> “It goes back to Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil a bit,” says director Andrew Neel. “These everyday things that are beloved to us, like food, can take on an entirely different dimension within the context of a dictatorship.”
That’s not at all what Arendt was writing about. She was writing about those who do evil things are rarely the “evil” monsters we imagine but rather bureaucrats motivated by things like promotions. Hard to remain motivated to consume an article after reading this in the opening.
Hannah Arendt's 'banality of evil,' as I understand it, refers to human beings who are incapable of thinking. Within a massively bureaucratized and divided system, the immense guilt of killing someone is broken down into tiny, mundane tasks, like stamping a document. Because the system absorbs all individual moral friction, ordinary people can become cogs in a vast machinery of evil without ever questioning it. (In other words, the individual is not morally evil, but the system is designed to break things down so thoroughly that it renders those parts mindless, and that is the truly frightening part.)
In that sense, I can understand part of what the article is claiming. The phrase 'it was a great gig' seems to be the core of what it was trying to say. The high salary, the Mercedes, the abundant food supplies all point to the fact that the source of that funding came from the dictatorship.
An individual can be moral, but the system numbs them. That is why evil is not interesting; its desires are too simple. Wanting to earn more money, wanting to beat someone else, becoming consumed by such things. But in that regard, good is interesting. Because it means overcoming one's own contradictions, striving for the greater good, or even sacrificing one's life for the sake of everyone.
But I think that is overly is presumptuous though.
Some people have a different moral framework. Some people think Saddam’s brutal dictatorship was for the better because it was finally brought stability. Freedom is valued lower than stability.
There are also just simply amoral
people too who just don’t care.
So I wouldn’t automatically assume someone working in an “evil” regime as “trapped as a cog” — they might frankly be OK with it. This is why sometimes just cutting off the head doesn’t enact change.
That is what makes the world interesting. You, unlike the unthinking people I was describing, are different. You are different from those who do not reflect on the final outcome of a subject and do not empathize with it, because you can empathize with a life trapped within a particular system or framework. I also do not think you are wrong. All context must ultimately be judged according to the situation. In some respects, I think you are right. And that is a good thing. We are different people, we think differently, and I like that difference in thinking.
This is an interesting article backed by months of hard work. It offers perspectives we probably won't find anywhere else. The quote is pretty tangential.
I see this over and over again on HN: pick the weakest sentence, attack it, proclaim the article is rubbish, and move on. Why? There are no internet points awarded for maximum drive-by cynicism.
> By most measures, theirs was a great gig – logic that can excuse almost anything. “Saddam’s chef got a car every year,” Neel says. “That phrase, ‘it was a great gig,’ I think, actually runs the world. Like, ‘It was just business.’”
No, they did not. Arendt’s point about evil being banal is that the perpetrator’s behavior is motivated by the banal. A chef isn’t the perp. They’re adjacent to the monsters and they might be motivated by and fixated on the banality of doing great work.at most this is juxtaposition of evil and banality.
It depends. If one is Iraqi and Saddam asks him to be his chef, they're not refusing. They're probably dead if they refuse. Chef's are also sourced from other countries without disclosing the actual client. Once they land their situation is precarious and getting out is next to impossible. One just shuts up, cooks and takes the money.
It's like everyone else serving the dictator. They money may be good, but threat to life is real and scary.
I wouldn't vilify them. It's the proverbial golden cage. They can't get out even if they want to.
These chefs are effectively being held hostage. One had his passport withheld. Another was executed for giving a kid a stomachache. This isn’t careerism.
> “It goes back to Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil a bit,” says director Andrew Neel. “These everyday things that are beloved to us, like food, can take on an entirely different dimension within the context of a dictatorship.”
Is still a misquote/misrepresentation. People can understand a subject but still say wrong things about it.
Perhaps but using that quote to describe that relationship seemed very forced and ill-fitting. They tried to make it work but came up short because it wasn't an apt application of the quote.
I don't see a misrepresentation there - the need to eat and the love of good food is common to most of humanity and points to the fact that even dictators are also just people. Banal humans rather than cartoon villians.
> Hard to remain motivated to consume an article after reading this in the opening.
I think it's unfortunate to be so dismissive of an article over one quote from one person that you disagree with. You can still get something out of the piece if you open your mind a bit.
I really, really want to cite Joe Franks "The Dictator" here, notably the scene where he's eating the vegetables that have grown on himself (if I'm remembering correctly), but...I really doubt anyone will get the reference.
Tangential point but just to be clear, Ardent's book is a journalistic work not something that is proven or widely accepted. There are many who disagree with this idea that Einchman was just a simple person who took orders since there are several documented events where it's clear that he was a piece of shit nazi and fully embraced the role.
> In Eichmann Before Jerusalem (2014), the German historian Bettina Stangneth reveals another side to him besides the banal, seemingly apolitical man, who was just acting like any other ‘ordinary’ career-oriented bureaucrat. Drawing on audiotapes of interviews with Eichmann by the Nazi journalist William Sassen, Stangneth shows Eichmann as a self-avowed, aggressive Nazi ideologue strongly committed to Nazi beliefs, who showed no remorse or guilt for his role in the Final Solution – a radically evil Third Reich operative living inside the deceptively normal shell of a bland bureaucrat. Far from being ‘thoughtless’, Eichmann had plenty of thoughts – thoughts of genocide, carried out on behalf of his beloved Nazi Party. On the tapes, Eichmann admitted to a sort of Jekyll-and-Hyde dualism:
I, ‘[t]he cautious bureaucrat,’ that was me, yes indeed. But … this cautious bureaucrat was attended by a … a fanatical [Nazi] warrior, fighting for the freedom of my blood, which is my birthright…
Arendt completely missed this radically evil side of Eichmann when she wrote 10 years after the trial that there was ‘no sign in him of firm ideological convictions or of specific evil motives’. This only underscores the banality – and falsity – of the banality-of-evil thesis. And though Arendt never said that Eichmann was just an innocent ‘cog’ in the Nazi bureaucracy, nor defended Eichmann as ‘just following orders’ – both common misunderstandings of her findings on Eichmann – her critics, including Wolfe and Lipstadt, remain unsatisfied.
"There are hardly any excesses of the most crazed psychopath that cannot easily be duplicated by a normal kindly family man who just comes in to work every day and has a job to do."
But, uh, I don't think I'll necessarily assign that level of moral gravity to chef.
I ended up going back and reading the article. It’s not bad that it’s bad writing, it’s that the opening is sloppy and turned me off from reading the article instead of pulling me in the way a good lede should.
The subject is interesting, which is why I clicked the link in the first place. I might check out the documentary. But the misunderstanding/loose invocation of Arendt is a turnoff imo
He does figure briefly in the discussion at the end and doesn't qualify for the full treatment yet as he's a dictator-in-waiting. In any case what is there to say about McDonald's? The man is as boring and tasteless as he is appaling.
In the case of book reviews (and film reviews, I guess, since that's what this is) we often change the title to that of the book/film being reviewed.
We started doing this years ago after realizing that book review titles often do pirouettes on top of the book being reviewed; it's kind of a minor art form (a very minor art form!) and it doesn't serve the reader who just wants to know what-is-this.
In the present case I wouldn't call the article title a pirouette, but the pattern of following HN's original-title rule through an extra hop (from the review to the thing being reviewed) has held up so well that we do it pretty consistently now.
It's amazing how many sub-cases like this there are. Who would have thought that reviews need to be handled differently from non-reviews, but it actually does work better.
> “It goes back to Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil a bit,” says director Andrew Neel. “These everyday things that are beloved to us, like food, can take on an entirely different dimension within the context of a dictatorship.”
That’s not at all what Arendt was writing about. She was writing about those who do evil things are rarely the “evil” monsters we imagine but rather bureaucrats motivated by things like promotions. Hard to remain motivated to consume an article after reading this in the opening.
Hannah Arendt's 'banality of evil,' as I understand it, refers to human beings who are incapable of thinking. Within a massively bureaucratized and divided system, the immense guilt of killing someone is broken down into tiny, mundane tasks, like stamping a document. Because the system absorbs all individual moral friction, ordinary people can become cogs in a vast machinery of evil without ever questioning it. (In other words, the individual is not morally evil, but the system is designed to break things down so thoroughly that it renders those parts mindless, and that is the truly frightening part.)
In that sense, I can understand part of what the article is claiming. The phrase 'it was a great gig' seems to be the core of what it was trying to say. The high salary, the Mercedes, the abundant food supplies all point to the fact that the source of that funding came from the dictatorship.
An individual can be moral, but the system numbs them. That is why evil is not interesting; its desires are too simple. Wanting to earn more money, wanting to beat someone else, becoming consumed by such things. But in that regard, good is interesting. Because it means overcoming one's own contradictions, striving for the greater good, or even sacrificing one's life for the sake of everyone.
But I think that is overly is presumptuous though.
Some people have a different moral framework. Some people think Saddam’s brutal dictatorship was for the better because it was finally brought stability. Freedom is valued lower than stability.
There are also just simply amoral people too who just don’t care.
So I wouldn’t automatically assume someone working in an “evil” regime as “trapped as a cog” — they might frankly be OK with it. This is why sometimes just cutting off the head doesn’t enact change.
That is what makes the world interesting. You, unlike the unthinking people I was describing, are different. You are different from those who do not reflect on the final outcome of a subject and do not empathize with it, because you can empathize with a life trapped within a particular system or framework. I also do not think you are wrong. All context must ultimately be judged according to the situation. In some respects, I think you are right. And that is a good thing. We are different people, we think differently, and I like that difference in thinking.
This is an interesting article backed by months of hard work. It offers perspectives we probably won't find anywhere else. The quote is pretty tangential.
I see this over and over again on HN: pick the weakest sentence, attack it, proclaim the article is rubbish, and move on. Why? There are no internet points awarded for maximum drive-by cynicism.
Later:
> By most measures, theirs was a great gig – logic that can excuse almost anything. “Saddam’s chef got a car every year,” Neel says. “That phrase, ‘it was a great gig,’ I think, actually runs the world. Like, ‘It was just business.’”
I’d say they understood the meaning.
No, they did not. Arendt’s point about evil being banal is that the perpetrator’s behavior is motivated by the banal. A chef isn’t the perp. They’re adjacent to the monsters and they might be motivated by and fixated on the banality of doing great work.at most this is juxtaposition of evil and banality.
But didn’t the chef literally serve the dictator, pushing moral concerns aside by dispassionately performing their assigned tasks?
It depends. If one is Iraqi and Saddam asks him to be his chef, they're not refusing. They're probably dead if they refuse. Chef's are also sourced from other countries without disclosing the actual client. Once they land their situation is precarious and getting out is next to impossible. One just shuts up, cooks and takes the money.
It's like everyone else serving the dictator. They money may be good, but threat to life is real and scary.
I wouldn't vilify them. It's the proverbial golden cage. They can't get out even if they want to.
These chefs are effectively being held hostage. One had his passport withheld. Another was executed for giving a kid a stomachache. This isn’t careerism.
Point taken, but maybe it's not that different than anyone who has no choice in any military. They could just shoot you for "cowardice" too.
Perhaps they understand the meaning, but this:
> “It goes back to Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil a bit,” says director Andrew Neel. “These everyday things that are beloved to us, like food, can take on an entirely different dimension within the context of a dictatorship.”
Is still a misquote/misrepresentation. People can understand a subject but still say wrong things about it.
Perhaps but using that quote to describe that relationship seemed very forced and ill-fitting. They tried to make it work but came up short because it wasn't an apt application of the quote.
I don't see a misrepresentation there - the need to eat and the love of good food is common to most of humanity and points to the fact that even dictators are also just people. Banal humans rather than cartoon villians.
> Hard to remain motivated to consume an article after reading this in the opening.
I think it's unfortunate to be so dismissive of an article over one quote from one person that you disagree with. You can still get something out of the piece if you open your mind a bit.
I really, really want to cite Joe Franks "The Dictator" here, notably the scene where he's eating the vegetables that have grown on himself (if I'm remembering correctly), but...I really doubt anyone will get the reference.
Tangential point but just to be clear, Ardent's book is a journalistic work not something that is proven or widely accepted. There are many who disagree with this idea that Einchman was just a simple person who took orders since there are several documented events where it's clear that he was a piece of shit nazi and fully embraced the role.
> In Eichmann Before Jerusalem (2014), the German historian Bettina Stangneth reveals another side to him besides the banal, seemingly apolitical man, who was just acting like any other ‘ordinary’ career-oriented bureaucrat. Drawing on audiotapes of interviews with Eichmann by the Nazi journalist William Sassen, Stangneth shows Eichmann as a self-avowed, aggressive Nazi ideologue strongly committed to Nazi beliefs, who showed no remorse or guilt for his role in the Final Solution – a radically evil Third Reich operative living inside the deceptively normal shell of a bland bureaucrat. Far from being ‘thoughtless’, Eichmann had plenty of thoughts – thoughts of genocide, carried out on behalf of his beloved Nazi Party. On the tapes, Eichmann admitted to a sort of Jekyll-and-Hyde dualism:
I, ‘[t]he cautious bureaucrat,’ that was me, yes indeed. But … this cautious bureaucrat was attended by a … a fanatical [Nazi] warrior, fighting for the freedom of my blood, which is my birthright… Arendt completely missed this radically evil side of Eichmann when she wrote 10 years after the trial that there was ‘no sign in him of firm ideological convictions or of specific evil motives’. This only underscores the banality – and falsity – of the banality-of-evil thesis. And though Arendt never said that Eichmann was just an innocent ‘cog’ in the Nazi bureaucracy, nor defended Eichmann as ‘just following orders’ – both common misunderstandings of her findings on Eichmann – her critics, including Wolfe and Lipstadt, remain unsatisfied.
https://aeon.co/ideas/what-did-hannah-arendt-really-mean-by-...
"There are hardly any excesses of the most crazed psychopath that cannot easily be duplicated by a normal kindly family man who just comes in to work every day and has a job to do."
But, uh, I don't think I'll necessarily assign that level of moral gravity to chef.
I think your interpretation is a little rigid. And did you read the rest of the article?
I ended up going back and reading the article. It’s not bad that it’s bad writing, it’s that the opening is sloppy and turned me off from reading the article instead of pulling me in the way a good lede should.
The subject is interesting, which is why I clicked the link in the first place. I might check out the documentary. But the misunderstanding/loose invocation of Arendt is a turnoff imo
Seeing this at #1 on HN, I'm genuinely surprised it isn't about Orange Jesus.
He does figure briefly in the discussion at the end and doesn't qualify for the full treatment yet as he's a dictator-in-waiting. In any case what is there to say about McDonald's? The man is as boring and tasteless as he is appaling.
There's only so much that one can write about McDonalds burgers and Diet Coke.
You forget about two scoops of ice creams because there is no level of pettiness he can’t sink to, to show he’s better than everyone.[1]
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2017/05/11/politics/trump-time-magazine-...
The man is by all accounts not a hedonist when it comes to food and drinks.
Keepin' it strait!
His weight begs to differ
Not the original title
In the case of book reviews (and film reviews, I guess, since that's what this is) we often change the title to that of the book/film being reviewed.
We started doing this years ago after realizing that book review titles often do pirouettes on top of the book being reviewed; it's kind of a minor art form (a very minor art form!) and it doesn't serve the reader who just wants to know what-is-this.
In the present case I wouldn't call the article title a pirouette, but the pattern of following HN's original-title rule through an extra hop (from the review to the thing being reviewed) has held up so well that we do it pretty consistently now.
It's amazing how many sub-cases like this there are. Who would have thought that reviews need to be handled differently from non-reviews, but it actually does work better.