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Serin Koh/Sun Graphics Contributor

January 23, 2025

Apathy as Policy and the ‘Banality of Evil’

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I find it increasingly disconcerting to scroll mindlessly through my social media feed — a post portraying a moment of violence to be immediately succeeded by an advertisement. These disparate moments, juxtaposed without context, exist within the same ephemeral space, absent any discernible hierarchy of significance. All things become subsumed by the same media landscape, a chaotic and indifferent flow, orchestrated by algorithms that privilege attention over meaning.

Recently on TikTok, I encountered a brief clip from a Wisconsin Supreme Court hearing wherein liberal Justices Rebecca Dallet and Jill Karofsky scrutinized a conservative prosecutor’s appeal to reinstate the state’s 175-year-old abortion ban. The law, notably devoid of exceptions for rape or incest, was condemned by Justice Karofsky as tantamount to a “death warrant” for both women and children — an exemplar of institutionalized indifference to individual autonomy and welfare.

Justice Karofsky pressed further: “To clarify, a 12-year-old girl, who was sexually assaulted by her father and became pregnant — under your interpretation of the law, she would be forced to carry her pregnancy to term, correct?”

With disturbing neutrality, the defendant replied, “Under the policy choice the Legislature made … that would be correct,” his tone as flat as the reading of a will, which in many ways, he was doing.

I draw on this example to underscore the chilling ease with which blatant violations of personhood, systemic tragedies and corrosion of civil liberties are dismissed — or rather, rendered inconsequential. It is a reminder of how effortlessly I might have scrolled past and moved on to the day’s next task.

Media plays a pivotal role in this desensitization, conditioning both civilians and consumers to accept as background noise the most egregious manifestations of human cruelty. Events are filtered through the same mediated vacuum, diluted and flattened into paltry soundbites and stripped of their materiality and urgency.

In the midst of widespread, muted chaos and a collective struggle to make sense of an era increasingly defined by ignorance, violence and cynicism, I am repeatedly reminded of Hannah Arendt’s concept of the “banality of evil.” The pervasive nature of violence — whether at the local, national or global level — coupled with the immediacy of its dissemination, renders it vexingly banal.

This “banality of evil,” as Arendt describes it, reframes our understanding of atrocities not as the product of extraordinary villains, but of ordinary individuals complicit in systems that normalize and facilitate inhumanity.

I wonder, then, to what extent this doctrine diffuses into our contemporary reality increasingly shaped by impatience and the trivialization of tragedy. When meaning is mediated through screens rather than embodied experience, tragedy risks a dissolution into spectacle — estranged from its visceral, lived reality and rendered disturbingly adjacent to fiction.

Nonetheless, all of this is not to suggest that humanity is inherently calloused to the ever-compounding cataclysms of daily existence. At the microcosm of Cornell, we have witnessed, both now and throughout the institution’s history, the remarkable rebuttals and activism of historically marginalized voices — testaments to the power of these communities to create and cultivate spaces for negotiation, transcendence, solidarity and change. In these efforts, the exercising of our fundamental rights as citizens has proven essential.

Rather, my concern lies in the routinization of inhumanity: the normalization of protest and dissent, etched into our daily schedules, and the discrediting of cries against injustice as nothing more than fear-mongering, propaganda or even privilege — thus rendered illegitimate.

Our Ivy League institution, hailed as a sanctuary of privilege, remains not only insulated from the injustices beyond its gates but increasingly indifferent to those within, mirroring the autocratic suppression of dissent it claims to oppose.

These growing occurrences underscore the complicity of institutions — whether through the algorithmic pull of my For You page or the ivy-clad halls of Cornell — in repeatedly reinforcing the wrong side of history, sheltering behind and perpetuating the insidious veil of banality in service to an elite few.

As students, consumers and citizens, we must not allow the pervasive violence of our day-to-day lives to undermine or suppress the essential vigilance that should characterize our purpose, nor allow it to quash our capacity to engage with the injustices unfolding beyond and within our immediate reach. We must instead remain alert to how power, its implications and the conjectured banality of them, aren’t merely concentrated at the top, but embedded throughout these systems, with us as subjects not entirely immune.

Eve Iulo is a third-year in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. She can be reached at [email protected]