The idea of the “banality of evil”, formulated by Hannah Arendt more than 65 years ago, continues to circulate as a philosophical formula that cannot be put into question in the meaning of a truly complicated process.

For a moment, it seemed that it was giving the civilized world a moral alibi to understand the crimes of Nazism, and then, with a frightening ease, also those of communism.

The question that was posed was brutal: Is man himself, in his nature, so dirty, so filthy and soulless, so ready for cruelty, that he can commit monstrous crimes such as those in the extermination camps?

Arendt thought that she had found a solution: evil is not necessarily demonic; it can simply be routine, bureaucracy, carrying out orders. A cold mechanism where the individual disappears and only the cog remains.

But for others, this idea risks flattening individual responsibility until its disappearance, something from which, strangely, the officials of communist totalitarianism benefited more, implicitly I would say.

Arendt went to Jerusalem to follow the trial of Adolf Eichmann, but according to the testimonies, after the first days she became bored in the adjacent room, where Eichmann repeated the same things. Arendt thought that she had understood the man in front of her, a mediocre bureaucrat, a man without imagination, without his own hatred, simply an executor of orders. Strange, then, because he was the head of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt, the Reich Main Security Office, which dealt with the “Jewish Affairs”.

Then, she stopped following the trial. She did not see the most important part of the testimonies, when the questioning of him began. The portrait of Eichmann began to appear completely differently, not a boring bureaucrat, but a Nazi with convictions, a man who not only carried out orders, but believed in them, supported them, fed them. He was not, therefore, a “banal” man, but an active part of radical evil. Except that, as we said, H. Arendt was no longer in the courtroom.

In fact, she was not wrong in the analysis of totalitarianism, there she was brilliant, but in the portrait of Eichmann. Her mistake turned into a theory that was embraced by many people.

The scandal that exploded was great, rightly so.

Because to say that Eichmann was simply a bureaucrat means minimizing the criminal consciousness of a man who contributed to the extermination of a people. The continuation of the trial showed the opposite: Eichmann was not a victim of the system; he was part of the group of its architects. But by not following the trial until the end, H. Arendt did not see this transformation.

Despite the harsh criticisms, she insisted until the end on her theory.

A theory that today continues to be cited as an unquestionable truth, although the facts of the trial itself refute it.