Currently there is an intellectual faction re-examining Hannah
Arendt and the intellectual aspect of her relationship with her longtime
Nazi-sycophant lover, the philosopher Martin Heidegger. This is leading to a reinterpretation of The
Banality of evil, a phrase coined by Hannah Arendt and incorporated in the
title of her 1963 work Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the
Banality of Evil.
Slate article writer, Ron Rosenbaum,
says, specifically “a further discrediting of the most overused, misused,
abused pseudo-intellectual phrase in our language: the banality of evil.
The banality of the banality of evil, the fatuousness of it, has long
been fathomless, but perhaps now it will be consigned to the realm of the
deceitful and disingenuous as well.”
Here’s the link.
Knock your socks off if you want to watch a passel of intellectuals
perform the equivalent of intellectual masturbation. <link>
Now to MY point, they do this sort of stuff on a routine
basis, our intellectuals, specifically those who drive the cutting edge of
culture because their idiocy gets all the press and their every utterance is
taken as intellectual gospel, and if it has ZERO relationship to common sense
it is literally worshipped as the new word of God from their fellow
[ironically] agnostics and atheists. Did
NOBODY examine the clever catch phrase The Banality of Evil for intellectual
gravitas BEFORE it became the utterance dejure for a generation of pseudo
intellectuals too lazy to actually think for themselves? No, it did not!
Well . . . that’s not precisely true. People DID point out that there’s really
nothing banal about evil or its source.
It can be ironic, sure, and it can be relatively small, yes, but
banal? While I generally discourage
clinging to dictionary definitions in regards to popularly used terms, let’s
dig up a reasonably accurate definition of the word as these elitists used its
meaning: Common
in a boring
way, to the point of being predictable; containing nothing new or fresh.
When facing the Nazi gas chambers or being worked to death
on starvation rations and living in hideous conditions simply because you are
not one of the master race then there is NOTHING common in a boring way, to the
point of being predictable; containing nothing new or fresh about it! People DID point that out to the intellectual
elites at the time but did so using mere common sense and historical data and
first hand accounts, sources spurned by such people.
Such sources are ALWAYS spurned by intellectual elites who
WANT to glom onto the newest intellectual fad to flitter out of universities or
their cocktail circuits [frequently the same thing].
So NOW, about forty-five years AFTER the phrase The Banality
of Evil has done its damage throughout the world because intellectual elites
just ADORE embracing catch phrases without ever applying common sense to the
process, only NOW are our intellectuals considering
catching up with people in possession of common sense and meaningful life
experiences. Then they wonder why they
are so often mocked.
You have to have intellectual elites and you need to pay
attention to what they say and frequently you need to heed them and change your
evil [or at least unthinkingly banal] and wicked ways for the better as a
result, but you need also to be aware that these are the same people who first
EMBRACED the phrase The Banality of Evil as a freaking UNIVERSAL TRUTH and
therefore are never to be blindly trusted to be able to distinguish between
shit and Shinola when it really counts.
So . . . while it turns out that The Banality of Evil is
being re-examined, the concept of The Banality of Idiocy does definitely apply
to this nation’s intellectual elites. What
harm they cause while being routinely intellectually banal in a common and
boring way, to the point of being predictable; containing nothing new or fresh
about it.
