It was the year 1960 and Arturo Frondizi He was the president of an Argentina that is far away today. A piece of news shocked society, a resident of Olivos who now lived in San Fernando, Ricardo Klement He had been kidnapped by an Israeli commando. The following year he would be put on trial and hanged in 1962 in Tel Aviv. The highly controversial trial was attended by correspondents from around the world, but one dispatched by the New Yorker would become famous by publishing a book, perhaps to channel something disturbing to her at that trial hearing. The book was called “Eichmann in Jerusalem” and its subtitle was and is: “A report on the banality of evil.” Klement was actually Eichmanthe Nazi criminal of whom it is not necessary to delve into the atrocities he committed.
What astonished Arendt as a philosopher, as a Jew, was the trivialization, how banal the account of what happened was, like someone who refers to the characteristics of her work, which she can even enjoy. She expected to see a monster and she met an official.
The question is the same as always, what is it that makes someone win the atavistic taboo of “Do not kill”? This leads to the need to distance oneself from what is beyond comprehension, to imagine that this character must be “crazy” (in another mental place, locus), that it cannot be normal “like us”. The usual question “what is on his mind” is to hope that an almost magical word will protect us and that this subject is identifiable. However, the most terrifying thing about murderers is that while we expect them to be extraordinary people in something that allows us to recognize them, they can be ordinary people and in many cases banal beings, hence the concept of Arendt. Various authors, have dedicated themselves to this subject, Susan Sontag, wondered in “Before the pain of others”, about the indifference to that pain as an effect of the saturation of images of massacres, wars, etc. in the media. But it’s Albert Bandura, the Canadian psychologist, who having worked extensively on experimental studies of behavior and social learning, such as the famous and controversial experiment in which children learn to hit a doll by imitation (Bobo doll/Bobo doll experiment), that is, violence was something learned and perhaps that would lead to the subsequent concept that interests us and is that of “Moral disengagement”, translated as moral disconnection.
The concept and the experiences that led to it are particularly interesting because they introduce the idea of moral conscience. Another author, Robert Hare, author of the scale that bears his name, had already referred to psychopathic personalities as beings without conscience (Without conscience R. Hare), but it is interesting how Bandura joins the classical authors who referred in some cases to “moral madness”, that is, subjects in which the moral criteria, norms, limits, tacit agreements that regulate life, particularly in relation to others, are guided by their own conception and not by the society in question. the one they inhabit They are their own gods. Thus, the concept of moral disconnection is one in which the subject understands that the prevailing criteria do not apply to him, or to a given situation, or that there are excuses, reasons, and thus inhibiting the inhibitory mechanisms that allow us social life. It is a process of cognitive restructuring, in which those atrocities, we would return to Arendt and Sontag, become trivial, banal, usual, and without negative consequences for him. Hence the astonishment when they are confronted, the trivialization of saying that they did not go out to kill, instead of understanding that a possible consequence of the acts that are undertaken, such as fiercely punishing another unprotected person, have tragic consequences. In that process he makes it somehow acceptable, to his own conscience. It is evident that since there is no moral reproach there is no guilt, there is no regret, since “a game was played” that had consequences but in some way they were part of the rules, their own, since they are disconnected from the social ones.
The enormous danger that this conception contains is that the subject cannot see the inevitable moral consequences of his actions, morality can be imagined as an intellectual presumption far from the concrete world, but neither can the concrete and irreversible consequences.
The correlate of this imitation and trivialization of violence is that these are emerging from a society in which violence has ceased to have a correlate with moral conscience and thus a reading of social networks these days showed publications in which basically it was expressed in various ways that it was an unfortunate consequence, but somehow foreseeable and that the public reaction was exaggerated. This process is historically experienced in wars in which individuals understand that the moral rules have changed, the framework is different, but also other experiences (Milgram) and unfortunately in our history it was lived in a concrete way with the famous “due obedience” .
That is why the process of rehabilitation of our society must be faced in a serious and profound way, since once the limits of morality are diffused, they begin to be imitated. Perhaps this is how we understand the epidemic of violence in its multiple forms that we live in the country.
*By Enrique De Rosa Alabaster (MN 63.406), he is a specialist in Psychiatry and Medical Psychology, Neurology and Legal and Forensic Medicine.
by Enrique De Rosa Albaster*
