Today I want to speak to you of the banality of evil. That phrase was used by the 20th century political theorist Hannah Arendt to describe her experience of the Nazi war crime procedures in Jerusalem. Although I acknowledge the controversial nature of many of her conclusions and theories, still I think the notion has its uses. What it says to me is that evil is not something special. It is not brought by men in black cloaks, riding dark horses, speaking foreign accents or wielding special dark powers. Evil is something plain, every day, unremarkable and common. Evil is our own behaviors performed in a different context. It has been said that the truth is the first casualty in war and the victors write the history books to suit their own political aims. We see the validity of these ideas all over the world every day. The victims become the oppressors and the cycle of violence and reprisal never ends. One of my teachers once told me a story of a client who had killed their own children in a delusional episode. The client was then lucid again and incarcerated for life, but working towards emotional growth and recovery. My teacher observed that “there but for the grace of god go I—because I have the same brain as my client.” Until we learn to see evil as something banal, unremarkable, every day, something we are all capable of, indeed something we have all perpetrated on one level or another, we will never be able to change our habits of stigmatization and devaluation. Until we learn to describe the problem accurately and compassionately, we will never be able to solve it.
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