Arbeit macht frei

By Jason Lim

"Work sets you free." These words probably formed the most ironic phrase ever witnessed in the 20th century as they greeted millions of Jews who were marched under the wrought iron gates of Auschwitz.

Jan. 27 marked the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by Soviet troops, a place where Nazis systemically killed 1.1 million Jews.

The evil of the Holocaust is still smeared across the collective psyche of the world. One cannot deny that the Holocaust imparted a horrific lesson that the post-WWII world used to baseline the morality norms that we enjoy today and still seek to uphold (albeit haphazardly) against all attempts to debase it. However, I fear that the depth of the trauma becomes shallower as years go by for a world that might prefer to forget, running the risk that we might one day have to learn the lesson all over again.

The enormity of the crime that was the Holocaust often masks the "banality of evil" that perpetrated and facilitated the continent-wide mobilization to kill. In her seminal work, "Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil," Hannah Arendt writes that Eichmann embodied "the dilemma between the unspeakable horror of the deeds and the undeniable ludicrousness of the man who perpetrated them."

It is often the most ordinary and unremarkable men who perpetrate unspeakable crimes. It is the unthinking everyday bureaucracy in its effort to constantly engineer operational effectiveness and efficiencies in all processes that ever so consistently and fearfully turns the machinery of the state to such crushing ends. It's all just a part of the routine.

Evil is certainly not existential or profound. It's unbearably shallow. But in its shallowness lies the horror. As Arendt wrote to scholar Gerhard Scholem: "You are quite right, I changed my mind and no longer speak of 'radical evil.' It is indeed my opinion now that evil is never 'radical,' that it is only extreme, and that it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension. It can overgrow and lay waste to the whole world precisely because it spreads like a fungus on the surface. It is 'thought-defying,' as I said, because thought tries to reach some depth, to go to the roots, and the moment it concerns itself with evil, it is frustrated because there is nothing. That is its 'banality.' Only the good has depth that can be radical."

In Haaretz, I came across one of the most astounding stories I have ever read about this shallowness in evil. Swiss journalist Sacha Batthyany wrote a book titled "A Crime in the Family," describing a dinner party that his aunt, a prominent aristocrat, hosted in 1945.

"In March 1945," it said, "just before the end of World War II, Margit held a large party in the town of Rechnitz on the Austrian-Hungarian border to fete her Nazi friends. She, the daughter and heiress of European baron and tycoon Heinrich Thyssen, and her friends drank and danced the night away.

"At the height of the evening, just for fun, 12 of the guests boarded trucks or walked to a nearby field, where 180 Jewish slave laborers who had been building fortifications were assembled. They had already been forced to dig a large pit, strip, and get down on their knees. The guests took turns shooting them to death before returning to the party."

Apparently, the guests then returned to have dessert. The horror of this story comes less from the killing itself but the casual ― dare I say shallow? ― way by which the killing happened. The taking of so many lives was just a sporty activity that provided some mild enjoyment to the guests of a dinner party. It was a game. An amusement. Mindless entertainment. Nothing deeply intentional or aspirational about this terrible crime. Eat food. Talk. Drink. Kill some Jews. Eat some more.

The Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE) that took place in 1971 echoes the dangers of evil lurking in routines, norms, and unthinking shallowness. Young men were divided into the roles of prisoner and guard and put in a prison-like environment. Even under such artificial division, regular and ordinary college students who were chosen to be guards, when encouraged by an authority figure, were willing to shock their fellow students who were assigned to be prisoners with what they believed to be painful and potentially lethal levels of electricity.

A make-believe social construct was able to elicit behavioral norms that uncomfortably mirror what happened just 30 years before in the Holocaust.

Arendt does leave us hope: "Under conditions of terror most people will comply but some people will not … Humanly speaking, no more is required, and no more can reasonably be asked, for this planet to remain a place fit for human habitation." But not complying when everyone else is complying takes thinking, the kind that rouses us out of our everyday shallowness. Such thinking takes courage. No wonder it's hard.

Jason Lim (jasonlim@msn.com) is a Washington, D.C.-based expert on innovation, leadership and organizational culture.