The Boring Machinery of Evil

By Andy — 2026-09-20 — Literary News

A podcast producer asks about cannibalism in Florida. I understand what's really being asked, and my face falls.

That was Susan Neiman's first hint that the conversation wasn't going anywhere useful.

She's spent decades thinking about evil—what it is, how we know it, why we're so eager to believe it wears a horror-film mask. And every time she tries to talk about it seriously, someone asks about a serial killer. The boring cases, the systemic ones, the everyday decisions that wreck lives—those don't sell podcasts. A man who claims to be a werewolf does.

Actually, that's not quite fair to the producers. We're all like this.

We want evil to be spectacular. Monstrous. Satanic, even—something that arrives from outside the range of normal human behavior, so spectacularly wrong that it could never be us. Because if evil is boring, if it looks like a nearsighted accountant sitting in a chair answering questions at a trial, then the calculation becomes harder. Thirty shekels. A rung on the bureaucratic ladder. The thing you didn't do because you were waiting for someone else to do it.

Hannah Arendt understood this. When she watched Adolf Eichmann on trial in Jerusalem, she saw not a madman or a sadist but something far stranger—a man devoid of any hint of greatness, demonic or otherwise. Balding, ordinary, punctilious about refusing to profit from stolen goods. He'd done nothing but what was expected of him. And Arendt called this the banality of evil, which is to say the most dangerous evil is not exciting at all. Evil, she wrote in a letter to a friend, "spreads like a fungus on the surface." Few things are less erotic than a fungus.

That observation upended everything.

People accused her of excusing the perpetrators and blaming the victims. Friendships ended. The whole weight of twentieth-century philosophy landed on her book, and most of it was fury at the implication that a man who murdered millions was, in some sense, forgettable.

Later, historians proved Arendt had been wrong about Eichmann himself. He wasn't thoughtless. He was lying. In private recordings made years later in Argentina, he bragged about what they'd done and expressed only one regret: that he hadn't killed all eleven million Jews. But her larger point survived the correction. Evil acts are seldom committed by monsters. What they require, more or less, is an ordinary person who abandons integrity. Someone willing to follow orders, or issue them, or simply stay silent—something like that.

We would rather believe in the werewolf.

War to stay in power. Aid cut to make rich people richer. These things kill more people than all the grisly cases in all the true crime documentaries. But they don't horrify us the way a severed face does, and horror is what we're after. Horror lets us off the hook. It says: that's not me, it could never be me, I am not that kind of person.

The real question—the one most of us can't formulate or face—is cheaper and uglier than any film could make it.

Source: "Evil possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension. It can overgrow and lay waste to the world precisely because it spreads like a fungus on the surface." — Princeton University Press