Villainification

How do otherwise normal people inflict harm upon others?

For Hannah Arendt (1963/2006), evil can be a form of thoughtlessness—the banality of evil. As Arendt (1977) stated over a decade after her initial exploration of mundane evil: “The sad truth of the matter is that most evil is done by people who never made up their minds to be or to do either evil or good” (p. 180). In some contexts, this situation is interpreted as our socialization to follow orders in the sense of Stanley Milgram’s (in)famous experiments on destructive obedience. In other contexts (and not necessarily mutually exclusively) thoughtlessness can be interpreted as a lack of critical thought about how ordinary individuals can affect others (den Heyer & van Kessel, 2015). The historical record indicates that “demonic despots are never exclusively responsible for hatred and violence” and it is largely “normal” people who are perhaps thoughtlessly following orders or passionately doing “God’s work” to “stoke the gas chambers at Auschwitz, sow the killing fields in Cambodia, or hone the horrors of Abu Ghraib” (Solomon, 2012, p. 1).

While Arendt revealed how we can perpetuate evil without intending it, Becker explained why sometimes ordinary people can indeed purposely do evil deeds. The fetishization of evil leads us to localize all of our fears and anxiety into a single, manageable source. We take all that threatens to overwhelm us, confine it to a particular group of people, cause, ideology, or, in some cases a specific person, which is then labelled as evil. Our heroic quest, then, is to annihilate it. One’s own group is “pure and good” and others “are the real animals, are spoiling everything for you, contaminating your purity and bringing disease and weakness into your vitality” (Becker, 1975, p. 93). We have seen this in the Nazis conceptualizing Jews as infectious vermin before and during the Shoah, and some Hutus labelling the Tutsis as cockroaches before and during the Rwandan genocide.

From Arendt and Becker, we have come to understand how people like ourselves can perpetuate extraordinary death and destruction, both intentionally and unintentionally. The task of anti-villainification, then, is to highlight how there are a nexus of factors that contribute to the evils of the world. Instead of focusing only on one villain, we need to examine how ordinary, average people also contribute to great harm.