It began, as intellectual inquiries often do these days, with a cold call over the internet. On a quiet summer afternoon, moral philosopher and author Susan Neiman received an email from a British podcast production company interested in collaborating on a project exploring "modern manifestations of the concept of evil." Having spent decades studying the philosophy of ethics, Neiman agreed to a short, off-the-record conversation via Zoom to discuss the themes of her foundational work on the subject.
Instead of a nuanced philosophical discussion about systemic ethics, however, the conversation immediately veered into sensationalism. The serious young producer on the screen eagerly asked Neiman if she had heard about a recent, gruesome case of cannibalism in Florida.
Neiman’s reaction was immediate and unconcealed disappointment. When she told him that if that was what the podcast was interested in, she could not help them, the producer was baffled. Why not?
The answer, Neiman argues, should have been clear from her previous writing, which entirely avoids the gruesome true-crime spectacles that saturate global tabloids and streaming documentaries. Cases like cannibalism or serial murder are exceedingly rare, she maintains, and their primary cultural function is to distract the public from evils that are far more common, systemic, and infinitely more dangerous. When pressed on what kind of evils she meant, Neiman pointed to political violence—such as waging wars merely to hold onto political power, or slashing social safety nets and public aid that poor people rely on for survival simply to finance tax cuts for the wealthy.
The producer acknowledged the truth in her statement, but quickly pivoted back to the macabre, recounting the tale of an ordinary man in an ordinary town who had murdered a couple in their garage and was caught eating their faces. "Don’t you wonder how that could happen?" he asked.
This exchange captures the central thesis of Neiman’s upcoming book, Call It Evil: Understanding the Trump Era, published by W. W. Norton & Company. In her analysis, the cultural obsession with extraordinary, gory crimes reveals a deep-seated psychological impulse: humanity’s persistent preference to externalize evil rather than examine its more mundane, institutional forms. By portraying evil as something so utterly alien to normal human behavior that it feels disgusting and theatrical, society avoids confronting the harder, less cinematic questions about everyday corruption and institutional cruelty.
This dynamic forms a massive commercial market for horror films, true-crime podcasts, and sensational news stories. Cynical critics argue that humans are hardwired to enjoy observing cruelty from a safe distance, while others view the fascination with rare atrocities as a subconscious substitute for a much more terrifying question: What accounts for the systemic, structural evils that have become so commonplace they form the invisible background of modern life? Society obsesses over individuals who take pleasure in direct, bloody cruelty precisely because those individuals do not reflect who we are—and because recognizing the alternative, which is the quiet erosion of human empathy and institutional integrity, is too unsettling to bear.
This tendency to dress up evil in "satanic greatness" was something Hannah Arendt understood with remarkable prescience. Arendt’s landmark 1963 work, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, generated more furious commentary and philosophical controversy than any other book of the twentieth century. Arendt herself inadvertently complicated the discourse by insisting her book was journalism rather than philosophy, fueling profound misunderstandings. Her core argument was never that evil itself is inherently banal, but rather that the people who perpetrate it usually are.
Covering the Jerusalem trial of Adolf Eichmann—one of the primary architects of the Nazi genocide of the European Jews—Arendt observed a balding, nearsighted bureaucrat who looked more like an anxious accountant than a demonic mastermind. Eichmann was not driven by raging personal hatred or an ecstatic pleasure in cruelty; he was simply a punctilious careerist who did what was expected of him after joining the SS in 1932. He was motivated not by deep malevolence, but by a staggering lack of thought. As Arendt famously wrote to her friend Gershom Sholem, evil possesses no depth or demonic dimension; it can overgrow and lay waste to the world precisely because it spreads like a fungus on the surface.
While later historical research, such as Bettina Stangneth’s 2011 book Eichmann Before Jerusalem, revealed that Eichmann was far more ideologically committed and self-aware in private exile than he pretended to be on the witness stand, Arendt’s foundational insight remains vital: mass atrocities are rarely committed by cartoonish monsters. They require ordinary people who are willing to abandon their integrity for institutional advancement or personal convenience.
This disturbing reality was famously demonstrated in social psychology by Stanley Milgram’s 1961 experiments at Yale University. Seeking to understand how millions of ordinary citizens could become complicit in mass murder, Milgram instructed everyday subjects to administer what they believed were increasingly dangerous electric shocks to unseen learners. Even as actors cried out in simulated agony from the next room, nearly half of the participants continued to crank up the voltage simply because an authority figure in a white lab coat told them it was necessary for science. Milgram’s grim conclusion was that a system of death camps could find willing, compliant personnel in any medium-sized American town.
The difficulty of defining and categorizing evil remains a central challenge for philosophers and political leaders alike. In the modern era, political figures frequently attempt to rank evils based on the visibility or savagery of the perpetrator rather than the total damage inflicted upon the world. Following the publication of the Abu Ghraib torture photographs, then-U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld insisted that the abuses were wrong, but argued they were "not the same thing as cutting off someone’s head in front of a video camera." Similar rhetorical strategies have been deployed during contemporary conflicts, such as the ongoing war in Gaza, where leaders emphasize the unique, visceral horror of terrorist atrocities to frame their own military campaigns as defensive necessities.
Neiman argues that searching for a neat philosophical essence or a single formula to define evil is largely futile. Major philosophical concepts—like justice, beauty, and judgment—consistently elude rigid definitions because they are dynamic and deeply contested. Instead of seeking a mathematical recipe or absolute proof, thinkers must learn to identify evils through careful, case-by-case analysis. This approach ensures that society does not overlook structural evils that happen to fall outside traditional worldviews, nor excuse one atrocity simply because it stands in opposition to another. As Israeli author and politician Avrum Burg eloquently observed regarding modern conflicts, understanding the grievances behind an action does not mean justifying it: nothing Israel did to Gaza justified the massacres of October 7, and nothing Hamas did on October 7 justifies Israel’s subsequent war on Gaza.
Without a neat, pre-packaged definition or divine intervention, moral judgment remains an agonizing human responsibility. In the Hebrew Bible, the story of Abraham bargaining with God over the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah illustrates that even within religious traditions, moral judgment is not about accepting unquestioned divine fiats. Abraham risks his life to argue that innocent people should not be punished alongside the guilty, effectively teaching an ethical lesson to the Creator.
Ultimately, Neiman suggests that humanity’s complicated relationship with the concept of evil is tied to the enduring illusion of a just world. People naturally yearn for a reality where virtue is reliably rewarded and wickedness is systematically punished. Yet a world constructed like a cosmic morality play—where individuals always act rightly solely out of fear of punishment or hope for divine compensation—would be a world of marionettes rather than free moral agents. True morality requires the freedom to choose integrity in a universe where justice is never guaranteed, reminding us that confronting evil is a permanent, daily obligation rather than a puzzle solved by dogma.
