I Am That Eichmann

Notes on ordinary evil, the comfort of monsters, and what happens when you stop pretending you're only light

The Light That Remains

The Cousin’s Diagnosis

“You’re nothing but doom and gloom lately.”

My cousin sends this in a text, followed by three sunshine emojis, as if yellow pixels could cure whatever she thinks is wrong with me. I’m sitting in my car outside the grocery store, engine off, watching people load trunks with the weight of their weeks.

I laugh. Actually laugh. The kind that makes strangers look.

It took me fifteen years to learn how to look at terrible things without flinching. Another five to realize the flinching was the problem. Not the looking.

She doesn’t know about the books stacked beside my bed—histories of Rwanda, Cambodia, Armenia. The documentary I watched last Tuesday about ordinary Germans in 1943, their faces bland as milk while describing what they knew about the camps. How I rewound one interview seven times, studying a woman’s expression as she said, “We suspected, but we didn’t really know.” The tiny muscle that twitched near her eye on the word “know.”

The Moment in Jerusalem

April 1961. The Eichmann trial.

Yehiel De-Nur takes the stand. The prosecutors know him as Ka-Tzetnik 135633, his number from Auschwitz. He’s there to testify about what he saw, what was done, what humans did to humans in that peculiar bureaucracy of death.

He begins to speak about “the planet of Auschwitz,” how time moved differently there. Then he looks at Eichmann. Really looks.

And faints.

Later, he would explain: he’d expected to see Satan. Some creature marked by evil, wearing his monstrosity like a uniform. Instead, he saw an ordinary man. Balding. Taking notes. Adjusting his glasses with the practiced gesture of an accountant reviewing receipts.

De-Nur fainted not from trauma but from recognition. From the terrible understanding that Eichmann was not a demon from another realm but a human being who ate breakfast, who had preferences about coffee, who probably worried about his hairline.

A man who could have been anyone. Who could have been him. Who could have been me.

What Hannah Saw

Hannah Arendt sat in that same courtroom, watching the same ordinary man, coining a phrase that would haunt us: the banality of evil.

People hated her for it. Still do. We want our monsters to advertise themselves, to arrive with sulfur and smoking hooves. We want evil to be extraordinary, Other, identifiable from across a crowded room.

But Arendt saw what De-Nur saw: Eichmann wasn’t a sadist. Wasn’t even particularly antisemitic, not in the rabid, ideological way we’d prefer. He was ambitious. Organized. Good at logistics. Proud of his efficiency. He moved human beings onto trains with the same emotional investment he might have applied to moving furniture, concerned primarily with meeting quotas, impressing superiors, getting promoted.

He was—and this is the truly unbearable part—competent.

The Stanford Basement

Stanford University, 1971. Philip Zimbardo wants to study prison dynamics, so he creates one in a basement. Advertises for participants. Regular college kids, screened for psychological stability. No one with violent histories, no one showing signs of pathology.

Twenty-four young men, randomly assigned: guards or prisoners.

Day one: awkward roleplay, nervous laughter.

Day two: guards start inventing punishments.

Day three: a prisoner has a breakdown.

Day four: guards force prisoners to clean toilets with bare hands.

Day five: parents visiting are shocked by what they see.

Day six: Zimbardo’s girlfriend, Christina Maslach, walks in and says, “What you’re doing to those boys is terrible.”

Six days. That’s all it took for normal college students to discover their inner Eichmann. To find out that given the right conditions—a uniform, authority, the gradual normalization of cruelty—they could become people they wouldn’t recognize.

Zimbardo had planned for two weeks. He stopped at six days not because the guards realized what they were becoming, but because someone from outside the experiment pointed it out. The guards were disappointed. They were just getting good at it.

The Things We Don’t Discuss at Dinner

My mother calls. “Will you please talk to your cousin? She’s worried about you.”

“About what, specifically?”

“She says you’ve been depressing. All this talk about—” she pauses, searching for words that won’t sound like an accusation, “—heavy things.”

“You mean reality?”

“You know what I mean.”

I do. I know she means the consensual fiction that we’re the good people, that evil exists only in other hearts, other countries, other centuries. That we would have been the ones hiding Anne Frank, not the neighbors who turned her in for the bounty. That we would have been Oscar Schindler, not the accountant who did his job.

But I’ve read the statistics. In every genocide, the actual killers are a minority. Maybe 10%. Another 10% actively resist. The other 80%? They go along. They comply. They look away. They say, “It’s terrible, but what can I do?” They worry about their mortgages, their children’s schools, their promotions.

They become what the system needs them to become.

The Mirror at 3 AM

I wake up sometimes and make lists.

Would I have owned slaves in 1850s Alabama? (Probably, if I’d been born into that class.)

Would I have participated in lynchings? (Probably not actively, but would I have spoken against them?)

Would I have signed the loyalty oath during McCarthyism? (To keep my job? Yes.)

Would I have turned in my Jewish neighbors? (For my children’s safety? God help me, maybe.)

This is what my cousin calls doom and gloom. This is what I call honesty.

Stanley Milgram ran experiments after Eichmann’s trial. Wanted to understand how ordinary people could participate in atrocity. He told subjects they were teaching word pairs to learners in another room. When learners got answers wrong, teachers were to administer electric shocks. Increasing voltage.

The learners were actors. The shocks were fake. But the teachers didn’t know that.

65% of participants administered what they believed were lethal shocks, simply because a man in a lab coat told them to continue. They sweated. They protested. Some cried.

But they kept pushing the button.

What the Darkness Knows

Jung called it the shadow—the parts of ourselves we refuse to acknowledge, project onto others, bury under personalities we can live with. But the shadow doesn’t disappear. It waits. It grows teeth in the dark.

Every urge you’ve stifled. Every cruel thought you’ve had in traffic. Every moment of satisfaction at another’s misfortune. The part of you that could watch someone suffer and feel... nothing. Or worse, feel interested.

We all have it. This capacity for extraordinary cruelty wrapped in ordinary choices.

The camp guards who killed during the day and played violin in the evening.

The Rwandan neighbors who murdered friends they’d known for decades. Then murdered their children.

The American soldiers at My Lai who killed children, then went back to base for lunch.

They weren’t monsters. That’s the horror. They were people who, under different circumstances, would have helped old ladies with groceries, coached little league, remembered birthdays.

The Protection of Not Knowing

My therapist asks why I read these books, watch these documentaries, study these trials.

“It feels like you’re punishing yourself,” she says.

“No,” I tell her. “I’m preparing.”

“For what?”

“For the moment when I’ll need to choose.”

She waits. She’s good at waiting.

“If you don’t know what you’re capable of,” I say, “how can you choose otherwise?”

This is what my cousin doesn’t understand. What my mother wishes I’d stop talking about. The doom and gloom isn’t pessimism—it’s prophylaxis. You can’t prevent what you won’t admit is possible.

The Experiment We’re Living

Every day, we participate in systems that require someone’s suffering.

The phone in my pocket: rare earth minerals mined by children.

The chicken on my plate: a life spent in a cage too small to turn around in.

The shirt on my back: sewn by hands working sixteen-hour days.

The gasoline in my car: purchased with the slow violence of climate change.

I know this. You know this. We all know this.

And we continue.

We continue while the Rohingya burn in Myanmar. While Sudan starves. While Gaza counts its dead. We continued while Standing Rock protesters were sprayed with water cannons in freezing temperatures, defending land we’d already stolen once.

We excel at looking away. At explaining why this particular horror is complicated. At finding the perfect distance—close enough to feel informed, far enough to feel helpless.

We are Eichmann, optimizing systems of harm, telling ourselves we’re just doing our jobs, just living our lives, just trying to get by. We are the guards in the Stanford basement, slowly normalizing what would have horrified us last week. We are the 65%, pushing buttons because someone in authority says it’s necessary.

The only difference is that our experiments don’t end after six days.

The Liberal at the Dinner Party

Last month, at a friend’s house. Wine and cheese, thoughtful conversation. Someone mentions the homeless camps being cleared downtown.

“It’s awful,” everyone agrees. “But also,” someone adds, “they were getting aggressive. My daughter didn’t feel safe.”

Everyone nods. Including me.

Later, driving home, I think about that nod. How easily it came. How naturally we move from “it’s awful” to “but also” to justifying why it had to happen. Why someone else’s survival matters less than our comfort.

This is how it happens. Not with ideology but with inconvenience. Not with hatred but with the quiet prioritization of our own ease.

What Primo Levi Knew

Levi survived Auschwitz. Spent the rest of his life trying to explain what he’d seen. Not just the cruelty, but the system that made cruelty efficient, rational, almost boring.

He wrote about the “grey zone”—the space where victims and perpetrators blurred. Prisoners who became kapos. Jews who helped select other Jews for the gas chambers. The thousand compromises that survival required.

He never condemned them. He understood: in that machinery, everyone was crushed into shapes they wouldn’t have chosen.

But he also never forgot the lesson: we are all capable of becoming what we despise. The right pressure, the right fear, the right authority, and we will do things that would have been unthinkable yesterday.

He knew this. Carried it. And forty-two years after liberation, walked to the top of his apartment building’s stairwell and jumped.

Some knowledge is too heavy to carry forever.

The Moment of Recognition

Three weeks ago. Grocery store parking lot. A man is screaming at a woman loading her car. Something about her taking too long, blocking the space he wants. His face is red, twisted. The things he’s saying are horrible.

I sit in my car and watch. Tell myself I’m waiting to see if she needs help. But really, I’m watching him. Studying him. Recognizing him.

Because yesterday, in traffic, when someone cut me off, I felt that same rage flash through me. Just for a second. Hot and pure and righteous. I didn’t act on it. But I felt it. That capacity for cruelty over something so small.

The screaming man isn’t Other. He’s me on a bad day with worse impulse control. He’s all of us, one disappointment away from cruelty, one uniform away from compliance, one authority figure away from pushing the button.

The Democracy of Darkness

This is what my cousin calls doom and gloom: the democracy of darkness. The recognition that evil isn’t a special category of person but a possibility that lives in everyone.

But here’s what she doesn’t understand: recognizing this is the only protection against it.

When you believe you’re incapable of evil, you stop watching for it in yourself. You stop questioning your own compliance, your own small cruelties, your own willingness to look away.

When you believe evil looks like a monster, you miss it when it looks like efficiency, policy, the slow normalization of harm.

When you believe you would have been the hero, you’ve already failed the test.

What the Shadow Teaches

I keep a photo on my desk. Not of family or friends. Of Eichmann in his glass booth, headphones on, listening to translation. Ordinary. Attentive. Human.

Sometimes people ask about it. I tell them it’s a reminder.

Of what? they ask.

That I am capable of terrible things. That you are capable of terrible things. That the line between good and evil runs not between people but through every human heart. And that line shifts. Moves. Responds to pressure.

They usually change the subject after that.

The Morning Practice

Every morning, before coffee, before news, before the armor of the day goes on, I sit with this knowledge:

I have the capacity for cruelty.

I have the ability to dehumanize.

I could comply with systems of harm.

I could choose my comfort over someone else’s survival.

I could push the button.

Not will. Could.

This isn’t self-flagellation. It’s vaccination. A small dose of truth to build immunity against the larger lie that we’re inherently good, naturally moral, automatically on the right side.

We’re not. We’re human. Which means we’re capable of anything humans have done.

The Choice That Remains

But—and this is crucial, this is the part my cousin might call hope if she understood it—knowing this is where choice begins.

When you know you’re capable of evil, you can choose otherwise. When you recognize your own shadow, you can decide not to feed it. When you see Eichmann in the mirror, you can refuse his efficiency, his compliance, his terrible normality.

But only if you see him first. Only if you admit he’s there.

The Conversation We Don’t Have

My cousin texts again. “Are you okay? Really?”

I think about how to answer. How to explain that I’m more okay than when I believed in my own inherent goodness. That there’s a strange peace in accepting your own capacity for darkness. That the real doom and gloom is pretending we’re not capable of what history repeatedly shows we’re capable of.

Instead, I text back: “Yes. Just trying to stay awake.”

She sends a question mark.

I send her a link to the Milgram experiments.

She doesn’t respond.

What De-Nur Saw

When Yehiel De-Nur fainted in that courtroom, he saw something that broke him: evil wasn’t alien. It was familiar. It was possible. It was him, in another life, another set of circumstances, another uniform.

This is the knowledge that modern life is designed to help us avoid. The knowledge that we’re all one economic collapse, one demagogue, one fear-based decision away from becoming people we wouldn’t recognize.

But if we can’t recognize ourselves in Eichmann, we can’t prevent ourselves from becoming him.

If we can’t see our own shadow, we can’t choose not to act from it.

If we can’t admit our capacity for evil, we can’t cultivate our capacity for good.

The Light That Remains

This isn’t nihilism. It’s the opposite.

When you know that goodness isn’t your default, every choice toward kindness matters more. When you recognize your capacity for cruelty, every moment of compassion is a victory. When you see how easy it is to comply with evil, every act of resistance, however small, is heroic.

The saints knew this. The real ones, not the plaster versions. They talked constantly about their own sinfulness, their own capacity for evil. Not from false humility but from clear sight. They knew that goodness was a choice, made again and again, against the gravity of easier options.

Tuesday, Still Watching

The light through my window has that quality of interrogation—too bright, revealing too much. I’ve been writing this for hours, trying to make it bearable. But maybe it shouldn’t be bearable. Maybe that’s the point.

My cousin means well. She wants me to look away from the darkness, to focus on the positive, to be more fun at parties. She thinks this will make me happier.

But I’ve been to parties where everyone agrees to not mention the difficult things. Where we all pretend we’re not complicit in systems of harm. Where we toast our own goodness while carefully not looking at what our goodness requires others to suffer.

Those parties are more depressing than any documentary about genocide.

Because at least the documentary admits what we’re capable of.

At least Eichmann, in his glass booth, makes us look at what ordinary evil looks like.

At least the Stanford basement reminds us how quickly we can become what we claim to abhor.

The Practice of Seeing

So I keep reading. Keep watching. Keep recognizing myself in the perpetrators, the complicit, the ones who looked away. Not because I’m especially evil but because I’m ordinarily human.

And in that recognition, strangely, is a kind of grace.

The grace of knowing what I’m capable of and choosing otherwise.

The grace of seeing my own shadow and not pretending it’s someone else’s.

The grace of admitting that I am that Eichmann, and therefore can choose not to be.

Every day. Over and over. In small ways and large.

Choosing to see the humanity of the person I disagree with.

Choosing to resist the system that makes cruelty efficient.

Choosing to stay awake to my own capacity for horror.

This is what my cousin calls doom and gloom.

This is what I call the beginning of morality.

The End That Isn’t

There’s no comforting conclusion here. No moment where the light breaks through and we all realize we’re better than we think. We’re not better. We’re exactly as capable of evil as history suggests.

The only question is whether we’ll admit it.

Whether we’ll look at Eichmann and see ourselves.

Whether we’ll recognize that the guard and the prisoner both live within us.

Whether we’ll stop pretending that evil is something other people do.

My phone buzzes. Another text from my cousin. “Want to have lunch? Somewhere cheerful?”

I text back: “Sure. But I choose the place.”

She sends a worried emoji.

I choose a restaurant near the courthouse. The old one downtown, with the worn steps where desperate people smoke cigarettes before hearings about their children, their debts, their deportations. Where every day, someone’s life is destroyed procedurally, efficiently, legally.

We need to eat there. To remember. To recognize.

To know that we are that Eichmann.

And therefore, by grace and choice and terrible self-knowledge, we might choose to be otherwise.

One ordinary moment at a time.

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Image ©2025 Gael MacLean