From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it’s different. Consider again that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar”, every “supreme leader”, every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. — Carl Sagan, 1994
Evil is banal. That was the conclusion of Hannah Arendt, who as a refugee from Hitler’s Reich had firsthand experience of evil. When we reflect on the roots of evil through time, it seems history confirms Arendt’s position that the course of evil is entirely predictable and therefore completely banal.
Hannah Arendt’s name appears more frequently lately, in the context of war and other outbursts of evil. For some time I have wanted to learn more about Arendt and there’s a good, brief summary of her philosophy in this episode of the Philosophize This! podcast. I find her words compelling and drawn from the truth of her experience. Arendt seems suddenly, and critically, relevant. That’s because, recently, there has been an increase in evil on this pale blue dot in the universe that we call Earth, and memory of Arendt’s approach to evil would do us well.
Here we are, in 2022, when tyrants use technology to vie for the minds and the time of their subjects, and seek to subjugate those of us who would have nothing to do with them. The banality of the tyrants is their predictability, and because a tyrant cannot win the hearts of his victims he inevitably resorts to force. This has always been so and will always be so, and so the tyrant is banal.
The difference between past and present tyranny is that there are now tyrants on this pale blue dot that we call Earth who hold the power to destroy life for all of us. How utterly banal. What’s more banal is the increasing numbers of contestants for national rule who seek to emulate the tyrants. Banality is self-loving, but to the rest of us it is pathetic.
The thing about tyrants that makes them predictable is their complete absence of imagination. There is an endless void in their heads where for the rest of us there is imagination.
The problem the tyrants have with imagination is their short-sightedness, because they are blind to the effects of their causes. Time is, after all, the sequence of cause and effect. The rest of us, who are far more imaginatively intelligent than any tyrant, understand that we have limits in time, but the tyrant sees none. That’s because the tyrant fails to look back in time, to reflect and to arrive at the same conclusion the rest of us have already achieved. It’s the conclusion that nobody loves a tyrant, and all the tyrant succeeds in achieving is a sad end to his short limit in time.
In all of recorded time, which we call history, no tyrant has ever or will ever persist as any form of life that is desirable. Tyrants always reach a sad and lonely limit in time, a brick wall in history while the memory of the rest of us goes on with no limit to our potential in time — individually, or in combination.
History does not celebrate tyrants. Tyrants are reviled and hated. What human in their right mind would love a Hitler, knowing the crimes he committed against humanity? Tyrants always lose, because they never fail to play a losing game against nature. If there is one thing in which nature will forever exceed humans it is nature’s power to sustain itself. By its very definition, nature is self-sustaining, always has been, and always will be, while nothing the tyrant does, has done, or will ever do, is sustainable over time. That’s because nobody loves the tyrants and everyone wants to erase their memory after they die. And all tyrants die, a fact of life that tyrants tend to forget. What human, in their right mind, would want to sustain memory of a tyrant beyond death?
If the tyrants possessed an iota of imagination, they would see this in history and they would appreciate the vast potential of the rest of us. But they don’t, because they lack the power of imagination, in that void in their heads.
And so while the tyrants terrorize the pale blue dot that we call Earth, darkening the lives of so many and threatening everyone else, the rest of us who aren’t tyrants can be assured that, in the final account of time, we are far more powerful than the petty, banal, pathetic tyrant. Woe to the tyrant, for the fate of the tyrant is written in time itself which the tyrant is too blind to see.
Open your eyes, tyrants, for your fate awaits you and memory of you will be erased. Time does not tolerate imperfections, as imperfect as you are.
Courtesy, James Myers in medium.com, dated : Aug 2022
– Manimozhi Ilango
My Fatty Brain Cell 