I keep thinking lately of Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil lately. Her concept of the banality of evil is often misunderstood to mean that the kind of monstrosity exhibited by the nazi’s could be performed by anybody. Instead what she meant was that Eichmann was a type of person who wasn’t sick so much as just unremarkably stupid. That this stupidity is what drove virtually all of his decision making and that the evil of the nazis wasn’t in the hearts of everyone but that the capacity for it also wasn’t exactly rare.