Goats who must atone for the trivialization of evil – an annotation to Hannah Arendt’s philosophy

How could one explain the paradox of diluting responsibility in an ocean of guilt, in the most "rational" of the worlds, within a "rules-based international order"?

It's frustrating to see that when a mother steals a half cheese wheel to feed her malnourished children, she could get a custodial sentence of several years in a prison, isn’t it? It is downright Kafkaesque to live in a world where an ordinary citizen who fails to send a proof of payment for a 50 euros fine to the police, or who misses out a comma in his personal data update statement, immediately has his bank accounts blocked, his salary garnished and, potentially, his valuables sold, right? 

Eventually, it is something “worthy” of the times of Medieval Inquisition that someone labelled as “negationist” or “conspiracist” is nowadays burnt at the digital stake just because he draws attention to the fact that the emperor has no new clothes, but he is naked and exposing his chunks in public. We already know that the “heretic” would be immediately barred from public life and, eventually, thrown outside the walls of the city, extra muros. But how is it that global criminals, systemic criminals and their accomplices are immune to liability? 

The explanation is not simple. Perhaps a relatively easy way to understand this is by referring to a scene from a movie running on Netflix these days. Painkiller is the romanticized story of the US opioid scandal – ‘medicines’ that have caused more than 300,000 deaths and millions of addicts. These pills, cynically named "pain killers", caused the heaviest suffering for Afro-Americans, Hispanics and the poor, i.e. precisely those regarded as main candidates for “rainbow happiness” by all the woke and progressivist policies. Purdue – the main painkillers producer – escaped liability through a multi-billion-euro deal with the prosecutors (deal in which it admitted no guilt) and its shareholders escaped through a friendly bankruptcy procedure in the state of Texas. The tens of billions of dollars of compensation due to the victims or their descendants are buried in the proceedings as each day goes by. They will, of course, be forgotten, not very soon, but forgotten.

One of the characters of the film has a memorable line. When asked ‘what do we do if people start dying from these poison pills’, the guy replies: “I do not care, I am not afraid, because (i) the pills were authorised to be placed on the market by the Food and Drug Administration and (ii) the doctors prescribed them, taking responsibility and making good money from the very fact of prescribing them as a medicine; so let's make some billions of dollars”.

Therefore, if the authorities have endorsed a crime (out of stupidity or corruption), the guilt is shared with the authorities. If the doctors prescribed the poison, the blame is shared with the doctors. If people have asked for these pills (for example, because they have become addicted to it), the blame is shared with the victims, too. If influencers, advertising companies, and the media have made money promoting these killer pills, it's their fault, too. 

Hence the conclusion that if everyone is guilty, no one is actually guilty anymore. Like a drop of poison in an aseptic pool, the guilt of a single man or a small, but precisely defined group dilutes and thus becomes harmless, non-punishable. Collective guilt dilutes individual guilt. It blurs the identity of the killer. It eliminates the person's responsibility. In this way, however satanic or cynical it would actually be, evil gets trivialized. 

An entire civilization becomes part of a crime and ends up no longer being able to distinguish daily evil from principled good. People who would normally do no harm to anyone would end up doing harm only by entering this stream of evil, even without perceiving the horror of the deeds of the crowd to which they belong. This is what, according to Hannah Arendt's explanation, led German Nazi society of 1933-1945 to tolerate of the Holocaust. The trivialization of evil causes the most sinister manifestations of hell to be seen and felt on Earth.

All the “useful idiots” of totalitarianism, pseudo-science and marketing are willingly joining this state of play, as well as other brainwashed individuals who sincerely believe that by carrying the labels of ‘science’, race superiority and progress right on their foreheads, they automatically belong to a select club of heroic and glorious elites, entitled to crush the ‘inferior’ people, the medievals and the skeptics. What’s catastrophic for humanity is that the devilish evil became like a tiger in the room: it is in sight, but can no longer be perceived. 

Hence this debilitating conclusion for the rational people, who might claim to have learned something from history: most people allow themselves to be drawn into this current of trivialised evil, then become accustomed to it, regard it as ‘natural’, and unconsciously wash away the sins of the real perpetrators by dilution into the crowd. 

In a sea of umbrellas that protect us from rain or from "fire domes", even Satan can hide. However, there are people who refuse to pretend to be blind and insensitive to the striking smell of crime. Thanks to them, scapegoats will be identified and punished. Still, this statement is not a trivialization of the idea of justice, but a severe warning to all who are truly guilty. No one knows WHO will be the scapegoat, thus ANYONE can be in the goat's shoes.