Ayala 1
Destiny Ayala
Prompt #1: Banality of Evil
Eichmann’s involvement in the Holocaust was “following orders.” He thought that since he did
not kill anyone by his hands that he did not do anything wrong. This is why Arendt says that in
Eichmann shows us the “world and thought defying banality of evil.” In other words can one do
evil without being evil? A quote from an essay Hannah Arendt published on Kafka in the year
1944 in the New York post, where she maintains that Eichmann “resembled not the heroes but
the officials and those deemed guilty in Kafka’s novels, jobholders…who live in complete
identification with their jobs. They have no psychological qualities because they are nothing but
jobholders. To err is to lose one’s job; therefore one cannot even admit the possibility of an error.
Jobholders who society forces to deny the human possibility of erring cannot remain human but
