The Banality of Evil illustration shows how evil can grow naturally from the intersection of natural forces of Gross Incompetence,Complex Systems, and Nefarious scheming - each of which are common in life and society.
Each is the result of communities of life and health.
Individual humans, like all life forms, live in cooperation and competition. Life does not exist without cooperation and competition. Individuals compete for resources. Cooperation creates communities.
As communities grow, they take on the attributes of individuals - individual communities. They begin to compete with each other, and can compete more effectively when they cooperate, creating larger communities. Unfortunately, modern medical, psychological, and sociological sciences study individuals and ignore the attributes and behaviours of communities.
However, communities are not life forms, they have no moral standards. Communities have reptile brains. They are motivated to grow, and as a result they eat everything, even their own members.
Even the simplest community easily grows totally out of the control of individual members. There is a reason police hate attending domestics, the communities of husband and wife are much more unpredictable and difficult to deal with either of the individuals.
Community and members often confess to being ruled by the community not by their conscience - and often suggest that we need to submit to the community as well, for our own benefit.
Let's look at the three types of communities illustrated in the Banality of Evil.
Complex System communities develop as communities gain power. The simplest community, of husband and wife, or a partnership of two brothers, has more power than either individual. The community develop systems to enable and use this power. As communities grow, they grow in complexity as well as in power. They develop rules to manage the individuals in the community and their contributions to the community. Communities either grow or die. Communities that grow persist. Communities that develop effective complex systems become more and more powerful, more and more effective over time. This power is available to individuals in the community and to individual communities of complex systems.
Complex systems need bureaucrats to enforce the system rules. except to interpret and enforce the rules on individuals and other communities. The result is a community, a growth of communities of:
Bureauceratic communities of Gross Incompetence: The bureaucrats don't need to think. The system creates rules. Rules need to be followed. Individuals and communities in the system must follow the rules. Incompetent bureaucrats don't need to take a higher level view, don't need a moral view - they only need to feed the complex system that provides thier power. Communities of bureaucrats also want to grow, because growth increases their power. Individuals people in the communities also want to increase thier power through cooperation and competition, which leads to:
Nefarious Scheming communities: Capitalists are nefarious schemers, individuals and communities that take advantage of and even break system rules to take advantage of system and individuals. When these capitalists work together, they can develop large conspiracies of cooperation and competition - leading to totalitarianism. Each of these communites of conspiracy naturally wants their power and influence to grow, to create larger communities to take advantage of complex systems and grossly incompetent bureaucrats.
These three forces of community create evil from the natural forces of complexity, bureaucracies - to deal with the complexity, and scheming to take advantage of the complexity. As the communities grow, the bureaucracy grows, and more opportunitie are provided for complex scheming.
The three books, 1984, Brave New World, and Farenheit 451, illustrate various aspects of these processes, and how they can take control of us, of our communities, of our lives, if we are not moral and diligent. There are many other stories and books that illustrate these problems.
In Kubrick's 2001 "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that," the complex system becomes an AI bureacrat that controls Dave.
In Juan José Arreola's story El Guardagujas Arreola illustrates the problems that individuals face when they attempt to make sense of the bureacratic system (of trains) that had developed out of control. I recently wrote a parallel story of a hospital janitor to show how the same problems might arise in a medical environment
Robert Malone, speaking of the Banality of Evil, references Hannah Arendt's work the Origins of Totalitarianism the growth of totalitarianism as the outcome of the disintegration of the traditional nation-state, the national community.
Communities, unchecked, can naturally drift towards totalitarianism in their persuit of growth and power.
