“Check your premises.” Ayn Rand
There is a social media format that I have recently become helplessly addicted to: video chats between strangers. Max Veifer, an Israeli influencer, is one of these guys who calls up random people on the “friendship platform” Chatrulenka to engage them in conversations about Israel. This has naturally led to a wide range of reactions, from a young Palestinian woman in Gaza who said she loved and supported Israel, to Australian, Austrian and Romanian neo-Nazis feeling edgy with their Hitler salutes, threatening to kill Veifer, or boasting about their SS ancestors (“we will do it again”), admittedly a more common and far less interesting reaction.
In one notable incident in February this year, Veifer connected with two nurses from Bankstown Hospital in Sydney, who made antisemitic remarks during their conversation, boasting about intending to kill and in fact having killed and harmed Jewish patients. The video quickly went viral and prompted investigations by both health authorities and law enforcement in Australia.
But hardly anything I have seen so far—you should, again, be warned that these videos are very addictive—has been as disturbing as a chat Veifer had with a man with a Kuwaiti VPN. The man (probably in his 30s, suit, slightly chubby, beard) sat in what seems like a travel agency or similar office and put on a happy smile when he realized his chat partner was an Israeli. To Veifer’s standard opening question “What do you think about the Jewish people?”, the Kuwaiti said, in very broken English: “I love Hamas … Hamas kill babies in Israel? No problem!”, laughing derisively. Veifer: “So you support the killing of babies?”, to which the man replied: “Me kill babies in Israel”. Veifer, not grasping what the man just said, again asked: “So you support the killing of babies?”, to which the man replied—smiling happily—“baby, mama”—imitating a rifle shot—“AK [47], AK [47] … me, Zakim [a city in Southern Israel that was attacked by Hamas on Oct 7], baby, mama”—and non-verbally imitated two rifle shots. Veifer, clearly misunderstanding what the man had just announced, then asked: “So that’s what you wanna do?” The man, not answering: “Me kill baby, but then mama”—mockingly imitates crying, then the loading of a machine gun, and another shot—“so I kill mama”. The conversation soon ended, with Veifer visibly distressed, but unsuspecting of this man and the deed he had just so derisively boasted about on live media.
“Me kill babies in Israel”. Man on Instagram
Veifer's reactive unwillingness to recognize that the man had just admitted to multiple murder—“Me kill babies in Zakim, Israel”—may have been a normal human reflex in this situation: think of when you witness something horrid and “play it down” as a first reflex. But the viewer was left with the impression of having witnessed evil in its purest form, which came to life through the mocking disparagement of its victims. We may call acts evil, but only men who are proud of such deeds, refuse to repent, or even stage themselves as victims—think of Eichmann’s testimony in Jerusalem—are viewed as thoroughly evil. And the banality of evil may sometimes manifest in the banality of a video call.
Saying “history is always the history of violence” explains nothing in its abstractness. Evil is always only present in the partial, the broken, the fragment. Like the slaughter of the Bibas babies in the hands of Palestinian terrorists on October 7—the younger child still bore the finger marks of its strangling around the neck. Or the “retaliation” massacre in Serbia’s Kragujevac in 1941, in which Wehrmacht soldiers lined up 300 schoolchildren for mass execution, because they ran out of adult people to kill (“100 Serbs or Jews for 1 German soldier”). Only concrete manifestations by which men act in the name of the unspeakable leave the impression of something bottomless, defying explanation and rationalization.
And yet, we must try to make sense of the phenomenon of evil. Or must we?
Confronting and combatting evil seems to present us with a specific conundrum: if we try to explain it, we run the risk of its justification. In most cases, child molesters have suffered through molestation in their own childhood and in this way can themselves be portrayed as victims. But does the explanation minimize the crime? If the meaning of civilization is to “fear no evil”, then confrontation obviously cannot be avoided. It is natural to shun thinking about painful and distressing deeds, and yet the human mind can’t help but wanting to understand. The question “shall we make sense of evil?” can then only be a rhetorical one—because we are always-already trying to understand.
The question “shall we make sense of evil?” can then only be a rhetorical one—because we are always-already trying to understand.
It can still be argued that pure evil cannot be rationalized to begin with, because the nature of evil itself is irrational. This was certainly the view of Theodor W. Adorno, who viewed bourgeois society as an object of critique possible by the means of rational logic, as bourgeois society itself was rational, even deeply so. But the means by which alone we can judge objects, our cognitive conceptual apparatus, failed when confronted with the “irrationality” of Auschwitz. This of course didn’t stop Adorno from writing lengthy volumes about Nazism—in fact, this was his philosophy’s primary interest. The human desire to make sense cannot be eclipsed by judging the object of one’s inquiry to be inappropriate for inquiry. In short, the judgment of evil being “irrational” is itself a rational statement. And this is a good place to start for rationalizing evil without justifying it.
What is therefore at stake is not the “failure” of our cognitive apparatus per se to identify evil—but rather the misconception about its function. Its function, even by empirical measures, is to cause confusion. The best illustration of this is Orwell’s Doublethink. If two statements cannot be true at the same time, and yet we are made to believe both at the same time, thought itself is denied, and with it, the judgment of something as good (or bad).
Accordingly, the function of evil is to corrupt the relationship between the logically true/valid and the good. But once we remind ourselves of the direct correspondence between logical and moral judgment, the challenge of evil seems less mystical. The means of our cognitive apparatus then allow us to identify an evil set of beliefs built on a limited set of logically faulty propositions, i.e., the reversal of cause and effect, self-contradiction (Orwell’s Doublethink), the inversion of the factual and the non-factual (inversions in general), and infinite regress. The last, for example, was the case during Covid, when we were told that we would have to sacrifice everything we ever believed in to “protect the vulnerable”, who would never be vulnerable enough to deserve protection, but who would always have to pass on their vulnerable status to someone else, so that everyone ultimately became a justified target of state intervention. Or, regarding self-contradiction, remember the claim that the vaccines were “safe and effective”, while at the same time, it was claimed that that the “unvaccinated” pose a constant risk to the vaccinated.
