Review

By Kang Young-joon
Editorial Consultant


The toxicity of a major brand’s humidifier sterilizer has led to rising fears about chemical household products. A growing number of consumers are considering not purchasing those chemical household products manufactured by Oxy Reckitt Benckiser (Oxy), whose humidifier sterilizer Oxy Ssak Ssak is currently blamed for allegedly causing the deaths of over 103 people in Korea. (This situation led consumers to have distrust toward manufacturing companies and government agencies’ ability to identify potentially harmful products and warn consumers about them.) However, did Oxy release the chemical product without thinking it might be harmful to consumers? In this review, I try to figure out why Oxy made a harmful humidifier sterilizer, based on a movie called “Hannah Arendt” and the concept of “banality of evil.”


Hannah Arendt

A man is walking down a street using a flashlight to shine on the street. Suddenly, a truck is driving toward him and a couple of strangers come out of a car and kidnap him. The kidnapped man is Adolf Eichmann who was a German Nazi SS-lieutenant colonel and one of the major organizers of the holocaust.

Hannah Arendt, who fled Germany during Adolf Hitler’s rise to power, read an article saying Eichmann was seized by Israeli secret agents and taken to Israel. She is curious whether a trial would take place in Israel or not and if so, she wants to attend the trial. She suggests to a magazine called “The New Yorker” that she write an article about his trial for the magazine. Finally she can, so she flies to Israel and attends the trial. During the trial, she notices something unpredictable. She thought Eichmann would be a tough and strong man, but what she can see right now is a weak and sniffling man, who does not seem to be in charge of the Holocaust. She notes that he continually argues he is innocent by saying he just followed his commanders. She finds he just obeyed order well, and he would have never thought his actions would kill so many people. In Israel, she met many Jews and debated Eichmann’s deed with them. However, nobody agrees with her opinion. They just say Eichmann should be hanged. Coming back to New York, she and her friends debate why Eichmann would do that and what made him do that. One of her friends, Hans Jonas, is strongly against her opinion. Despite many doubts, she writes down what she saw in the trial and tries to figure out why Eichmann would do that.

After the article came out, Hannah Arendt was criticized by many Jewish public figures wondering how come a Jew defended Eichmann, the massive murderer. Most Jewish people accuse her of defending Eichmann, and after the article is controversial, she is asked to leave the college where she works. She rejects the resignation, but she wants to reveal her “real” meaning of the article which most Jewish people could have known if they read the article thoroughly. In her lecture, she says “this trial was about a new type of crime which did not previously exist. A court had to define Eichmann as a man on trial for his deeds. It was not a system or an ideology that was on trial, only a man. But Eichmann was a man who renounced all qualities of personhood, thus showing that great evil is committed by “nobodies” without motives or intentions.” She never argued Eichmann was innocent, but said he just obeyed orders without thinking it would be catastrophic because he was “unable to think,” which is she called the “banality of evil.” After the lecture, her friend Hans came to her and said he thought she changed her mind, but she did not, so he breaks off relations with her. Many other people do as well, aside from a few friends and family members, she eventually has no one around her until she died.

Banality of evil

The concept of the banality of evil is introduced in Hannah Arendt’s book named “Eichmann in Jerusalem.” She came up with its concept when she was at Adolf Eichmann’s trial and saw Eichmann continually argue he could not foresee the massacre his actions would bring but he just followed his boss’s command. Her thesis is that “Eichmann was not a fanatic or sociopath, but an extremely average person who relied on cliched defenses rather than thinking for himself and was motivated by professional promotion rather than ideology. Banality, in this sense, is not that Eichmann’s actions were ordinary, or that there is a potential Eichmann in all of us, but that his actions were motivated by a sort of stupidity which was wholly unexceptional.” She never denied that Eichmann was an anti-Semite, nor that he was fully responsible for his actions, but argued that these characteristics were secondary to his stupidity.


Oxy might have known about the toxicity of the humidifier sterilizer but they would not have had the intention to kill people. They just thought of the immediate benefits but did not think of the catastrophe their product would make, which actually took over 100 people’s lives. They did because they were “unable to think.” If they had been able to foresee that their product’s toxicity would kill people, 100 people would not have to have died. Likewise, if someone fails to think, it might lead to a catastrophe, which can be prevented if someone is able to think. So, we should always try to think about what results our actions may yield, and try to avoid the banality of evil.

 

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