Representations of Evil 2: The Easter Existential Evil Eggstravaganza, or the 4 E's of Evil .
Hi, and welcome to Studious! I’m your host, Stuart Byers. Each week on Studious, we try and parse out life’s greatest riddles. We will tackle topics of particular interest to me, and hopefully to you the listener as well. If not, consider this one of those great podcasts to fall asleep to.
We are piggybacking on our introduction of Post-Metaphysical Evil this week as we examine the concept of Existential Evil. Primarily we will be examining existential evil through the lens of World War 2 and our metrics of evil calibrated based on the Nazis. We will examine two works in particular that you may not be familiar with: The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosiński and Eichmann in Jerusalem by Hannah Arendt.
These two works are entirely heavy, and if you haven’t read them, maybe don’t? I am sure that the morally right thing to do is to read them, but your life might just be a little less sad if you avoid them. I jest. You should read them if you want to buy into our view of existential evil here, for the concept kinda delves into responsibility, and giving of the two or more fucks to try and stave off evil. This is gonna bring up some new questions for me and my relation to evil. Sure, it’s great to want to be the good guy, but can that position itself be manipulated? Hopefully we will circle back around to that notion later.
Fuck it, let’s talk about it now, because I honestly might forget. I’ve been having this notion lately about my own personal drives growing up. I was gung-ho about being a hero. Honestly, we are all probably the hero of our own tales, but some may take this narrative more seriously than others. Are we just priming ourselves to be open to manipulation? I often wonder about the zealotry of fervent fascists. On some note, you’d have to think they’d convinced themselves that they were operating on behalf of the “greater good.” I have trouble thinking that the entire Nazi party just was comprised of psychopaths. That’s just too many psychos mathematically for one nation to have. They obviously would have had to convinced themselves internally that their cause was just.
This is the cautionary tale, for if it could happen to one country, it could happen to any of them. Keep this in mind when you are telling yourself that you would have behaved different than the average German in 1930. You fortunately have the benefit of being shaped by a different set of circumstances and have learned the error of their ways. And yet you and I wouldn’t set foot in the sand June, 2020. As if the outdoors themselves were gonna give us COVID.
We had previously discussed the tenets of hard determinism in our Free Will podcast. Some critics of hard determinism feel that one cannot be judged morally because of their perceived inability to exercise free will. I’d like perhaps shed some more light on that concept as it pertains here to existential evil before we get started. We have enacted a reform system to speak to our reptile brain. Do these bad deeds, and there will be possible consequences. Some people are more risk adverse than others, and these punitive measures will corral their behavior. It’s simple cause and effect here. Furthermore, those who stand more to lose will continue to behave within the law. And mind you, loss is subjective here. A wealthy man may look at the loss of income for a traffic fine negligible, and may choose to play by his own rules, but when it comes to incarceration, his loss of time, freedom, wealth and prestige may figure too high of a cost, so he may decide to observe the law when the stakes are too high.
Have you ever heard the term, “life is cheap” in reference to a poverty-stricken area? Everything is relative. Priorities shift. Some people live paycheck to paycheck, others live meal to meal. When you can’t plan for the future, your only major concern is survival. For some, incarceration might feel like a summer camp in comparison. Even if incarceration was still viewed negatively by that individual considering crime, their brains just aren’t in that long term planning mode. Furthermore, the risks of them not committing that crime might outweigh the consequences of them committing it. If this all sounds confusing, just go watch Liam Neeson in Les Miserables.
I say all of this to preface The Painted Bird, by Jerzy Kosińksi. The story follows an orphaned boy wandering war torn Europe during World War II. Existential Evil here rears its ugly head, primarily in the shape of inhospitality. As the boy meanders about, trying to survive, he’s met with more Strombolis and Honest Johns than Geppettos. The tale depicts life at its most gruesome.
Eichmann in Jerusalem by Hannah Arendt features this concept of existential evil in a similar way. It’s kind of an understatement to call the Nazis inhospitable. I’d suppose they both relate in evil being expressed as an absence of good. It’s here we see the potentiality for evil when people are too busy caring about other things, like surviving a war. Going back to our “life is cheap” sentiment, I’d like to pair that with another idiom: morality is for those who can afford it. Our own personal ties to morality can shift if our circumstances are shifted. In the absence of civilization, we can lose our civility, our prized humanity. Hopefully, I’ve set the stage now for our consideration of Existential Evil.
In his Inaugural Address at St. Andrews in 1867, John Stuart Mill stated:
Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.
We’ve all heard some variation of that quote by John Stuart Mill. I always thought it was Churchill who said it. Attitudes towards conceptual “evil” performed by mankind usually arrive at some sentiment regarding how easily “evil” can be achieved. In the above instance, a rallying cry for heroism comes from simply engaging the listener to excite themselves out of complacency, to rise up and take action. Another view is that this call to arms also beckons the reader to ultimately take a side. What the quote really is all about can be summed up in one word: complicity. For existential evil to exist, one only needs to be complicit to the series of steps necessary that promote suffering. Often times we structure our views around “evil” behavior as an inherent pathology or attraction to vice that allows one to make decisions that enable “evil” consequences, but in cases like The Painted Bird or Eichmann in Jerusalem, we learn that inaction or by neglecting the proactive choice to fight for civility or humanity can be the complicity required for these representations of “evil” to occur.
If we view post-metaphysical “evil” through an existential lens, then we are categorizing this concept through the individual’s free agency and responsibility for the consequences of their own actions/inactions. We must adopt this outlook on free will and agency for the representations of “evil” in literature, not only to make sense of their meaning within the work, but also because any deterministic view of man within the confines of the story makes him a mere automaton acting according to programming, lacking any culpability for his role in the outcomes. The participant must be just that, one playing a part with his/her own motivations, desires, fears, and other impulses or thoughts that guide one’s actions. If man is simply powerless and destined to react according to the preordained, then there is little point in observing his role, for he holds no authorship. If we are to examine the why of these representations of existential evil, then to reduce the man from a deterministic viewpoint limits him to a mere pawn or worse: a force of nature capable of causing “evil” without sentience, remorse or reflection.
In the case of Eichmann, one actually might wonder if that sentiment would possibly describe the former S.S. Lieutenant Colonel or Obersturmbannführer. From Hannah Arendt’s description of the former Nazi officer, we get very little remorse from Eichmann, though at times he gladly offers his neck as recompense for his role in The Final Solution of the Jewish Problem. Quick side note for those of you who didn’t pick up on the subtlety there, the final solution was extermination. I talked to a gentleman recently who is somewhat of a holocaust denier. He seemed to think there was a conflagration of excess in the reporting of the numbers of Jews who reportedly died in the holocaust. To be fair, 6 million is a huge number. If you don’t believe me, try and count to six million. Just because something is unfathomably large, it doesn’t disprove its existence. If you need further proof of this, one only need to look at our sun or the observable universe. This of course may prove difficult if you are a Flat-Earther. From that viewpoint, the sun would seem rather small and insignificant. But back to the 6 million… we also have word that many Russians died during World War 2, but that figure is not readily agreed upon. Some sources have the figure of both civilians and infantry at around 20 million. The Russian Academy of Sciences figures 26.6 million, whereas the Russian Ministry of Defense calculates the total at 8.7 million. The Central Defense Military Archive lists approximately 14 million military men’s names and other researchers and historians have figured the number closer to 40 million. The point is, these are all staggering numbers to consider, and this is how history can be messy sometimes, because it’s hard to calculate such things. The gentleman I had spoke with had raised the question of how many people would need to be exterminated a day to reach such numbers. Given that the war lasted 6 years, which roughly is 2,200 days. To exterminate 6 million people, that would require around 2700 executions a day. According to the Holocaust Encyclopedia, the Germans and their allies established more than 44 thousand camps and incarceration sites. Some of these would naturally be used for prisoners of war, but just the fact that there were so many camps, it wouldn’t seem difficult to perform the relatively small amount of daily executions. Most importantly, it doesn’t matter if it was one million or six million. Genocide doesn’t need to be abhorrent by a larger metric.
So back to Eichmann and The Final Solution… His offering his life for the Jewish people is less of a reflection for any wrongdoings, for Eichmann spends most of the trial defending his actions or his own ideologies. In terms of sentience, Adolf Eichmann almost poses as a caricature of a man. Though capable of expressing a rationale and ideology behind his motivations, through most of the presidings, Eichmann speaks in stock phrases or idioms. Arendt points out that Eichmann’s relating in clichés was almost comical. It’s like the alien or robot in a film that assimilates through these rote familiarizing communication strategies. It’s a masquerade of sentience or more to the point, a masquerade of relation or relateability. Eichmann attempts to build rapport in his proceedings with other humans by saying something, all the while saying nothing. Arendt notes, “The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else,” (Arendt, 24). In this insane attempt by Eichmann to relate, to distinguish himself from the “other,” he actually telegraphs his incapacity for human empathy. In fact, this apparent lack of empathy from both Eichmann and the agents of suffering in The Painted Bird represents the very impetus of the Existential Representations of Evil.
Just as Eichmann attempted to distance himself from being perceived as an “other,” The Painted Birdrevolves around the stark reality that the human condition through self-preservation maintains safe distance from “the other.” From the onset, we learn that to harbor the boy is to invite trouble. Part of the irony in The Painted Bird stems from what the boy’s “otherness” represents: a mystical or supernaturally cursed existence. Be he Romani or Jew, the boy acts as an antithesis to Christian doctrine, (also ironically becoming somewhat Christlike in his suffering for others’ sins) yet the peasants often are performing some sort of pagan mysticism in their beliefs in his gypsy powers or their warding off his curses.
Horror is easily imagined if we take the protagonist at its most vulnerable and pit it against the world at its worst. The bildungsroman of The Painted Bird examines the boy's coming of age and his conceptualization of good and evil through a trajectory perhaps similar to the European’s historical wrestling with similar concepts. Man first starts backwards and pagan, superstitious, and following a line of reasoning deduced by illusory correlation. The boy too attempts to discern the world of man in hopes to glean the riddle of causation, particularly in the case Garbos' indiscernible cruelty. In the story, Garbos takes the boy in only to beat and torture the boy. Eventually, he hangs the boy by his arms, in which he is forced to balance upon a chair to keep from being attacked by Garbos’ sadistic dog Judas. All of this torture eventually renders the boy mute. The boy cannot glean the why's of Garbos’ behavior, though he attempts to methodically with the experiential data afforded by his young age. Like the trajectory of the European, the boy then finds organized religion and tries to utilize its teachings to improve his chances of survival. In the end, he is offered somewhat of a new hope for survival from what he learns during his time spent with the Red Army; in particular, how meting out revenge is the most assured prospect in the protection of the self. This return to the secular and self-actualization is perhaps most in keeping with the post-metaphysical and redefining the self as the center of the universe. In this passage, the protagonist expresses these sentiments:
Every one of us stood alone, and the sooner a man realized that all Gavrilas, Mitkas, and Silent Ones were expendable, the better for him. It mattered little if one was mute; people did not understand one another anyway. They collided with or charmed one another, hugged or trampled one another, but everyone knew only himself. His emotions, memory, and senses divided him from others as effectively as thick reeds screen the mainstream from the muddy bank. Like the mountain peaks around us, we looked at one another, separated by valleys, too high to stay unnoticed, too low to touch the heavens - (Kosiński, 258).
From here we learn from Kosiński that the individual is alone in the world and can only count on themselves. For Adolf Eichmann, this prospect was his greatest personal fear as one who lived to join and created a personal identity and self-worth centered around garnering the respect of others. This very devotion to seeking the approval of his in-group enabled his ability to self-delude in his participation in The Final Solution. In fact, Arendt proposes that it was his time in Argentina spent directionless without belonging that lead to Eichmann’s subsequent capture. The prospect of hanging for his crimes was preferable to that solitary existence of exile in hiding. Eichmann, like most of us, was a herd animal. He quickly adopted the principles of the herd in which he found himself. Far from being an intellectual, Eichmann did not possess the necessary faculties to make executive moral decisions, rather he fell back on prescriptions from the in-group (a short-cut to thinking). Unless one considers personal motivations like career advancement or massaging his emotional and sexual needs (like taking a Jewish mistress) would he consider circumventing the party’s directives.
As herd mammals, we all seek acceptance from the crowd. The Painted Bird follows the travels of a solitary boy seeking refuge from the most inhospitable. Most of the boy's experiences aren't stemming from a fear-motivated lack of hospitality, rather more of a cruel reality where the perversion of hospitality signifies a deepening sickness within the psyche of the different peasants and villagers he encounters. Most of those who enact atrocities upon the boy do so out of an ire in them created by a world falling apart. Each sadistic act enacted is an attempt at control, to be the master instead of the servant. The pragmatism of demonization for the peasants isolates the boy from the rest through obvious superficial features. Often demonization works for purposes of identity not only by contrast, but to usually support whatever “evil” is necessary in support of the “greater good” (see also: utilitarianism). Like Eichmann, we can justify horrible cruelties if we truly believe they are in service of a grand principle, such as Eichmann’s professed ideologies or the rigid binary of an “us vs. them” proposed by the Nazis as integral to the survival of the German people.
Quick side note: for those who are unfamiliar with The Painted Bird, the title is taken form a scene in the novel where one of the peasants, a professional bird catcher, shows brutally how an in-group attacks an outsider. The catcher paints one of the birds multiple different colors, which might seem unusual or even beautiful to the casual observer. He then releases the bird to find its flock. Eagerly flapping to join them, the bird is met with immediate avarice, as the flock ceases to recognize it as one of their own. The turn is fast and ferocious, and after a severe, relentless thrashing, the painted bird falls to its death.
Subsequently, identity is preserved in The Painted Birdby erasing the humanity left to be found in the demon. The boy stands as the painted bird in the metaphor, but easily is substituted as the scapegoat or sacrificial lamb. We discussed scapegoating previously in our episode on mimesis. It's the "othering" of the boy that makes him the painted bird, but it's also the need of these backwards folk to exercise power over their domain of which they currently have little. This too infects the boy through his trajectory. As they say, “hurt people, hurt people.” He seeks the same power of domain when he breaks the arm of his adopted brother or drops bricks on the unsuspecting theater attendant who wronged him. This shift in perspective for the boy occurs as he seeks his own power and is seen when he dismisses the raping of the girl in the end of the story as the girl being "reckless enough to venture out alone." He doesn't identify anymore with her innocence. His survivalist ways shape his worldview and identity from the harsh realities he experienced. The boy from his bildungsroman is cast in hard steel, unflinching at the cruelty that surrounds him.
In the end, the boy recalls the hare broken into submission by Makar, and that eventually the hare was so submissive that he carried the cage inside him. Again, for those unfamiliar with our story here, Makar and the rabbit very much stand in for the science experiment where they place a shark in a tank with a glass wall between it and the fish. The shark bashes into the glass, trying to reach its prey, until it inevitably sees futility in its pursuits. The glass is then removed, and the fish swim freely around the docile shark.
The boy's voice is submissive to its owner like the hare as he regains his speech. In this moment, the boy surrenders to rejoining the collective, for the need for belonging was too powerful to ignore. The fact that someone wants to speak to him is the invitation to belong and the hospitality he desires, enabling him to communicate once again.
While the boy yearned for hospitality, Eichmann’s only example of hospitality was to show his guests the door. He makes much ado about the various ways he was willing to commit to the diaspora of the Jews from Europe, to aid the Zionists in their expulsion into a new homeland (one can’t help but notice a continuing narrative throughout history of a displaced people in constant search of their home). Eichmann’s lack of introspection creates the trajectory of a great irony: a man so committed to belonging is actually responsible for others remaining on the fringe, leading to their dispersal and extermination.
The banality of evil isn't present as much in The Painted Bird as it is in Eichmann in Jerusalem. Banality of evil you say? Banality simply can infer something that is boring or unoriginal. With Eichmann, you have this boring, unoriginal thinker who represents the mindlessness of bureaucracy. He’s like bureaucracy personified. If you require an illustration of the banality of evil, just think about dealing with the government for a personal matter. Conjure up your many experiences with customer service at the DMV.
The peasants in The Painted Bird can't be viewed as much as one just "doing their job," like Eichmann professes. Each act of "evil" propagated towards the boy is a primal attack on the outsider. Other acts of hedonism not in keeping with societal laws speak to not only an ignorance, but also a perverse desire for pleasure arrived at any cost. This more expresses the breakdown of society and the laws used to govern the simplest societies, such as our simplest laws against bestiality and incest. This is a far cry from bureaucratic banalities, or rather an antithesis, whereas bureaucracy represents a blind allegiance to guidelines no matter how "evil" or obsolete. If we consider “banality” as unoriginal, look no further than Eichmann who lacked any original thought, easily assumed by his many uses of cliches and stock phrases (side note: borrowing from Henry Ford, Eichmann originally sought to clean up bureaucracy with his deportation of the Jews by creating an assembly line to hurry the process and concentrate all of the necessary agencies under one roof; we of course see this as the birth of the concentration camp and following genocide). Arendt shows us how easily “evil” can manifest through conventional or unimaginative means. Part of conforming to a system depends on devotion sans suspicion. This is just a further reminder to remain ever vigilant and ever skeptical. Eichmann’s most banal idea: ripping off the assembly line, lead to the diaspora and annihilation of over six million Jews. If originality stands in direct opposition to banality, then it’s rather curious that kosher also stands as a synonym for original. Perhaps they really are God’s chosen people.
Ultimately, both Eichmann and Bird serve as cautionary tales, particularly because they represent an elusive, shadowy path to “evil” more obscured than the obvious sociopathy one easily imagines. Whereas the psychopath takes an active role in the contribution of “evil,” these other agents of suffering play more of a passive part. To contrast, their actions are often more indirect, say for example: a blacksmith versus the swordsman, but the suffering could not manifest itself otherwise without their direct participation. This is perhaps why these particular representations of evil are so insidious, because one need not be at heart a villain to become a grand agent of agony. In fact, these two representations democratize the capacity or propensity for “evil” within us all.
So, what is our takeaway here with existential evil? Weirdly, it seems to be intrinsically tied to our capacity for socializing, and our need to fit in. Think of the times where you may have turned on a friend to appease the sensibilities of the group. This doesn’t have to be something insidious, it could be something as trivial as not approving of their decided attire for the day. Group think and behaviors are fascinating, and they have their own measures of policing behavior. This isn’t an intrinsically evil feature of groups, it can just display itself in that fashion. We all respond to positive and negative stimuli. Groups conform the members through these two processes. There are many reasons to unify a group in its thinking. This can ensure the groups’ survival and minimize infighting. Conversely, we also need group members to challenge the group think on occasion to evolve and learn from past mistakes or to forge new paths towards success and survival in an ever-changing world. Adaptability is probably one of our greatest human traits, and if you subscribe to Darwin, the best trait to ensure the survival of a species.
Existential Evil is like the frog in the boiling pot. It doesn’t occur overnight, it happens slowly. Even if the impetus occurs quickly, like the immediacy of war, we humans deal with our new roles through a series of steps, until we can’t see how we got there.
When I was in the military, I went to military prison for a small stint. Was I evil? Did I do some evil act? No, I just missed a couple of appointments, and then was too naïve to plea for forgiveness. I saw a broken system, and instead of wisely massaging the system, I fought it. Like the song, I fought; it won. I was sentenced to 30 days of Correctional Custody.
To give you a little taste, military prison is the best of bureaucracy the military has to offer. There were lines drawn around the facility. Every time I approached a line, I’d have to stop and give a reporting statement: “Sir, Airman Byers reports.”
“Report.”
“Sir, Airman Byers requests permission to speak.”
“Granted.”
“Sir, Airman Byers requests permission to cross the red line and enter the facility.”
I would then cross that line only to be met by another line up the stairs. And then there was a line to enter my room, to enter our commons area, to enter the latrine. Red lines abounded everywhere. Our only brief respite was to request permission to be put on a status reserved for doing our daily routines. When we were on cleaning duty, we could move freely about, crossing red lines willy nilly, otherwise it would have taken us a short eternity to get our chores accomplished.
Mind you, I awoke at 4:30 every morning to start my work. I reported groggy eyed, requested permission to speak, then requested permission to be put on “detail status” so I could perform my details. At 6, we would all march to breakfast, where we were sequestered from the other airman, singled out as painted birds. We ate silently and in solitude, much like the boy. After which, we would march to our community service detail of the day, then back for lunch, followed by some rigorous physical training or PT as they say.
I was graded my first day of ironing and cleaning my room. If there was a lowest score, I received it. Not because I was particularly slack at cleaning, but because the system needed a metric by which it could measure its success in my rehabilitation. This is bureaucracy at its finest. It must define its success by the perception of failure in others, ones not following the system. The message is very clear. To operate within the system is the greatest chance at success.
I learned this during my first day of physical training. We ran a mile and a half, which is 6 laps around a track. The first day, I was jogging at a rather comfortable pace, having just finished basic training. I was then informed by someone kind enough to extend the advice to SLOW THE FUCK DOWN. He then explained that each day we ran, we had to improve our time. This was perhaps the only concrete, objective way for the bureaucracy to measure its success in our rehabilitation. The white glove that was ran under my bed and in my drawers and closet came up empty of dust, yet I still “performed” poorly. With our running, here was an easily observable metric. This was performance driven results. By the end of my stint, (just 22 days after being let out for “good behavior”) I was having to sprint my 6th lap. Consider this. Go run a mile, and then after another 400 meters, sprint 400 more. Needless to say, I was in perhaps the best shape of my life.
Where was I going with all this? Ah, yes. Even though I was sentenced rather quickly, and thrown in the hoosegow, my adaptation to my surroundings was impervious to me. It’s rather bizarre how quickly I just accepted my fate. Maybe it’s not the boiling pot so much. Maybe we humans just adapt quickly when necessary. I remember thinking distinctly my second week in “this is my life now.” I just made my peace with it. There was a part of my brain that completely forgot the person I was before. I was just completely in the moment, assuming a new role. That other me was distant. It was not even a Ship of Theseus moment: I definitely was not the same Stu that entered basic training, or even the same Stu that entered Correctional Custody. I was Airman Byers, forever requesting permission to speak.
There’s this hopelessness or futility once we’ve resounded ourselves to fate. It’s this position of powerlessness I think that provides the sounding board for evil to spring forth. I’m not trying to be extra here, but I wonder what I could have been convinced to do if I stayed longer in that state. I’m sure the setting would probably set the stage for which evils I could be convinced to perform.
But for existential evil to exist, it only needs to be permitted to exist. Like Eichmann, one just need to be convinced for the evil to be allowed. One doesn’t need a direct hand in participation. I wouldn’t need to be persuaded to commit evil, only to turn a blind eye to it. And that part is the easiest. After 6-8 weeks of training, I had already fashioned myself as different from the civilian set. I saw them as soft, and undisciplined. Even the Coast Guard who bunked across the street looked slovenly in comparison. At the young age of 19, it wouldn’t take much for me to look the other way if laws were passed by the state to make those civilians more disciplined. I would see it as a necessary evil to uphold the greater good, and not a theft of autonomy or freedom. Plus, c’mon. Those sloppy bastards could us a fine tuning. Especially the Coast Guard with their sideburns and barely tucked pants.
When I consider Germany and its peoples, I see a nation primed for manipulation. Just 21 years before, they lost their pride as a nation losing World War 1. Then you stoke this fire of nationalism and patriotism, some call it fascism, in their hearts to remind them that they ain’t so bad. It’s what that country was dying to hear in that moment. Then you start drafting everyone, and its quickly realized that if you don’t want to be on the short end of the stick, you stick to the party line. Those closest to the Fuhrer have the most control seemingly over their destinies, with influence, prestige, and power. Even those who don’t hold a prayer to rising in the ranks still have to maintain this adherence to the party’s core values. The people who question indoctrination are quickly removed.
With Existential Evil, the only prescription is to get ahead of it before it happens, because once it does, it snowballs and becomes impossible to fight from within. Unless of course you are Liam Neeson, then you can heroically make a difference through guile and subterfuge.
Maybe the real lesson here, is that we all need to be more like Liam Neeson. He fights the Nazis and the French aristocracy, so he’s clearly worth emulating.
I have a particular set of skills, and apparently those include the callback. I hope you enjoyed our talk about Existential Evil. I’ll see you next week. Thanks again for listening to Studious.
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