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Evil of Banality

On The Life and Death Importance of Thinking
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How is it possible to murder a million people one by one? Hatred, fear, madness of one or many people cannot explain it. No one can be so possessed for the months, even years, required for genocides, slavery, deadly economic exploitation, sexual trafficking of children. In The Evil of Banality, Elizabeth Minnich argues for a tragic yet hopeful explanation. "Extensive evil," her term for systematic horrific harm-doing, is actually carried out, not by psychopaths, but by people like your quiet next door neighbor, your ambitious colleagues. There simply are not enough moral monsters for extensive evil, nor enough saints for extensive good. In periods of extensive evil, people little different from you and me do its work for no more than a better job, a raise, the house of the family "disappeared" last week. So how can there be hope? The seeds of such evils are right there in our ordinary lives. They are neither mysterious nor demonic. If we avoid romanticizing and so protecting ourselves from responsibility for the worst and the best of which humans are capable, we can prepare to say no to extensive evil - to act accurately, together, and above all in time, before great harm-doing has become the daily work of 'normal' people.
Acknowledgments Introduction:What Were They Thinking? PART I: EVIL-THINKING THE UNTHINKABLE Chapter 1: Truth and Fiction: Camus' The Plague Chapter 2: Thinking about Not-Thinkingh Chapter 3: Changing Minds Chapter 4: Escaping Explanations, Excuses Chapter 5: Meaning, Truth, Rationality, Knowledge, and Thinking Chapter 6: Romanticizing Evil Chapter 7: Intensive Evil, Extensive Evil Chapter 8: The Ordinary for Good and Ill PART II: GOODNESS: WHAT IS TO BE DONE? Chapter 9: Phillip Hallie: It Takes a Village Chapter 10: Preparing for Extensive Goodness? Chapter 11: Looking for Good Beyond the Village Chapter 12: The Banality of Goodness? PART III: FERTILE GROUNDS FOR EXTENSIVE EVIL Chapter 13: Seeding Prepared Ground Chapter 14: Large-Scale Enclosures: Meaning Systems Chapter 15: Physical Enclosures of Bodies, Minds Chapter 16: Laying out the Strands Afterword: Teaching Thinking Notes Bibliography: Sources and Resources Index Author Biography
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