Cain proves to be a real pest (a nice observation on the persistence of evil), and things go from bad to worse.
The amorality of the killers, as they dress up in costumes or matter-of-factly stage-manage scenes of gruesome brutality, is repellent but also curiously fascinating, as Hannah Arendt's observation about the "banality of evil" is given a chilling postmodern twist.
Writing in the 14th Century, Saint Gregory Palamás made a similar observation regarding the nature of evil: "It should be remembered that no evil thing is evil insofar as it exists, but insofar as it is turned aside from the activity appropriate of it, and thus from the end assigned to this activity".
Those observations bring to mind Hannah Arendt's famous description of "the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil" she observed in Adolf Eichmann, the high-ranking Nazi who helped orchestrate the Holocaust.
In "Eichmann in Jerusalem," one of the most poignant and important works of 20th-century philosophy, Hannah Arendt made an observation about what she called "the banality of evil".
I learned that our government was quite capable of its own kind of evil, which was an interesting observation.
Today, the 19th-century critic John Ruskin's observation that "the neglect of art... has been of evil consequence to the Christian world" sounds so overwrought to us — so filled with moral outrage — as to verge on the unintentionally hilarious.
Her observations, first published in this magazine, on what she eventually dubbed the "banality of evil," exhibited by the Nazis' tidy, carefully monitored control of the Final Solution, are, sadly, timeless.
Arendt's observation of the "coexistence of normality and bottomless cruelty" in Eichmann led her to coin the term "banality of evil".
The Soviet Union was an evil empire; Osama is evil; the axis of evil is evil.
