I was in a car for forty-five minutes on unfamiliar backroads when I heard both the most amazing and most outrageous thing I’d ever heard. There are about ten radio stations between UMF and Colby, and none of them are particularly good, but I stumbled on a gem of what I assumed was a minister with a slight Irish accent yelling and yelling an excerpt from a book written by Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, about the execution of a Nazi war criminal by the Israeli government. He shouted a passage which described the man’s descent to the gallows, as she was there and reported on it directly:
“Adolf Eichmann went to the gallows with great dignity. He had asked for a bottle of red wine and had drunk half of it. He refused the help of the Protestant minister, the Reverend William Hull, who offered to read the Bible with him: he had only two more hours to live, and therefore no ‘time to waste.’ He walked the fifty yards from his cell to the execution chamber calm and erect, with his hands bound behind him. When the guards tied his ankles and knees, he asked them to loosen the bonds so that he could stand straight. ‘I don't need that,’ he said when the black hood was offered him. He was in complete command of himself, nay, he was more: he was completely himself. Nothing could have demonstrated this more convincingly than the grotesque silliness of his last words. He began by stating emphatically that he was a Gottgläubiger, to express in common Nazi fashion that he was no Christian and did not believe in life after death. He then proceeded: ‘After a short while, gentlemen, we shall all meet again. Such is the fate of all men. Long live Germany, long live Argentina, long live Austria. I shall not forget them.’ In the face of death, he had found the cliché used in funeral oratory. Under the gallows, his memory played him the last trick; he was ‘elated’ and he forgot that this was his own funeral. It was as though in those last minutes he was summing up the lesson that this long course in human wickedness had taught us--the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.”
Thousands of people were alive to witness this, thousands of people heard these words and even thousands more people read these words in this book, but I live in central Maine, and have never seen or been touched by war or evil. My jaw dropped. From the second the minister opened his mouth to the second he closed it, a high-strung word about God at the end, I was silent with my jaw to the floor. The yelling stopped and who I guessed were the regular radio announcers started chatting. I switched the station.
Dozens of great thinkers have done a lot of their great thinking around Arendt’s closing line, “the banality of evil,” which describes how otherwise non-sociopathic individuals can commit horrible atrocities purely for banal, routine motivations, such a professional promotion and peer pressure. People have tried to poke holes in this psychological theory, but it stands. There’s few other reasons for so many people to have gone along with such a horrendous act as the Holocaust other than this stupidity of evil.
As it were, this left me with a kind of stupid realization. I have always been the invisible type, only distinguishable by my loud voice when I choose to use it. I thought that I had never experienced peer pressure, that I had never been someone with enough importance to experience peer pressure. But when people tumble down philosophical rabbit holes like “what is free will?” it’s easy to conclude that, well, hardly anything is free will. I finish nearly everything I start because I have a feeling that people, unidentified, unreal people, will be disappointed in me--that’s peer pressure. I don’t go to class because I want to, I go because I need a degree. I don’t need a degree because I want one, I do because society dictates that I do. Society doesn’t even have free will; society dictates that I need a degree because our society as we know it now is ruled by money and consumerism. People with more money buy more things, which theoretically “furthers” society (and is also the reason diamond sellers are stressing out, because millennials don’t have any money and don’t care about shiny rocks).
This seems like the way the world works, which is why it seemed like a stupid realization, but there it has inside it a slightly less stupid realization that, according to semiotics, which dictates that every word contains both itself and its opposite, there is a true opposite to our current society. Most people would say it’s communism, but communism still assumes the concept of money, which can never equal the actual weight of the good or service provided, as stated in Karl Marx’s Das Kapital. A world without money, but where everyone’s needs are satisfied and no one succumbs to greed. Sounds like paradise, huh?
I saw a video by Tommy Edison, a blind film reviewer and vlogger, on YouTube the other day, where he said that when he was a kid, he thought being sighted would fix all his problems. But, he concluded, with sight comes problems as well, just different ones.
My solution is anarchy, but the solution always carries with it as many questions as it answers, as every word contains its opposite. But if our current question serves difficult to answer, it is always an option to start on a new one.
