Fascism on the Rise Archives - KDA Keeping Democracy Alive Podcast & Radio Show · Burt Cohen

Mindless Banality Spreads Quickly. And It’s Evil.

·59 min·3 clips

Conscience, she says, is 'knowing with' and depends on thinking about your own thinking.

1. Keeping Democracy Alive features Elizabeth Minnick discussing Hannah Arendt and the phrase 'the banality of evil' through her book The Evil of Banality on the Life and Death Importance of Thinking. 2. Bert Kohn hosts the conversation, and Minnick is identified as a philosopher, former New School doctoral student under Hannah Arendt, and author of books including Transforming Knowledge and The Fox in the Hen House. 3. The episode asks why ordinary habits, lies, and cliches become politically dangerous when Donald Trump, book bans, and public complacency are in view. 4. Minnick defines banality as 'the ordinary with the life sucked out of it' and says useful conventions become dangerous when people stop thinking attentively. 5. She says people need to be 'startled back into thought,' because intellectual autopilot and self-lying weaken conscience. 6. Minnick explains her expanded edition with a new piece called 'Why Not Lie?' and says lies to oneself change what a person can think and remember. 7. She ties conscience to 'conscientia, knowing with' and says self-watching is essential if people are to retain conscience. 8. Minnick says Hannah Arendt was attacked after Eichmann in Jerusalem, often by people who had not read the book she was being criticized for. 9. She argues that banality spreads quickly because it is 'mindless' and 'superficial,' which makes book banning and rumor easy to repeat. 10. Minnick distinguishes 'evil' from ordinary badness by using it for horrors such as enslavement and genocide that break normal categories of speech and thought. 11. She says some large harms are 'intensive' and brief, while 'extensive' evils unfold over time and require 'planning,' 'efficiencies,' and 'administration.' 12. She links extensive evil to many participants, saying a figurehead alone cannot change a country without circles of people carrying messages, orders, and support. 13. Minnick says political lying tries to redefine reality, then forces institutions and public life to conform to the lie. 14. She describes a 'firehose approach' of spectacle and untruths that keeps people watching, confused, and unable to tell what is real. 15. She argues that attacks on cultural and educational institutions aim at the 'commons of the mind,' because shared meanings help people think and communicate. 16. Minnick says history matters because changing history can loosen identity and make people easier to unmoor from common memory. 17. She and Bert Kohn talk in a conversational interview style, with Kohn pressing examples from Trump, Bill Maher, law firms, and the targeting of trans people. 18. The tone is serious and analytical, with Minnick moving from philosophy to concrete political examples and occasional references to her teaching and research history. 19. Best for listeners interested in Arendt, authoritarianism, and moral philosophy. 20. Skip if you want light politics or minimal theory.

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