The Banality of Evil - April 11, 1961

On April 11, 1961, the trial of Adolf Eichmann opened in Jerusalem, and a philosopher named Hannah Arendt walked in expecting to see a monster. What she found instead was a man so disturbingly ordinary that it produced one of the most controversial intellectual arguments of the 20th century. But decades later, new evidence raised a question that cut even deeper: what if the ordinariness itself was the final deception? Today, we explore the trial that forced the world to ask whether evil requires evil people and why that question has never stopped being urgent.