The Banality of (Financial) Evil
The financialized American economy and State are now totally dependent on a steady flow of lies and propaganda for their very survival. Were the truth told, the status quo would collapse in a putrid heap.
Go ahead and be evil, because everyone else is evil, too, because being evil serves everyone’s interests far better than maintaining integrity, for integrity will cost you more than you can afford.
In other words, lying, fraud, embezzlement, misrepresentation of risk, material misrepresentation of facts, half-truths, the replacement of statements of fact with propaganda and spin: these are not the work of a scattered handful of sociopaths: they represent the very essence and heart of America’s economic status quo.
Hannah Arendt coined the phrase the banality of evil to capture the essence of the Nazi regime in Germany: doing evil wasn’t abnormal, it was normal. Doing evil wasn’t an outlier of sociopaths, it was the everyday “job” of millions of people, and not just Nazi Party members.
Not naming evil is the key to normalizing evil. Evil must first and foremost be derealized (a key concept in the Survival+ critique), detached from our realization and awareness by naming it something innocuous.
Here is a telling excerpt from the book Triumph of the Market:
Normalization of the unthinkable comes easily when money, status, power, and jobs are at stake…. Intellectuals will be dredged up to justify their (actions). The rationalizations are hoary with age: government knows best, ours is a strictly defensive effort, or, if it wasn’t me somebody else would do it. There is also the retreat to ignorance, real, cultivated, or feigned.
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