Viswanathan K's Thoughts

During the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi, Hannah Arendt coined the phrase about the “banality of evil” based on how “normal” Eichmann seemed. Robert Sapolsky in his best-selling book, Behave , mentions the “three of the most influential, disturbing, and controversial studies in the history of psychology” that showed: 1)       People want to conform, so much so that if enough people say or do something, they will start doing/believing the same; 2)      People are willing to punish others for failing to do something, if someone in a position of authority tells them to; 3)      When given power over others identified as being bad people (e.g. prisoners), people will go to any lengths to enforce discipline on them. Sure, as Sapolsky says, these experiments have been criticized and their findings questioned, but it’s hard to dismiss them entirely given the genocides from former Yugoslavia to Rwanda to the much ...

In recent times, my 6 yo daughter has suddenly become very interested in Hindi movie songs. This was surprising to us because we hardly ever watch Hindi movies. To begin with, she couldn’t even identify the actresses. Since that was around the time of the talk-of-the-town Virat Kohli – Anushka wedding, it was very embarrassing for her to not even be able to recognize Anushka! And so began the binge watching of Hindi song videos. Progress was slow: she complained that Anushka and Katrina look so similar as she got them wrong yet again. In which universe do they look similar, I wondered… (Among the actors, she’s been able to recognize Salman Khan since she was 2. And till date, she has shown no signs of being able to name any other actor). Next her interest expanded from identifying actresses to sing and hum the hit songs. I offered to download the videos of the songs she liked from YouTube thinking it might also help improve her Hindi (I know, I know, parents ruin everything ...

Sometimes, evil geniuses can be impressive. Very impressive. Like Lord Voldemort. A great (albeit evil) wizard, the man wasn’t just brute force. He could manipulate others into doing his work, he could improvise, he could use guile and cunning…And now I found a real life guy for that role: Vladimir Putin. For starters, just see why the man is even Russia’s President today. The Russian constitution (yes, they have one) says nobody can be President for more than 2 successive terms. Putin realized the keyword there was “successive”: so he served 2 successive terms, then made Medvedev his proxy for the next term, and now is back in power! How’s that for exploiting a loophole? And just see how Putin has handled the Ukraine/Crimean crisis. The EU had been wooing an in-dire-economic-straits Ukraine for some time to come into their orbit. Just when it looked Ukraine would say Yes (and Russia would lose access to the Crimean naval bases), Putin got the Ukrainian President, Viktor Yanu...

Often people wonder how (other) people can be so evil, so thoughtless? Don’t they have a conscience, they wonder? As someone who is naturally cynical, I’ve never spent much time on that topic: to me, the answer has been that most people are evil, dumb or both. Of course, in my more rational moments, I know that can’t be it. Certainly not all of it, anyway. Surely there must be some other answer to explain how the scale of atrocities by many (and the do-nothing-against-it response of the rest) could happen during Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia? Steven Pinker’s comments on the need to defend dissenters and whistleblowers seems to explain “collective delusions”, which in turn could be the answer to the evil-on-a-grand-scale question: “You look at them retrospectively and you wonder, 'How could everyone have been so mad?' On top of being evil these ideas seem patently ludicrous. How can you have a collective delusion overtaking an entire society? And it looks like one o...