The Uncomfortable Ordinary: Evil, Responsibility, and the Banality of Systems
- Frazer Macdonald Hay
- 20 hours ago
- 5 min read
by Frazer Macdonald Hay
On 18 May, I published an article titled “An Uncomfortable Framing of the Most Heinous.” It was an attempt to sit with an idea that resists moral comfort: that the perpetrators of the worst crimes in human history are rarely the monsters we want them to be. Last night, while watching Nuremberg (dir. James Vanderbilt), that discomfort returned with renewed force.
The film centres on the uneasy relationship between Hermann Göring (played by Russell Crowe) and U.S. Army psychiatrist Lt. Colonel Douglas Kelley (played by Rami Malek). Kelley was tasked with assessing the mental fitness of the Nazi defendants held at Nuremberg Prison before they stood trial. Over roughly five months, he conducted hundreds of hours of interviews, searching for something (anything) that might explain the scale of the crimes these men had overseen.
At one point in the film, Kelley articulates his driving question: “If we can psychologically define evil, we can make sure something like this never happens again.” It is a profoundly human hope, and one that history has repeatedly frustrated.
Evil Without Madness
Kelley’s findings were deeply unsettling. The defendants, he concluded, were not mad. Their IQs were average or above average. He described them as workaholics and opportunists, men who, as historian Jack El-Hai paraphrases, “would not hesitate to climb over the backs of half the people in their country to subjugate the other half.”
Göring, in particular, struck Kelley as highly intelligent, imaginative, and profoundly narcissistic. Many of his responses revolved obsessively around himself. “No man has ever beaten me,” Crowe’s Göring boasts in the film. Yet Kelley did not diagnose him with any serious psychiatric illness.
This conclusion placed Kelley at odds with many of his contemporaries. Rather than locating Nazism in pathology, he arrived at a far more disturbing verdict: these men fell within the normal range of human personality. They were not aberrations. They were us, under certain conditions.
After the trials, Kelley published 22 Cells in Nuremberg. The book was not well-received. Its thesis was morally uncomfortable, but historically powerful. If the perpetrators were sane, then evil could not be quarantined as madness. It lived instead in ambition, obedience, ideology, and the pursuit of status. To declare them insane might have softened our horror, but it would also have diluted responsibility.
The Cost of Knowing
Some historians suggest that this realisation profoundly affected Kelley. If psychiatry could not explain evil, what could? He died by suicide on New Year’s Day 1958, ingesting a cyanide capsule at his home. Early reports speculated darkly about the capsule’s origins, perhaps a grim souvenir from Nuremberg, perhaps even connected to Göring, whose own cyanide suicide had shocked the world.
Kelley’s widow, Alice-Vivienne, and his son offered a more grounded explanation. Kelley maintained a home laboratory filled with chemicals. There was no certainty about the capsule’s provenance, nor about his intentions that night. Still, the symbolism lingers.
Watching Nuremberg, I reminded myself that this is a film, a Hollywood depiction of a profound moment in humanity’s reckoning with itself. Yet the questions it raises are not cinematic. They are structural, political, and enduring.
Ordinary Men
I found myself thinking again of Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. Browning documents how a unit of middle-aged, working-class German policemen (most of them not fanatical Nazis) became responsible for mass shootings and deportations of Jewish people in occupied Poland in 1942.
Browning identifies no single monstrous motivation. Instead, he traces a convergence of pressures: conformity, obedience to authority, role adaptation, and the slow recalibration of moral norms. Within the battalion, three groups emerged: a core of eager killers; a larger group who carried out their duties without enthusiasm or initiative; and a small minority who avoided participation altogether, without materially reducing the unit’s killing efficiency.
The lesson is not historical but human. Under certain conditions, most people will do things they would never imagine doing alone.
The Banality of Evil
Hannah Arendt reached a similar conclusion when she reported on the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. In Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, she described Eichmann not as a sadist or ideologue, but as “terrifyingly normal.” He was a bureaucrat, motivated less by hatred than by careerism and a desire to belong.
Eichmann, Arendt argued, committed evil deeds without evil intentions. His crimes were rooted in thoughtlessness, an inability to think from the standpoint of others, to grasp the reality of what his actions meant for those subjected to them. This was the essence of what she famously called the banality of evil.
The thesis was (and remains) deeply controversial. Critics argued that to deny Eichmann's monstrous intent was to minimise his crimes. Gershom Scholem dismissed the idea as a slogan. Mary McCarthy wondered whether a man so incapable of thought was not, in fact, a monster after all.
Yet Arendt’s provocation endures precisely because it is so uncomfortable. If evil is banal, then it is not safely distant. It is procedural. It is bureaucratic. It is embedded in systems that reward obedience, efficiency, and silence.
Contemporary Banalities
Today, the banality of evil manifests less through jackboots than through spreadsheets, algorithms, and administrative language.
Bureaucratic and corporate systems diffuse responsibility so effectively that no single individual feels accountable for harm. The 2008 financial crisis and the Volkswagen emissions scandal were not driven by singular villains, but by cultures of compliance and incentive.
Technological abstraction, including AI and platform design, allows harm to be optimised at scale while remaining psychologically distant from its human consequences—whether through misinformation, surveillance, or discrimination.
Political euphemism and propaganda normalise violence. Language like “collateral damage” or “enhanced interrogation” creates moral distance, making brutality administratively palatable.
The bystander effect, amplified by constant exposure to global suffering, encourages disengagement. Doomscrolling replaces responsibility. Witnessing replaces action.
Climate change may represent banal evil at an existential scale: collective knowledge paired with collective inaction, driven by short-term interest and structural inertia.
Repetition After Reckoning
Three moments in Nuremberg struck me with particular force: the liberation footage from the camps; the brutality of public hangings; and the unspoken truth that none of this ended violence.
After the Holocaust came Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda, and Darfur.
And since October 2023, the government of Israel has been accused by multiple states, legal scholars, and human rights organisations of committing genocide against the Palestinian population of Gaza. South Africa’s case before the International Court of Justice, supported by a growing number of countries, remains ongoing. In 2025, the International Association of Genocide Scholars passed a resolution stating that Israel’s conduct meets the legal definition of genocide under the 1948 UN Convention.
The details are harrowing: mass civilian casualties, widespread destruction of housing, attacks on healthcare, aid, and education systems, famine conditions, and dehumanising rhetoric from political leaders. Israel denies the charge, framing its actions as self-defence following the 7 October 2023 Hamas attacks. The ICJ has yet to rule.
What is beyond dispute, however, is the pattern: atrocity followed by denial, bureaucratic justification, and moral deferral. Again.
The Antidote
Arendt believed that the only defence against the banality of evil is active thinking, the refusal to surrender moral judgment to systems, roles, or authority. This requires courage: to dissent, to disrupt, to remain human in environments that reward compliance.
Evil does not always announce itself with hatred. More often, it arrives dressed as normality, efficiency, and necessity.
That is the most uncomfortable framing of all.
And it is why remembering, critically, honestly, and without abstraction, remains a political and moral act.
Thank you - Frazer
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