“The tyrants don’t concern me. What concerns me are those who are blindly obedient.”
That line, simple and unadorned, captures the essence of the modern dilemma. Tyrants have always existed. Every century gives birth to its strongmen, its ideologues, its bureaucrats with the soul of a warden. What changes—what determines whether tyranny thrives or collapses—is how many ordinary people are willing to follow orders. The machinery of oppression is never built by monsters alone; it’s assembled by millions of tiny, harmless hands.
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The philosopher Hannah Arendt understood this better than anyone. In her reporting on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, she coined the phrase the banality of evil to describe how ordinary men commit extraordinary crimes, not out of passion or hatred,
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