Hannah Arendt coined the expression “the banality of evil” in her work Eichmann in Jerusalem, when analyzing the trial of the Nazi official Adolf Eichmann, responsible for the logistics that led millions of Jews to the extermination camps. Arendt did not see in him an ideological monster, but an obedient bureaucrat — an ordinary man, incapable of thinking for himself, who carried out atrocious orders without ever questioning their moral meaning. In that very normality lay the true horror: evil does not need fanatics; it only needs docile people, accustomed to obey and to look away.

Systems based on oppression do not endure because of tyrants, but because of the daily cooperation of “normal” peoplewho accept, without resistance, the logic of power. The twentieth century is filled with such examples, but their relevance is disturbingly present today. In the United States, thousands of employees join ICE — the immigration enforcement agency — to hunt down human beings whose only “crime” is to seek refuge. For each migrant captured, a financial reward is offered: a number that transforms human dignity into a transaction.

In Israel, more than eighty percent of society justifies the siege of Gaza and the systematic destruction of an entire people, presenting as “self-defense” what is, in reality, a process of ethnic cleansing. This collective acceptance of horror does not arise from pure fanaticism, but from an ideological machinery that normalizes the suffering of others and strips the victim of humanity.

The banality of evil, therefore, does not belong to the Nazi past; it is a structural element of the neoliberal present. It is the moral glue that keeps together a system demanding obedience, performance, and silence. It turns us into functional pieces of a machinery that spins endlessly, powered by indifference and by the fear of losing comfort.

Each time we justify injustice in the name of order, work, or security, we help — however imperceptibly — to sustain a structure of domination that feeds on our passivity. Evil, as Arendt taught us, does not need heroes, only ordinary people willing to look away while the world burns.

But normality can never serve as a justification for the unjustifiable. That is why breaking the board becomes an ethical necessity: only disobedience can open the way to a new normality — one in which the human prevails over the useful, and conscience over obedience.