the u they were trying to figure out how to gas the jews but they didn't know how to do it very well they wanted to get an efficient in form so they thought carbon monoxide might be way to do it so in order to do that they created these vans and they had set up the euthanasia program so the engineers were talking were talking to each other about how to work the vans how how to design them
00:56:02
michael
So all of their communication with each other were about the valves, the air inlets, the sluices, because obviously there are quite a few seemingly, there's quite complex business here because once all the people are in the van, you close the door and they're all dead, you have to take them out and you have to clean the van and you don't want the next group of people to actually know that that you're going to die in this van. So the euphemisms of fluids and whatever, that's like vomit and feces and urine and all of They don't use any... so again here's a moral distance from the actual reality of what you're doing they're focusing on the technical things so arent would see this as this is thoughtlessness because even though you're using your intelligence and these people were highly intelligent they were the engineering class they're using their cognitive apparatus to think how to solve the problem so that's one form of thinking instrumental thinking
00:56:56
michael
But reflective thinking is and different element, which is when you're having the conversation with yourself about the meaning of what you're doing. So when Arendt talks about thoughtlessness, she does not mean that you're not intelligent and it doesn't mean that you don't think.
00:57:12
michael
It means you don't think about the meaning of what you're doing. That's the bit. So she's gotten a lot of and criticism because of this word, thoughtlessness, because people don't tease out this.
00:57:25
michael
Now, ironically, she doesn't really tease it out either. I tease it out in the work I'm doing in relation to figuring out what does she mean because highly, and she does say this, highly intelligent people can be thoughtless.
00:57:37
michael
and She does understand it, but she doesn't tease it out maybe clearly enough to make that distinction. And that allowed her work to be open to this kind of criticism because as it turns out, Eidman wasn't really that thoughtless.
00:57:50
michael
He knew what he was doing, but he hid it. But there were so many others who, like those engineers. When they went home at night, there i remember writing a paragraph once about this, and and i remember writing a PhD, and my or when I was thinking of turning the work I was doing into its book my supervisor talking to Felix in the philosophy department, and he said, it doesn't really work, but it doesn't fit. But I wrote a paragraph, a kind of a thought experiment, about Hans going home to his wife, all worried, Gertrude, and she's giving him a cup tea and soothing his brow because there's a problem with parts
00:58:23
michael
that One of the suppliers, have he's working in them in in the machine shop, technical, whatever, and the parts haven't arrived and the Gestapo have ordered certain things and we don't have them and he's worried about it and he doesn't know what to do and he rings rings them up the next morning and then he comes home the next day and he's much relieved because they sent a courier with the parts.
00:58:43
michael
So everything is fine because the guillotines are going to be ready for delivery.
00:58:48
Daithi Flannery
Yeah, ah yeah that that's that yeah that's ah that definitely paints a picture. like, everything's going to be fine. What?
00:58:56
michael
Yeah.
00:58:56
Daithi Flannery
But that it's it' it's it's like my mind, it's very strange because we're talking about the Holocaust here, which is very real, very, as you were saying, a very traumatic part of our history.
00:59:11
Daithi Flannery
But now that Holocaust seems to have become part of an ideology that's justifying something very similar. um When Arendt went to Eichmann in Jerusalem to the trial at that time, a lot say that Israel was nation building at the time and there were they were kind of myth building as well to build their nations.
00:59:35
Daithi Flannery
So they wanted Eichmann up there as the epitome of evil, as this kind of demonic evil that's the that the Jewish people and the survivors of the Holocaust had had ah survived.
00:59:43
michael
Mm-hmm.
00:59:50
Daithi Flannery
And so that they they really wanted this demonic picture almost as a justification of what they were doing themselves, even at that time with the Nakba and things like this coming up.
01:00:03
Daithi Flannery
um
01:00:04
Daithi Flannery
how how do we stop or is it possible or or or what takes place that that that's something like the Holocaust, that that we can be so studious and study it and how did this come about, but then that can be used in a weird way as an ideological basis to do something very similar.
01:00:26
Daithi Flannery
And that thoughtlessness comes into play in that because I imagine now that there's soldiers in Israel who are, who have this thoughtless attitude now, who are going forward, oh, I have to do this, we have to clear this area, such and such a thing, and they're just not talking thinking about the the consequences of the starving children, etc.
01:00:51
Daithi Flannery
Do you have anything to say about that, Mike? You know you know the kind of slight......
01:00:55
michael
Well, I do. I do. Because it's whether we talk about Israel or whether we talk about Rwanda or whether we talk about Pol Pot or whether we talk about Stalin or Mao or any of the the vast sort of experiences of destroying innocents, destroying innocent people, killing people, causing... And you're so right to remind us that we're talking about the Holocaust.
01:01:17
michael
When we talk about it, we can become it becomes it can become an abstraction. And that's why I always keep coming back to this thing about suffering. The end point of what we're we're talking about here is actually suffering.
01:01:30
michael
That's the piece. And I just want to, you know, and because even though I'm talking about it, it does not mean I would not have spent years of my life trying to get to do something with this without having a deep passion and empathy.
01:01:31
Daithi Flannery
Yeah. yeah
01:01:42
michael
for for for for what's happening in the world and because i can speak so freely about it it doesn't mean it doesn't affect me i mean i can remember when i started doing this doing the study remember being up in the phd room in the university And I was reading the accounts of the nurses who were sent to the east to euthanize the other soldiers, the young soldiers that are wounded on the front because Hitler couldn't feed them. So they send these nurses. And then the photographs of the secretaries going to work in Auschwitz, the young secretaries, the 20, 21 year olds, the smiling photographs of them dancing outside Auschwitz and having fun. and there
01:02:20
michael
You're there and you're embedded in this. And you might have read, we'll say, the slaughter of Baba Yar outside Kiev, which is the most, to read the description of that and not get sick is not easy.
01:02:32
michael
Not easy. Remember, used to have to come out of this mind space and go down and have a cup of coffee. And I have a cup of coffee and I see these young people, all these young people. I was the elder lemon, like I was the oldest swinger in town. But you know, and they were all there and like the young lads were laughing.
01:02:48
michael
The young girls were laughing and all that goes on there, you know. And i was thinking, take me back to Germany in 1938, 39, 40.
01:02:59
michael
How many of these would be the secretaries? going to Auschwitz to write the... How many of them would be working in the post office, type in in Germany, in Berlin, typing out the deportation orders.
01:03:12
michael
How many of them would be having fun after work going for drink. So it can kind of mess with cup of coffee, you know, and you're scorn.
01:03:21
Daithi Flannery
yeah yeah yeah no no no that's a problem of evil when you're messing with your coffee and your
01:03:28
michael
yeah yeah so So the the banality of evil is one of the strands and the three elements I picked out on that were one of them is thoughtlessness, the lack of self-reflection on the meaning of what I'm doing.
01:03:42
michael
That kind of thought and Plato of course and his allegory of the cave is very important here because he's thinking his argument is most people don't want to do that.
01:03:52
Daithi Flannery
Yeah. Yeah.
01:03:52
michael
your man leaves the cave and finds that there's another world out there and it's and the cave is just a little <unk> it's it's ah it's a world that people are enslaved into and they think it's real and it's not and they he wants to tell him that they kill him so and as jesus says in the gospel the prophet is not welcome in his own town you know somebody who you know when you're bringing this kind of news to people to make them think So thoughtlessness is not a natural position for a lot of people.
01:04:21
michael
It's uncomfortable. but Now, some of that might be just fear because there's a fear to really question the fundamentals because where do you go? Where do you find and answer that you can ground yourself in? This is where ideology plays a hugely important part.
01:04:36
michael
So that's one piece of that banality puzzle, but obedience is another one. And again, Arendt has a very
01:04:40
Daithi Flannery
Mm-hmm.
01:04:42
michael
powerful argument to make about obedience. And she feels that we should take obedience out of the language off and of adulthood. Because people say she would say, well, you know, the question is not why did you obey? The question is, why did you consent? She says that adults consent. They don't obey. They consent.
01:05:03
michael
You're consenting to the authoritarian system. You've given the validity to this. So when you obey, it's not just now she believes that if you're obeying because you're afraid or because you're under terrible duress,
01:05:17
michael
That has less moral, we'll say, implications for you as a human being than if you're consenting. But most people are consenting. they They're consenting to the validity of the system. They're saying, actually, I'm OK with this.
01:05:33
michael
So a very classic, simple example of that is you're driving up and the traffic light goes red and you stop. Why do you stop? Maybe you're in a hurry. Maybe your needs are there to know.
01:05:45
michael
I'm consenting. The reason why I'm going to get there in a reasonable amount of time is because the other cars aren't breaking the lights on the other side and we'll all be able to do it. We consent to the system because we can see that it has some kind of meaning and validity.
01:05:59
michael
And that's how we've chosen to solve the problem of traffic congestion. And if everybody consents to this, then it will work. So consent can be a good thing, but I'm not obeying the law. I'm not stopping at the traffic light because I'm afraid of getting caught.
01:06:14
michael
I'm stopping at the light because I believe in the system. But this goes back to morality, which is we will not be able to cover morality today because it's too big a subject. And I need to do more thinking about it, to be honest with you, because I am looking at the notion of moral maturity and how does this fit in the question of obedience.
01:06:30
michael
But obedience is another feature of banality because we say that Eichmann would have called this, well, I was obeying the law. I was obeying the rule of the Fuhrer.
01:06:41
michael
And that's what everybody did. We just did what we were told. Now, the Nuremberg defense, that was the Nuremberg defense, said, and the courts afterwards said that is never going to be used as that cannot be used as excuse for criminal or evil behavior again but people do it and the third element of banality so you've got two there tortelessness which is no self-reflection about demeaning what you're doing avoiding the responsibility by doing that by the way secondly giving the responsibility to somebody else and saying well i'm just obeying them rather than that there's a there's a moral choice in obeying
01:07:15
michael
And that's called consent. You're guilty of consent, not obedience. So the third strand in the banality of evil is what he she called. She doesn't tease these out now as much as I do, but they're in her work and they're in IHUILM is rule identification.
01:07:32
michael
I'm just a train driver. I drive trains. Where's your train going? It's going to Auschwitz. Okay. Where's the other train going? It's going to Salt Hill or whatever. I drive trains. The moral...
01:07:45
michael
meaning of what I'm actually doing is outside of the road. The task is not even. There's no driving a train is driving a train. That's a task orientation.
01:07:56
michael
This is where I give the example of the secretaries in Berlin sending out the deportation notices. If you go down to the council council offices today, there are people on a housing list. they're waiting you know They're waiting for a house. The secretaries are there.
01:08:09
michael
The list comes up every day and they say, oh, yeah, there's a house available in Coral Park or wherever that is. And then they look over at the other list and they say, now, Mrs. Nugent, she's been on the list for 100 years.
01:08:21
michael
She's been on the list for for five years.
01:08:24
Daithi Flannery
it's It's likely these days. Yeah, it's likely.
01:08:26
michael
that That fits there. So we'll call her up and we'll tell her we have a house for her. Could she attend? The task is exactly the same as...
01:08:38
michael
What's her name? Gertrude writing out to Mrs. So-and-so and family. Could they please attend to the station? They need to bring their suitcases with them. They need to to for a resettlement.
01:08:50
michael
It's exactly the same task. So if you immerse yourself in the role and just hold that piece to be the moral responsibility, you also escape. So the banality of evil has these three strands, which is obedience, which is role immersion, and which is not thoughtlessness.
01:09:09
michael
The vast majority of the people who are engaged in collaborating with the Holocaust and in the holodomar and in many of the other, operate like that.
01:09:18
Daithi Flannery
Yeah.
01:09:19
michael
But they would never, um and and she's so clear about this, she said they wouldn't have harmed fly. The vast majority of these people would not have harmed a fly. Ended up murdering people because it was their job.
01:09:29
Daithi Flannery
Yeah.
01:09:33
Daithi Flannery
Because it was the job. That was, that's a, That's horrific. and the In the book you use, um it seems so long ago now, you use the example of what was happening at the border in America, where they were separating children from their parents and the trauma and the suffering that that was going to cause in the future.
01:09:49
michael
yeah and i and i deliberately use the same language as the as the holocaust language which was the same thing about you know that you know you got up in the morning you kissed your children you said your prayer because you know i'll probably near the border lot them would be christian and evangelicals they maybe had church to follow in the morning afterward or the after the day after and they had a good sermon about love and christianity and spirituality and being born again and all that and Mum and Dad got up and Dad put on his uniform or whatever, maybe he was a bus driver and maybe Mum's a social worker and they kiss their kids and say, right, they're off to school and then they go to work. And the social worker, she goes down to the office and he goes and he goes and he gets the bus. And when he gets the bus, then he drives down to the cages and bring these children that are crying into the bus.
01:10:36
michael
and he gets them all on and maybe he prays that they'll have a safe journey. As Eichmann did, he was very Eichmann very upset about the fact that people were mistreating the Jews when they were being put on the trains.
01:10:47
michael
He thought, this is very inhumane. and You shouldn't be doing this. There's no need for that. we hope that should be And so you drive the bus up to the holding from the holding pens then into another centre and then the children are taken out and then the doctors and nurses.
01:11:02
michael
They take care and make sure they haven't gone out scarlet fever or some terrible disease that will spread to other people and they check them out and maybe inoculate them or whatever. And then the paperwork goes over to to to to to Randy's wife, you know, and she's there. She's a social worker and she's at a meeting thinking, where are we going to send? Oh, there's a two-year-old there, yeah.
01:11:23
michael
There's family in Chicago about 5,000 miles away or 2,000 miles away. We think that that they look like they're a good fit. You take a three year old and you go and you send them off there. Then you pay that person and that child is traumatized for the rest of their lives. And there's hundreds of children still not even find their parents because of this.
01:11:41
michael
Not one of those people in that situation in their own minds did anything.
01:11:47
Daithi Flannery
No, they just ah followed orders, as they say.
01:11:52
michael
They did what they believed was they they believed this in the system.
01:11:52
Daithi Flannery
But that
01:11:57
Daithi Flannery
that... Arendt faced a lot of criticism afterwards as well because she was kind of accused of victim blaming because she was talking about how how how the Jews seemed to fall into some of these roles too during the Holocaust.
01:12:09
Daithi Flannery
And they seemed to just kind of fall into the the role they were doing and they didn't put up enough resistance. And as she said, a minimum amount of resistance could have saved many, many lives.
01:12:23
Daithi Flannery
Um, and that's not to, to blame the Jews for what's happening, but, or what happened, but, but that resistance is important, you know? and, and when we think about what's happening in America right now,
01:12:37
Daithi Flannery
um I worry about the system over there that there isn't enough resistance. Although, thankfully, we do seem to be seeing pockets of resistance coming up and people that, but there's a lot of this obedience, a lot of this role immersion, people just doing their jobs, following along that, you know, if we if we have a podcast in another 10 years, we might be talking about what the people of America had done five years ago and how did they manage to do it?
01:12:46
michael
yeah
01:12:54
michael
well equity yeah Well, I think we're already talking about
01:13:03
Daithi Flannery
Yeah, yeah.
01:13:04
michael
Because i i think I think the seeds of totalitarianism are already there. I mean, it's in that authoritarian.
01:13:08
Daithi Flannery
yeah
01:13:09
michael
And I don't want to get into the weeds here. I'll tell you why. Not because I don't have strong views on this, but because when someone is listening to this, I want them to be able to evaluate what I'm saying about evil doing.
01:13:22
michael
without having to react to the fact that I might have a particular political position. Because one of the things that happens for people is if they can pigeonhole you as in a particular way, then they can stop listening to what you're saying.
01:13:27
Daithi Flannery
I get
01:13:35
michael
And for me as a communicator, that's something that I really want to avoid.
01:13:36
Daithi Flannery
you. Yes, yes.
01:13:40
michael
which is now I've already shown my hand to some extent in relation to the separation at the border.
01:13:40
Daithi Flannery
Okay.
01:13:43
Daithi Flannery
Yeah.
01:13:44
michael
But I think that's okay so far. I think, you know, that that's, I don't think that would offend somebody who was doing that.
01:13:47
Daithi Flannery
Yeah.
01:13:53
michael
I think that when they would maybe hear that, the might it might just, but what generally happens in the study of ideology, and that we go on to ideology in a moment,
01:13:54
Daithi Flannery
Yeah.
01:14:04
michael
is it hardens the position. This is what's so bloody paradoxical about this is people become hardened in their position when they meet resistance.
01:14:07
Daithi Flannery
Yes.
01:14:11
Daithi Flannery
Yes.
01:14:17
michael
So this is the paradox about how do you help with this?
01:14:17
Daithi Flannery
yes
01:14:19
michael
How do we how do we but deal with that? There are people who are who are very ideologically strong, but the people I'm talking about here are not ideologically strong. They're just ordinary human beings.
01:14:30
michael
This is why this is why i think Christopher Browning called his book Ordinary Men. They were ordinary men. we're all We all have feet of clay and we all follow the rules to some extent because that's a society can't function without people cooperating with each other.
01:14:47
michael
just the very thing that helps our society to function that actually makes it go really badly wrong once the people in power start to guide the system.
01:14:47
Daithi Flannery
Yeah. Hmm.
01:14:57
michael
And this is key. None of what I've said about the banal evildoer is morally wrong in and of itself. There's actually nothing terribly badly wrong about being unreflective.
01:15:12
michael
Half the people in the world are unreflective. If they're living in a civilized society where actually there is a fairly strong moral code about decency and care, then a non-reflective person would be great.
01:15:27
Daithi Flannery
Just muddle along, away you go. Happy days, yeah.
01:15:29
michael
Yeah, you know, obedient people, very important have people that ob obey the rules. We obey the rules.
01:15:35
Daithi Flannery
Yeah.
01:15:36
michael
We obey because otherwise we wouldn't stop at the traffic lights. But if we're not reflective, and this is why Arendt said something very interesting about morality in relation to this.
01:15:39
Daithi Flannery
Yeah.
01:15:47
michael
She said morality stood on its head twice. and the Because when the Nazis took over and the document and and the and and the ideological frame changed and people became collaborators at different levels with the murderous machine that was Nazi Germany,
01:16:06
michael
When the war was over, a great number of them went back to their original morality that they'd let go off and picked up the pieces and everything was fine. And she said that should make us even more afraid, not less afraid, because it means that we're so malleable.
01:16:22
michael
So the banality of evil is not, and that's why she got such trouble because people said evil can never be banal. She was talking about the banality of the evil doer. and the evil that they did is the product of their banality.
01:16:33
Daithi Flannery
yes
01:16:36
michael
So that's what she meant by the banality of evil is that this evil, which is horrific, has been produced by banal evildoers who have just put their energy and time into it.
01:16:38
Daithi Flannery
yeah
01:16:48
michael
But that won't work.
01:16:50
michael
In a society where the fundamentals of the moral code of behavior is decent, banal people
01:17:00
michael
non-thinking, obedient, conscientious workers will do just fine and society will work. The thing that makes the difference is when the society embraces an ideological system which evil has evil as its outcome.
01:17:22
michael
Now the evil may not be its intention, let's go back to our intention, the evil may be the outcome.
01:17:26
Daithi Flannery
Mm-hmm.
01:17:27
michael
In order to reach the ideological goal, we have to end up causing grave suffering and harm and undeserved harm.
01:17:40
michael
cause that so but and So I'm saying that now rather than saying in order for the ideological goal to be met, we have to do evil because nobody would do that. It's it. No, no, no, no, no. no so But you see, if you say, well, we have to do cause grave suffering and harm to a certain number of innocent people, they would say, yeah, you have to do that.
01:18:02
michael
So now.
01:18:03
Daithi Flannery
that big
01:18:05
michael
So therefore, we have reframed. It's a bit like, you know, the mathematical formula, A plus B is equal. And if you just extend out the formula, now you can get at it more. So if you change the word evil and put in what we've defined evil as, then it makes complete sense.
01:18:20
michael
Vladimir Lenin now would be a great example of somebody who would absolutely put his hands up and say, you're absolutely right. There is no question in my mind about it's actually going to take thousands and maybe millions.
01:18:32
michael
We will have to cause grave suffering, undeserved suffering to millions of people for our ideology to work. He knew it.
01:18:43
michael
Hitler knew it. Stalin knew it. Mao knew it. Pol Pot knew it.
01:18:48
Daithi Flannery
And and what about what about the millions what about the millions who who then enacted it?
01:18:48
michael
These are historically.
01:18:52
Daithi Flannery
Because as you said, Eichmann, Hitler, Lenin, they actually probably didn't kill anybody themselves.
01:18:59
michael
Exactly.
01:19:00
Daithi Flannery
so So, yeah, it was the banal it was the banal evildoers.
01:19:00
michael
Eichmann said he never killed anybody. yeah Hitler never killed anybody.
01:19:05
Daithi Flannery
So do they have to understand at some level through an ideology that Millions are going to have to die and do they have to have that kind of accepted at some stage to carry out?
01:19:14
michael
no they no no because no i think that's a really good question the banal evildoer doesn't fully doesn't fully appreciate the importance of the one little piece that he's doing in the bigger picture that's why when the americans forced the villagers outside i'll switch think it was out or was it back or one of the camps to go in and they all knew what was going on in camps this is where
01:19:41
Daithi Flannery
Yeah. Yes.
01:19:43
michael
bauman's moral distance comes in the notion that if you're the further you are distant from the actual doing like i gave you the example of him himmer's himmler's speech at posen the soldiers when they put on a show for him himler went to uh posen um to look at how things were going essentially and the the guys there said look the boss man he's the head of the ss like he's he's the main guy
01:19:53
Daithi Flannery
yes
01:20:08
michael
We need to put on it. We need to show him how it's working. We need to show how effective we are. I mean, it's not fair, really. He's there. you know He's doing his best. He's sending us trainloads of Jews. you know and you know he he needs So we put on a show.
01:20:21
michael
So they put on a show and they gathered 200 and something, 300 people, got them to take off their clothes, get into the ditch. Himmler standing in his great court, massacred them all. Himmler went green.
01:20:34
michael
He was really upset by it. And particularly because his great cut got some brain splashed on him. So he wasn't right for a while afterwards. He came back and had to give him a drink or whatever, i would sit him down whatever. He's shaking his head. He said, this is this is terrible.
01:20:49
michael
we This cannot go on. We have to find a better way to kill these Jews because this is awful. Our soldiers are suffering.
01:20:57
Daithi Flannery
Yeah, that's what was awful. But why, were like, there must have been some move there then that the soldiers' suffering was awful, but the other suffering was fine.
01:21:09
michael
That's the ideological split.
01:21:11
michael
The reason why i'm bringing that up is a lot of the people who collaborated didn't have to face, they didn't get the brain matter on their clothes.
01:21:22
michael
But you couldn't have got the situation that was happening at that time on the scale that was happening unless there were hundreds of thousands of people collaborating thoughtlessly to make this system work from the person in the post office right through But in order for the machinery to turn into an evil doing society, essentially an industrial machine of death, you need you need an ideological system that can convince a certain number of people that this is not only necessary, but it's right.
01:21:22
Daithi Flannery
Hmm.
01:21:57
Daithi Flannery
Yeah.
01:21:58
michael
They become zealots.
01:21:58
Daithi Flannery
Yeah. to to And and and you need you need to have one portion dehumanized.
01:22:01
michael
That's the ideological. Yeah. Yes.
01:22:05
Daithi Flannery
is is is really the key key as well, isn't
01:22:05
michael
Yeah. Yeah, exactly.
Dehumanization and Ideological Control in the Nazi Regime
01:22:07
Daithi Flannery
it?
01:22:07
Daithi Flannery
That you need to dehumanise the other.
01:22:07
michael
Yeah.
01:22:09
Daithi Flannery
so So the bad that you're doing is to the soldiers who have to do this to the non-humans, you know, almost.
01:22:14
michael
Yeah, exactly.
01:22:15
Daithi Flannery
and
01:22:16
michael
So but that's the othering of them, you know, and there's a couple of things that go on there then in terms of, so your ideological zealot will understand morality. See, here's the shift in morality, the moral system that helps human beings not to do this is the value of human life.
01:22:34
michael
mean, when the euthanasia program came in, uh, into Germany and they started to exterminate people who had physically and mentally disabled, They were not able to keep going because the ideological tenet that was still part of the Christian tradition was that life is sacred.
01:22:49
michael
All life is sacred.
01:22:53
michael
And that still lodged in the people. And also there were Germans that were doing it to other Germans. So there was a couple of different reasons. But the main one being was that they did not daily not accept that massacring these people could be a good thing.
01:23:11
michael
So in order for this to work with the Jews, you had to dehumanize them. You had to turn them into something that was not human. So, but because even though the people who were disabled and even though the Goebbels, who was a genius, um did his very best to inoculate the human, but the ordinary people with propaganda to to convince them that because they had this this new dogma or this new tenet, ideological tenet of the life, unworthy of life,
01:23:40
michael
And the beast had a life unworthy of life. And if you could get that across, then it became a logical piece. It became logical to kill them. But it didn't work because the life unworthy of life didn't stick.
01:23:53
michael
But what did stick was the Jews are not human. They're subhuman. So they don't deserve or warrant. They're a virus. there And even if you think about the language, like in Rwanda, the Hutus and the Tutsis, the Tutsis were for the whole year beforehand. And it's ironic that it was the radio that got this, because the same thing happened in Germany, the use of the radio to constantly talking about the Tutsis as cockroaches.
01:24:21
michael
So that's ah that's that's straight out of Goebbels' playbook. The kulaks in Russia, the same. It's OK to starve them because they're kulaks. There's a term used in the UK.
01:24:32
michael
you said
01:24:36
michael
pejorative term to describe them. So once you other the people, you create a schism in the human consciousness where these no longer warrant the care. They don't warrant the empathy and they don't warrant the love and they don't warrant the commitment because they're not us.
01:24:51
michael
So that's one piece of an ideological strand, but there are other pieces to that.
01:24:56
Daithi Flannery
Yeah.
01:24:56
michael
which is, and and this is where the zealots come in and you need a certain cohort of zealots. So um Hitler in Mein Kampf called this the difference between a member and a follower.
01:25:09
michael
He had really no respect for the German people. He thought they were sheep.
01:25:14
michael
His view was we need certain number of members. And once we have the members, the followers will follow. This is the connection sometimes into Nietzsche as well.
01:25:23
Daithi Flannery
Yeah, I was just thinking of them, yeah.
01:25:23
michael
which is unfair because Nietzsche actually would have been horrified about what was happening in Germany.
01:25:25
Daithi Flannery
The herd.
01:25:29
michael
There's no doubt that it's a terrible, terrible misrepresentation by his sister of Nietzsche's understanding of this.
01:25:29
Daithi Flannery
Absolutely.
01:25:36
michael
but so So the ideology, the ideological zealots, they they gain hold of power. They get the propaganda. They know if they have a certain number of of passionate zealots who are willing to kill, willing to do this job.
01:25:54
michael
Once they harness the banal to run the system, you don't need that money. You don't need that money. Maybe 5%. I haven't done any percentage.
01:26:06
michael
But that's all you need. you need and And then, of course, within the camps, for example, Here's the thing with the camps. The Germans were just so clever because they didn't they they only had a certain number of zealots. So what they needed to do in the camps is they needed to get the the criminals, the thugs, the people who everybody thinks are evildoers that I'm talking about today, the bad-minded, vengeful, horrible human beings.
01:26:30
michael
They were prized in the camps. because they knew these criminals don't give a damn about murdering other people, so they were elevated to be the capos. They were given the jobs because they were cruel and they were corrupt.
01:26:44
michael
they made for it So we didn't need a zealot at that point because those people didn't have any ideological commitment to Nazism. They had an absolute commitment to their own survival and they had a huge willingness to be amoral and to murder anybody that got their way. So they were perfect.
01:27:00
michael
So those tools were used. The worst elements of human nature could be selected by the Germans to run the camps. So you didn't need an awful lot of zealots. But for all of that system to work, you needed a huge number of denial,
01:27:14
michael
people who were willing to go along with it because they didn't have to face the consequences.
01:27:21
Daithi Flannery
Mm-hmm.
01:27:21
michael
So when we look at evil in terms of a so society turning towards evildoing, we've got to look at what's the ideological system that's taking place. And Arendt helps us with this because she uses a really interesting, two really interesting things. One, she calls the recipes of ideology, which I thought was really recipes, I think about making a cake, you want a current cake or you want a sponge cake or you want what Christmas cake?
01:27:48
Daithi Flannery
Or a Nazi kick.
01:27:49
michael
Yeah.
01:27:50
Daithi Flannery
Yeah.
01:27:51
michael
Yeah. So if you want, if you want a cake that will make for the pure Aryan race, That cake is going to require ideological pieces. That means you have to get rid of anybody that doesn't fit.
01:28:05
michael
And this was him. Himmler was a bit of a mystic and did stupid stuff going all around the world trying to find this pure Aryan bullshit.
01:28:14
Daithi Flannery
Yeah.
01:28:15
michael
But they bought into it and Hitler bought into it. And this is what they were selling. And they sold this to the Germans, the German populace. But that what that meant was getting to the final solution.
01:28:28
michael
We have got to rid all of the German body politic of this disease. So these human beings were no longer seen as human.
01:28:40
michael
The Zealots were totally committed to that. They were also totally committed to the new, the third Reich, the great 1000 year Reich. Stalin had the same thing, the great international communist regime, which would actually bring which would bring peace on earth.
01:28:58
michael
I mean, Karl Popper talks about this. He said, you know, history tells us that the people who are really committed to heaven on earth to always bring hell.
01:29:06
Daithi Flannery
Yeah. hey yeah
01:29:08
michael
So the ideological strand is too, there's a recipe in the ideology, which is what what what's it made up of? What are the fundamental tenets of it? What is it saying?
01:29:18
michael
And the second thing is, does it have what Arendt calls a murderous alphabet? And the murderous alphabet is another really interesting concept because it's the idea of logic that if you take one piece, will that lead to the next piece?
01:29:34
michael
And will that lead to the A, B, C, D? The logic and what she calls the iron grip of logic takes the place inside your head. Which is you say, right, take something like the pure race.
01:29:45
Daithi Flannery
All right.
01:29:50
michael
We have to get rid of all these people. What do we do with them? Right. Okay. Well, like him, say, this is terribly messy. It's very cruel. We don't want cruel. We're not savages.
01:30:04
michael
The other people were saying, well, we're good people. We're good, decent. Because the thing in they in the speech at Pozen, he said, we have seen tens of corpses, hundreds of corpses, piled up over each other. And we've known this.
01:30:17
michael
And yet, in all of this, we have remained decent. So how do you remain decent and exterminate millions of people? Well, you try to find the most humane way of doing it.
01:30:31
Daithi Flannery
So, but yeah, the the murderous alphabet, I found a really good concept to hold because um it's almost logic works fine, but it depends what what the premise is you begin with.
01:30:42
michael
That's exactly it. And the ideological premise.
01:30:43
Daithi Flannery
So as you mentioned there, yeah. So as you mentioned there, the the premise was ah we're Aryan, Aryans are great.
01:30:51
michael
Yeah.
01:30:51
Daithi Flannery
So then logic will work fine off that.
01:30:54
michael
Yeah.
01:30:54
Daithi Flannery
But what does it result in? I mean, the logic isn't faulty.
01:30:56
michael
Yeah.
01:30:57
Daithi Flannery
It's that initial premise.
01:30:59
michael
Exactly.
01:30:59
Daithi Flannery
ah you mind if i Do you mind if I read that Himmler speech, Mike?
01:31:02
michael
Sure, no problem.
01:31:02
Daithi Flannery
i think it'll give the listeners give the listeners a better idea of what we're talking about.
01:31:03
michael
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Okay, sure.
01:31:07
Daithi Flannery
Unless you want to read it. you want to read it?
01:31:09
michael
I don't have it to hand. You go ahead. Yeah.
01:31:11
Daithi Flannery
Okay. okay Himmler inphius infamously explains. the wealths they possessed we took from them ah gave a strict order which has been carried out by ss urban grouper paul that this wealth will of course be turned over to the reich in its entirety we have taken none of it for ourselves individuals who a erred will be punished in accordance with the ardor given by me at the start threatening that anyone who takes as much as a single mark of this money is a dead man A number of SS men, they are not very many, committed this offence and they shall die.
01:31:47
Daithi Flannery
There will be no mercy. We had the moral right, we had the duty towards our people to destroy this people that wanted to destroy us. But we do not have the right to enrich ourselves by so much as a fur, as a watch, by one mark or even a cigarette or anything else.
01:32:06
Daithi Flannery
All in all, however, we can say that we have carried out this most difficult task in the spirit of love for our people, and we have suffered no harm to our inner being, our soul, our character.
01:32:22
Daithi Flannery
It's frightening. i think
01:32:23
michael
Yeah.
01:32:24
Daithi Flannery
I think that should be plastered all over Israel right now, too. um But I think it is frightening how much ah how he's trying to I was trying to build up how good they are for doing this awful thing.
01:32:38
michael
Yeah.
01:32:39
Daithi Flannery
And it's that murderous alphabet that lets that logic take place.
01:32:42
michael
Exactly.
01:32:42
Daithi Flannery
Hmm.
01:32:43
michael
Yeah. and and And then you see the other piece of the murders alphabet is that once you've started, the other piece then is because when I was thinking about that, I was still thinking about Christopher Browning's story about the Hamburg police that he shows how the first time they did it, they were so upset and sick and comforted each other and whatever.
01:33:07
michael
And then they did it again. And then they made a few changes. They didn't have to talk to them. They didn't have to bring them out individually to shoot them in the head, you know, because they had to show them how to shoot the children.
01:33:19
michael
they They allowed the mothers and children to be held together because they were trying to separate the children from the mothers before murdering them. And that was causing this is something that they sold at the Hamburg police. They were not able to get them to do.
01:33:31
michael
They were not able to get them to take the babies off the mothers. So they said, no, they actually killed mothers and children together.
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in Perpetrators and Moral Accountability
01:33:38
michael
So that sort of eased it bit.
01:33:38
Daithi Flannery
Jeez.
01:33:40
michael
And gradually, but by about two weeks later, they were killing people without a shot, without any compulsion. They just thought it was really tough work and they were really unlucky that they were sent from Hamburg. They could have been doing their traffic warden work in Hamburg and not have to be doing any of this shit, basically.
01:33:59
michael
That's what. And they're comforting each other. So here's the other thing.
01:34:02
Daithi Flannery
at that stage did something At that stage, did something have to have left them? Did some form of humanity have to have left them?
01:34:06
michael
Absolutely. This is called desensitization. There's two things that happen in my understanding of this is desensitization, which is Once you start doing something horrible, it gets easier to do.
01:34:19
michael
If you feel that you have to do when it gets easier. And that's why murderers can become quite ruthless, why terrorists can become quite quite cold-hearted about because they see this now as the their their duty. This is the task. It's horrible.
01:34:32
michael
And they comfort each other in it, and that's it. But the other piece, I think, is very interesting, and that's the notion of sacrifice. And Yuval Harari, yeah, Harari's really interesting in that, in Home of Ace.
01:34:39
Daithi Flannery
Yes, this is a big one.
01:34:43
michael
He tells the story about Don Quixote, the old elderly gentleman who's actually, you know, sort of fighting imaginary monsters and to to gain the hand of of the of the of the beautiful maid or whatever that is, you know.
01:34:58
michael
And it's a fantasy, and he's dreaming about it. But Harari makes this point. He said, imagine if he actually did kill somebody in this path. he would have to believe that he did it for, that there was there was real meaning in it. There had to be meaning in it.
01:35:17
michael
The more you sacrifice for something, the more you have to find meaning in it. So this is part of why the the ideology then can absolutely capture you because you have sacrificed so much for it.
01:35:28
michael
And this is why when we talk about this, and you talk when i if I'm having a conversation with someone who is quite zealous in their, in their, commitment to an ideological position, I know that it's not good for me to push them because they're going to harden their position because it's cost too much.
01:35:47
michael
In economics, this is called sunk cost and the sunk cost fallacy. The sunk cost is when your accountant says you're never getting that money back. And the sunk cost fallacy is I'll put more in and maybe I'll get back.
01:36:00
michael
So the sunk cost fallacy, morally and emotionally, is if you have sacrificed so much,
01:36:00
Daithi Flannery
Yeah. Yeah.
01:36:06
michael
foreign ideology, you better be damn sure that that this ideology is true. And that is so difficult.
01:36:13
Daithi Flannery
yeah
01:36:15
michael
It is so difficult to think. Now, this is what happens with post traumatic stress disorder as well, something that people don't talk about when they talk about post traumatic stress. We think about post-traumatic stress in relation to soldiers. We say it it became the the the go-to phrase in psychology after Vietnam, because then this was where it was really recognized as being this condition.
01:36:36
michael
It had several symptoms of wherever it was. Generally, when it's spoken about, it's the the ex if it's it's the person's exposure to terrible fear and danger, constant exposure to fear and danger.
01:36:49
michael
But there is another form of post-traumatic stress disorder, and that is coming to terms with what you did. that you became a murderer. And that one is one that kills a lot of people. They kill themselves.
01:37:02
michael
And the rent says this about thoughtlessness and the people who killed themselves before they were taken or when they were supposed to do this or fought back or hid the Jews.
Dualistic Views on Evil and Human Rights
01:37:13
michael
And she said, because somewhere and this is the thoughtlessness, like the Socratic two in one, She goes back to Socrates and Socrates has a dialogue with Hippias and Hippias is bit stupid and Socrates is kind of jealous.
01:37:25
michael
He says, you know, when you go home, you just put the legs up and if they had Netflix, he'd be watching Netflix. He wouldn't give a damn. He wouldn't thinking. He says, when I go home, I have to face myself and I have to interrogate myself.
01:37:38
michael
because of that two in one. And what Arendt says is the people who could not live with themselves because they could not live themselves if they were a murderer. They could not live with a murderer who were themselves.
01:37:51
michael
So this is a very deep insight in terms of the power of thinking as a means of helping people to not not to deny the responsibility of what doing.
01:38:04
michael
So we're talking in extremes here, but the banal evildoer, the one who sent in the deportation notice, when that frame of understanding this thing about evil, and I would love, you know, something i was taken I was talking to someone in the philosophy, I would love to have a module on evil for transition year students. Can imagine?
01:38:24
michael
But not a hope in the world if that ever happened.
01:38:28
Daithi Flannery
no no that's because the privative ideas are are so
01:38:29
michael
No.
01:38:32
michael
Yeah, this ah this would be way too disturbing.
01:38:33
Daithi Flannery
prominent yeah
01:38:36
michael
would be way, you know, and and and the thing that's awful about this is it flies in the face of all the research as well.
01:38:36
Daithi Flannery
Yeah.
01:38:41
michael
i was looking at research recently.
01:38:42
Daithi Flannery
Yes.
01:38:43
michael
Many criminals have a real, they've got self-esteem problem. But what people don't realise is their self-esteem is too high.
01:38:57
Daithi Flannery
Oh, please tell me more about this.
01:38:59
michael
Yeah. Unearned high self-esteem is one of the features, particularly of gangbangers in that. The sense of entitlement, the rage, the violence.
01:39:06
Daithi Flannery
okay Yeah.
01:39:08
michael
They have an overvaled overvalued view of what they're able to do and not do, and an overestimate of how much they're entitled to, and a rage when they don't get what they're entitled to, and they take it.
01:39:19
michael
So that's part of their criminality.
01:39:22
Daithi Flannery
OK. Yeah.
01:39:23
michael
so so So this whole Rousseauian utopianism, is it's there.
01:39:23
Daithi Flannery
is it
01:39:29
michael
I see it everywhere. And I think we really need to take stock on that.
01:39:31
Daithi Flannery
yeah
01:39:34
michael
I think we really need to, as a society and in education, we need to stop fooling ourselves. You know, it's just...
01:39:41
Daithi Flannery
But is it like like there there there is there is positive benefits to this kind of primitive ideas and there is a lot of work that society has done and continues to do to kind of ah improve the environments to allow good to flourish.
01:39:55
michael
Hmm?
01:39:58
Daithi Flannery
um and And I definitely agree a lot with that. And there's definitely um an element of of things that happen to people when they're young and they end up growing up and doing bad things.
01:40:08
michael
Yeah.
01:40:09
Daithi Flannery
You know, that there's definitely an element of that.
01:40:09
michael
Yes. But again, it's very interesting. It's very interesting. Most people who have been abused as children do not abuse other people. See, this is what we have to be really careful about, about the language here.
01:40:20
Daithi Flannery
Hmm.
01:40:21
michael
You're absolutely right. Progress. As I said, we progress in two parallel lines. We progress for the good. And of course, ending poverty, all of that. I mean, I'm really positive about all of this and really have huge even like faith maybe in the human condition, in the human possibility, of the human spirit, because it spent my bloody lifetime harnessing that and whatever.
01:40:43
Daithi Flannery
yeah
01:40:44
michael
But denying the notion of human evil as a real thing that needs to be identified and understood is it's it's very dangerous because it allows people, yeah, and ah yeah that's exactly right.
01:40:53
Daithi Flannery
it's an ideology in itself
01:40:58
michael
Because it's a bit like C.S. Lewis, the Christian apologist. He wrote the screw tape letters where the older devil is writing to the younger devil. And one of the bits of advice that he gives him, he says, one of the most important things that you need to realize is the best thing to make sure of is make sure nobody believes you exist.
01:41:16
Daithi Flannery
Yes, yes.
01:41:17
michael
So I would say when you look at the thing about evil, to bring evil back into the conversation about human human, the human condition is not to denigrate the goodness at all, because I'm a dualist.
01:41:32
michael
I absolutely think, but we're not going to improve our I don't think we want to improve our human condition by denying that evil is a very weak thing. And I think part of what's going on in our world, because it's we're looking at the world today and and and the civilized, what we call the civilized world. It's like Mahatma Gandhi was once asked what he thought of Western civilization.
01:41:55
michael
And he said he thought was a good idea.
01:41:58
Daithi Flannery
could be great when it happens yeah have brilliant answer
01:41:59
michael
yeah and that' mean I know that's a bit cynical on my part because actually I have very strong positive views about Western civilization. I really do. I think that, you know, there's so many good things, so much. we You get up in the morning and you're thankful for so much of what's there.
01:42:17
michael
I don't think we have to deny the existence of evil to really and enjoy and and and and and the blessings of ah of all that we have. I mean, even this conversation today is a miracle.
01:42:29
michael
It's an absolute miracle.
01:42:29
Daithi Flannery
It is, yeah.
01:42:29
michael
If you to think, if you were to go back any time and say, well, I'm going to have a two-hour conversation about history and human evil and psychology with Dahi and we're going talk to each other he's going to be a couple of miles away i'm here we'll have that conversation and then he's going to send it up into the sky and the sky gods are going to send it down to everybody on a little box that they can look at wow you know not even not even the roman gods could do all that we're doing
01:42:51
Daithi Flannery
Yeah. yeah Yeah, yeah. No.
01:42:57
Daithi Flannery
No, no, no. Indistinguishable from magic, I think, is what Harari calls it.
01:43:01
michael
absolutely absolutely absolutely yeah absolutely
01:43:04
Daithi Flannery
Yeah, no, it is. And is there a and In the privative view, which, as you say, is prominent and I see as prominent too, it's, we'll just get rid of evil, then everything will be good and we'll all be good and we can all go about day and everything will always be good. But in in the dualist view...
01:43:21
Daithi Flannery
which is the the position you take, it's like there's there's always going to be this battle. There's always going to be this this that this fight.
01:43:29
michael
yeah
01:43:32
Daithi Flannery
We're always going to have to be wary of the rise of this force of evil. It's always awaiting to be burst into the world, I think was one of the quotes you used.
01:43:42
michael
Yes, there's a I read that because I think it's actually a very useful from Roy Boymaster.
01:43:43
Daithi Flannery
Yeah.
01:43:47
michael
He said when evil increases, it does not necessarily mean that the causes of evil have become more powerful or important. Rather, it may mean that the inner controls have become weaker.
01:43:59
michael
Or to put it another way, you do not have to give people reasons to be violent because they already have plenty of reasons. All you have to do is take away their reasons to restrain themselves.
01:44:10
michael
Even a small weakening of self-control might be enough to produce a rise in violence. Evil is always ready and waiting to burst into the world.
01:44:20
michael
So there's One of the things when we look at our ideological position, part is our ah everybody has an ideology. Everybody lives in an ideological frame. There's no doubt about that.
01:44:31
michael
what And this is where the self-reflection comes in. Does my ideology open up an avenue for even to come into my world? Do I am I justifying something? You know, the issue of ideology is a big, big subject, and I'm going to be doing a bit more work on that in time.
01:44:50
michael
um But yeah, so that awareness, self-reflection, this is a Socratic thing that the examined life, you know, he talks about the unexamined life is not worth living.
01:45:02
michael
I think that's a bit harsh, actually, but the unexamined life is great in a society where the power structures are grounded in a moral frame that keeps the sacredness of the human being as its center.
01:45:23
michael
That was something you actually, i saw there, you were questioning it and i've actually it just struck me. You were saying at the end of our interview, you would ask me a question if I had to say something. about human and maybe that's the one because i've never used that sentence quite in those words you know that actually that human life the unexamined life is okay if you live in a world or in a society where the power structures are grounded in a moral frame that elevates the human as the human life has been sacred if you hold that yeah and then when you say human life
01:45:39
Daithi Flannery
Okay, go on.
01:45:55
Daithi Flannery
Because we're unavoidably in an ideology.
01:46:02
michael
as being sacred, then you don't have the room to other the the other.
01:46:08
Daithi Flannery
Hmm.
01:46:08
michael
You don't have the room to take some humans as less worthy of that value than others.
01:46:09
Daithi Flannery
Yeah.
01:46:15
Daithi Flannery
Absolutely.
01:46:16
michael
Yeah.
01:46:17
Daithi Flannery
Absolutely. That's why human rights are so important. And that's why the erosion of human rights at the moment is so dangerous.
01:46:19
michael
Exactly.
01:46:23
michael
Absolutely. And you know, yeah it's very interesting.
01:46:23
Daithi Flannery
And why e even the best people, the the best people who worry about, i often hear them ah and they criticize things that go on and in the rest of the world because you shouldn't do that, you shouldn't do this.
01:46:36
Daithi Flannery
And then it comes to immigrants coming here and suddenly they're okay with them being less human. Suddenly they're okay with their human rights being not that important to because it's suddenly about to cost them something.
01:46:40
michael
who
01:46:46
Daithi Flannery
but But I think that key, it's key what you said there, that humans have rights by way of them being human. That's it. There doesn't need to be any other qualifications.
01:46:55
michael
Yes. And you know what's interesting? Arendt actually, Arendt had a fairly skeptical view of that because what she said was, okay, lovely idea, but who allocates those rights?
01:47:11
Daithi Flannery
Hmm.
01:47:11
michael
in the statelessness, and this is what she was thinking about statelessness, when you're stateless, there's no protective umbrella to give you those rights. And she understood, the Nazis understood this as well. This is why the Nazis, the Nazis had rules about how it treated its citizens.
01:47:29
michael
So the first thing they needed to do when they expelled the Jews into France, when they sent them into France, they renounced their citizenship.
01:47:42
michael
So the German Jews no longer had citizenship. Now, once they had citizenship in Estonia, the people in Estonia, when the Nazis went into Estonia, they had already surrendered Estonia to Stalin in the Ribbentrop Act, whatever that treaty.
01:48:00
michael
So Estonia had lost its identity as a society under Stalin. So when Stalin left and and and and and and and the and the Nazis arrived, there was no state in place. 95% 95% of Estonian Jews were murdered.
01:48:18
michael
In Denmark, Denmark did not relinquish the rights of the Danish Jews And so the Jews who are in Denmark, something like 90% of them survived. Now, the ones that didn't survive were the Jews from other countries who came into Denmark.
01:48:36
michael
They were not Danish citizens. So Arendt is really clear about this. She says, this is a lovely idea that by virtue of being human, you have rights. But she says, where did you get them from and who looks after them? And that's why statelessness is really dangerous.
01:48:51
michael
And any system that starts to denude or discount your right to be somewhere, you see that sometimes in any of the migrant situations now, if you can take away the person's rights under the law of the state,
01:49:06
michael
then it's fair game. that's she she That's right.
01:49:08
Daithi Flannery
They're not a juridical person, as you said.
01:49:11
michael
She called that out. yeah Yeah. Anyway. Okay.
01:49:15
Daithi Flannery
Yeah, that's a that's excellent. so um Okay, I think we'll start heading towards a close here, Mike.
01:49:21
michael
Okay.
01:49:21
Daithi Flannery
yeah Maybe one or two final questions.
01:49:22
michael
Sure.
01:49:24
michael
sure
01:49:24
Daithi Flannery
what are the resources What are the resources necessary to resist authority? And are we cultivating or eroding them today? Authority in the sense of that obedience and role immersion.
01:49:37
michael
authority you see i suppose my concern or my worry today is in relation to our society operating it's less clear what where the authority is coming from i would see that the worry if was to think about this it's it's never it's not the brute authority it's the soft authoritarianism herbert marcusi talks about this the gradual
01:50:01
Daithi Flannery
Yeah.
Therapeutic Culture: Narcissism vs. Community Values
01:50:03
michael
programming of the human being, and this is a Huxley interview as well, the most important thing for the brave new world that Huxley would say is you have to get control of people, but they have to like being controlled.
01:50:18
michael
So it's easier to fight against the the jackboots kicking in your door than the subtle rewards that go in
01:50:18
Daithi Flannery
yeah
01:50:27
michael
into your mind, convincing you that something about the way this is going on is actually good. the convict so so So becoming alert to the forces that, first of all, I would say resistance, resistance to authority.
01:50:43
michael
You can have passive resistance. I do know that passive resistance is very powerful. I mean, the guards are are a really good case in point. I have to say and now, I admired their cunning on this when they got the blue flu.
01:50:57
michael
It's against the law, you know, to strike as a guard, but there's no you're not against the law to actually get sick.
01:50:59
Daithi Flannery
Yeah.
01:51:02
Daithi Flannery
Okay.
01:51:05
Daithi Flannery
Okay.
01:51:07
michael
So thinking, ah, okay, that's passive resistance. That's finding a loophole. Being late.
01:51:13
Daithi Flannery
Okay.
01:51:14
michael
then The Italians were brilliant at this. The Italians... were never very fond of Hitler and particularly the x exportation of the Jewish people to the death camps.
01:51:27
michael
So they constantly messed with it by taking the German bureaucracy, which of course was very highly developed, and turning it against them because they knew the Germans would not move unless they got the stamp of approval from whatever department.
01:51:41
michael
So the letter would come in asking for the deportation of whatever train of Jews and your man would write back, yeah, I said, but you know, the fellow that was supposed to do that, he's on holidays. So would you send or did send it back to the wrong address?
01:51:54
michael
So they said, we've already replied to this, but it went and then they'd reply and saying,
01:51:54
Daithi Flannery
Yeah. Yeah.
01:51:59
michael
But that wasn't the right office. You sent it to the wrong office. So he used to go, the Nazi has to go down to the wrong office, find a letter that never existed anyway and come back and then the other fellas in holidays. And all the time that this was happening, the Jews were escaping out of Italy, you know, into into South America, wherever they were, to get away, basically.
01:52:13
Daithi Flannery
yeah
01:52:15
michael
So... The bureaucracy, so the banal evildoer, potential banal evildoer can still create their own little moment. We're all kind of cowardly. Most people are not brave enough to stand up to the jackboots and get the shit bed out of them and kick to death inside in the Lubyanka or in the, in the, whatever.
01:52:35
michael
We're frightened. We're fearful. we we want to save ourselves. So you have to, you have to think about how do you resist?
01:52:43
Daithi Flannery
but Where can we throw a spanner in the works of the evil ideology?
01:52:45
michael
Yeah, even the smallest thing. And you see the importance, the really important piece of that is that's about holding some of your moral compass still. You know, you're still holding on.
01:52:57
michael
that There aren't very many heroes. You know, there aren't very many.
01:53:01
Daithi Flannery
No.
01:53:01
michael
I mean, I read about the heroes. I read about... And interesting research came across recently about the people who hid the Jews in Berlin. That when they did the study, they went... And there are two characteristics.
01:53:13
michael
One is... The less educators and two, the more religious.
01:53:19
Daithi Flannery
Well, so they had they had they had perhaps an overriding ideology then that was, yeah.
01:53:21
michael
Education is.
01:53:25
michael
That's exactly it. They had they had a they had an ideological tenant that said this is wrong.
01:53:32
Daithi Flannery
Yeah.
01:53:32
michael
And again, as Arendt said, they did not want to live with themselves as being murdered.
01:53:33
Daithi Flannery
Okay.
01:53:37
michael
They saw it.
01:53:37
Daithi Flannery
I get you.
01:53:38
michael
They took risks. How many of us would? I mean, I think most people do this thought experiment, and i I don't see it having much value, to be truly honest. you know Would I have hidden a Jew in my attic or whatever?
01:53:47
Daithi Flannery
Yeah.
01:53:49
michael
Nobody really knows when it comes down to it.
01:53:51
Daithi Flannery
context yeah yeah
01:53:52
michael
Yeah, exactly. So but but in terms of I think one and and this goes back to the or anything about thinking become aware of is there a murderous alphabet in your ideological position?
01:53:55
Daithi Flannery
oh
01:54:04
michael
Is there an open is there a window open there that says to murder somebody for the soul of your country? Is that OK?
01:54:12
Daithi Flannery
yeah
01:54:15
Daithi Flannery
don't Don't just let the elephant trot on through the world. Engage the rider.
01:54:18
michael
Absolutely, yeah.
01:54:20
Daithi Flannery
Engage the rider.
01:54:21
michael
Engage the rider and get to know the elephant.
01:54:21
Daithi Flannery
um
01:54:24
michael
Look for this.
01:54:24
Daithi Flannery
Exactly.
01:54:25
michael
And then that Carol Young's understanding the shadow. This is why the dualist view of evil for me is really, really important.
01:54:29
Daithi Flannery
Hmm.
01:54:32
michael
And I know that I think that within the Catholic frame, right through the generations, they spent far too much talking about the shadow. about the guilt, about the shame, about the badness. They they really did that to the point where people felt horrible about themselves. They felt horrible.
01:54:49
michael
and but and But they were very selective about the things that they thought were part the shadow, like sex and your body and all the rest of that, things that were not at all harmful. But you look and you say, is it is it okay to destroy somebody's livelihood because I don't agree with them?
01:55:08
michael
You know, there's different ways of killing people, the juridical person, moral person. So we have to, we have to, and that is that, that's the piece where we look at our own corner of the world, our own, that's the Solzhenitsyn's argument.
01:55:23
michael
It's the human heart.
01:55:24
Daithi Flannery
yeah
01:55:25
michael
And we all have that capacity. And to what extent are we engaging? To what extent have we bought into a view? do we just dig our do we do we Do we just look at confirmation bias? Going back to the thing about authoritarianism, how do we fight it? It's the soft authoritarianism we have to really careful about.
01:55:47
Daithi Flannery
Yes. Yes. Okay. um Much of modern psychology rests on the privative notion. And you discuss a kind of cult of self-worship, self-love that emerges from this kind of therapeutic culture.
01:56:06
Daithi Flannery
What dangers do you see in the glorification of the self without confronting the darker capacities here?
01:56:12
michael
okay um i think one of the things again about being time-bounded in the 70s and 80s there was a rigidity and there was a very negative it that probably come from the freudian view about quite a negative view of human beings punitive child rearing practices were punitive praise and and and and and support were limited and the idea was you know coming from to old testament uh thinking you know spare the rod spoiled child this created this created generations of people who were deeply hurt and did not have the possibility of
01:56:56
michael
did not have opportunities to really grow a very so a lot of respect for themselves, lot of value and and good self-care. It was not a highly valued ideological piece.
01:57:07
michael
two And this is where we say the modern de birth of modern therapeutic psychology developed. It became, and in all aspects of realized this is a real problem and there's such lovely things happen when we change that.
01:57:21
michael
So the ideological shift was we need to move from repression, punishment, criticism, and we need to move towards affirmation, validation, praise, and then the pendulum swang the whole way across.
01:57:38
michael
During that time also there was very little understanding of narcissism. Narcissism is a is a very serious problem in the world because if because it was there when people didn't understand it. They didn't understand what happens.
01:57:51
michael
That certain people are narcissistic in the sense that that's another that's that's a long conversation so i won't have much time to you sort of go through it.
01:57:58
Daithi Flannery
Yeah.
01:57:59
michael
but Narcissism is the cult when human beings grow and have a distorted relationship with reality whereby their fundamental orientation in life is narcissistic, is self-indulgent, is self-absorption.
01:58:21
michael
So in a society where The child-rearing practices were so punitive and so destructive, it crushed people's spirits. It left them feeling insecure and frightened, who they were, unable to stand up for themselves, and replaced it with the possibility of growing into a better self, which is what therapy was all about, psychotherapy and all that.
01:58:46
michael
The problem with that was, the problem became that it became in and of itself almost and like an an ideological piece. comes from Abraham Maslow's idea of self-actualization. Self-actualization is the notion that your your main purpose and meaning in life is to actualize yourself.
01:59:03
michael
It's a really, really interesting concept, highly individualistic, tends to not be grounded in community and in society. It tends to become you. So you become you know like I'm responsible for my own orgasm kind of thing, you know, and so.
01:59:21
michael
There's something really valuable in this notion. Maslow's idea that the peak, the top of the human development is a self-actualized person. But what he doesn't talk about is who is the person you're going to say to you're going to actualize.
01:59:36
michael
If we think about the template of all different bits and pieces that go to make us up. Now, the postmodernists would disagree with me on this because their notion is there's no such thing there's no essence in the human being. however Let's just call it potentially. Carol Rogers idea of the actualizing your potential.
01:59:53
michael
Becoming a self-actualized person is actualizing your potential. But if we take the dualist understanding of evil, I have the potential for evil. Do I actualize that? So can I be a self-actualized person who is absolute narcissistic con artist who will steal, rob and take whatever I want and punish and abuse anybody that gets in my way?
02:00:18
michael
Of course, that's a self-actualized narcissist. So if we take modern therapy, modern psychotherapy, if we take a psychotherap view sorry psychotherapy view that the cultivation of the self in and of itself for the no with no value banisters, you are going to create monstrous levels of narcissism and self-absorption and self-entitlement.
02:00:47
michael
You're not going to increase happiness Because if you are self-indulgent, if that's all you're about, you lose the capacity for love and intimacy. You love the ability for self-sacrifice and you love you you lose the ability for delaying gratification and discipline. These are hugely important elements of a healthy person.
02:01:10
michael
So while I see an enormous value in the therapeutic world, a lot of therapy doesn't address this issue. And it's the fear and it's grounded in the fear that therapists must never make value judgments about their clients.
02:01:30
michael
They're just codding themselves. That's a fantasy. So
02:01:35
michael
What do I mean? and but so so that so So that therapeutic model, which was absolutely so important in the repair of wounded children growing up in the sixties and seventies and into the eighties, people who were victimized, then it became a kind of a dogma that this is what we have to do for everybody.
02:01:54
michael
So you end up in a situation where you actually indulge. Two things are happening. One, the ground for happiness is shifts into indulging all of your feelings.
02:02:06
michael
And this is happening in parenthood, in education. And the idea that suffering in the sense of pain is not essential to learning, which it is.
02:02:18
michael
And that the most important thing is you have to avoid any pain. If you don't, if you if you like, I mean, there are people who suffer from a physical disease whereby they can't feel pain. They all die young.
02:02:30
michael
Pain is really important because it helps us to understand our relationship with the world. And psychological pain is really important because it helps us to recalibrate our relationship with the world. So the toddler stage of narcissism, ah very useful picture of that is the picture of the toddler in the supermarket aisle where you're standing there and you're looking at this child screaming and crying and banging their head on the floor because there's a chocolate bar they're not allowed to have.
02:02:58
michael
And we we kind of smile at that because we know they're going through this. And and and anybody who has children themselves will know this because they'll have seen it actually happen. It's an incredibly important piece of personal development.
02:03:10
michael
But it's also when you go into the world of the child, this is what I would call an existential crisis. If that child has been loved in a reasonable way,
02:03:22
michael
they will have grown in the early part of their consciousness to believe that they are the center of the world. That was, that actually is really important for their development. It's an omniscient and omnipotence that they have, which is that when they cry,
02:03:37
michael
Mother comes, if they're hungry, mother or their caregiver comes and they're fed. They get the breast, they get cuddled. to get So the there's a profound wiring of a sense of power.
02:03:48
michael
It's incredible the power they feel. They are the center of the universe and they have to be in order to survive. And that's why they cry, they get fed. And they build, and Eric Erickson talks about this, this first huge chapter of life is between trust and distrust.
02:04:02
michael
Do you trust the world to meet your needs? So it's incredibly important. But you are developing. This is what Freud would call the narcissistic stage of human development. You are a narcissist to the last degree or last cell of your body.
02:04:16
michael
You believe the world was created for you. And then you're in the supermarket. And you want the bar of chocolate and you're not going to get it.
02:04:27
michael
And if your parent is Healthy and well, they will insist that you don't get it. Now, you have to recalibrate your connection to the world, and you will rage against that.
02:04:42
michael
And in that rage, you rebuild your relationship with reality, and you begin to realize you're not the center of the world, but you're still okay.
02:04:54
Daithi Flannery
yeah yeah that's that's that's that's a good one um that line i
02:04:58
michael
And that's... and And that's it. And if you don't try if you don't get that over a long period of time, because that happens from the age of about two on,
02:05:09
michael
the terrible twos, but gradually you're recalibrating all the time. You're learning the social rules. You're learning not everything is yours. You learn how to play. You learn how to cooperate. You become part of a community. You learn how to love and gradually learn how to share yourself and how to give and receive.
02:05:24
michael
But if that part of you is broken and you stay in that state, you will never get out of the place where you feel that that you are the center of the universe and you are entitled to anything you want and you take whatever you want.
02:05:37
michael
And people who are like that sometimes get into power.
02:05:42
Daithi Flannery
and have a lot of, and ah shall we say, an orange aura.
02:05:43
michael
And we won't say any more about that.
02:05:46
Daithi Flannery
Let's just leave it there.
02:05:49
michael
You're supposed to let me with that.
02:05:52
Daithi Flannery
They have been tangoed. They have been tangoed.
02:05:54
michael
Well, when you look at Lenin, I look at them, I look at the different leaders that led to Horat. often ho rap
02:06:01
Daithi Flannery
You keep talking about the dead ones. I keep talking
Final Reflections on Personal Vulnerabilities to Evil
02:06:03
Daithi Flannery
about the live ones.
02:06:03
michael
I know, and and when I do so purposefully and intentionally.
02:06:08
Daithi Flannery
I know. I know.
02:06:11
Daithi Flannery
ah Very good. um Okay. Where can people find more of your stuff, Mike? and um You're very interested.
02:06:18
michael
Well, I have a website, which is it's a very sort of, it's a basic website.
02:06:18
Daithi Flannery
It's a very interesting topic.
02:06:22
michael
All my books are available online. The early ones are all about child development. parental alcoholism, children of alcoholic families, trauma, the long-term effects of that.
02:06:34
michael
Then there's healing the hurts of childhood, which are children who have been abused or who suffered. Then there's ones on addiction um and codependency. And then the more recent ones, this the one we're talking today is the main is the main story. This is The Path to Mass Evil, which is it's available online. It's expensive. Rutledge is the publisher, so there's nothing I can do about that.
02:06:58
michael
The other one is Misled, How Ideology Captures Your Mind.
02:06:58
Daithi Flannery
Yeah.
02:07:01
michael
That's available online to download as an e-book, as is the one on authenticity. MichaelHardiman.net.
02:07:08
Daithi Flannery
Excellent. um i mean any final at words of but Any final words of advice for people who want to actively avoid evildoing?
02:07:17
michael
Yeah.
02:07:20
michael
Locate... I to locate your vulnerability to where your vulnerability to evil will be. Some people it's ideological, the more idealistic, the more educated of us.
02:07:27
Daithi Flannery
Wow.
02:07:32
michael
Ideological educators, smart people who really want to do something really nice in the world, really good in the world. They join Colson University.
02:07:45
Daithi Flannery
Okay.
02:07:45
michael
Yeah, later on in life.
02:07:46
Daithi Flannery
Yeah. Yeah. No,
02:07:48
michael
Later on in life, they'll embrace political agendas or whatever, but they're and they have to be really careful that there is not embedded in their ideology murderous alphabet, murderr's house but ah place whereby you will allow cruelty to emerge, to harm or to do away with the notion of the sacredness of the human.
02:07:58
Daithi Flannery
Excellent.
02:08:07
michael
That's one. So that that would be the piece. We all are susceptible to evil doing. The biggest mistake we can make is to think that the evil doing we're not susceptible to is over there because I'm highly unlikely to be someone who go out tomorrow and rob a bank.
02:08:28
michael
I'm much more likely to be someone who's ideologically committed to something that would mean that.
02:08:28
Daithi Flannery
I get you.
02:08:34
michael
Narcissism is the second. but So knowing the shadow, this is the Carl Jung piece. So we we address the possibilities for evil within ourselves. That's our first route.
02:08:46
michael
This does not mean that you don't be politically ah active. Look at the banality of evil doing. Look at the everyday things that we do and think, you know, does this does this add another grain of sand to the the beach of evil?
02:09:00
michael
Or does it take one away?
02:09:01
Daithi Flannery
Okay. Yeah.
02:09:03
michael
doesn't have to, you know, and the thing about that is it does not have to be a morose piece. It doesn't have to be, you know, it doesn't have to be morose and it doesn't have to be, it doesn't have, you don't have be showered with guilt. Guilt is important.
02:09:17
michael
The people who don't feel guilty, like the ones who don't feel pain, the ones who don't feel guilty are psychopaths. You know, we have to feel, ah you know, it's good to feel guilty every now and again. But the church in Ireland made us feel guilty about just being alive.
02:09:30
michael
So we got rid of guilt.
02:09:30
Daithi Flannery
yeah
02:09:31
michael
But that's not the solution.
02:09:33
Daithi Flannery
Yeah. As you said, the pendulum swung too far the other way.
02:09:36
michael
Absolutely. Yeah.
02:09:39
Daithi Flannery
um Okay, the question i ask all my guests at the end, if we were writing a new story about what it is to be human, and you could add one sentence, what would that sentence be?
02:09:52
michael
But it is to be human.
02:09:55
michael
We're the only creature that can have a relationship with themselves.
02:10:00
michael
And that relationship will stay with you for the rest of your life.
02:10:00
Daithi Flannery
Brilliant.
02:10:04
michael
And you need to look at it.
02:10:06
Daithi Flannery
Brilliant. Okay, that's a very good one. That's a very good one. Okay, Mike, thank you very much. I'm just going to finish, not with a direct quote, but it's something paraphrased from Robert Nozick from The Examined Life.
02:10:20
Daithi Flannery
And then we'll say goodbye. Please don't hang up, Mike, you as I hang up the other people. But okay, and here it is.
02:10:24
michael
Okay.
02:10:29
Daithi Flannery
There is a difference between explaining evil and accepting it. Explanation must not become endorsement. Thank you for listening. Like and subscribe, please.
02:10:42
Daithi Flannery
It helps. Bye-bye now.