[richlevy]

Look up the banality of evil. I'd have a lot more respect for 'pro-life' politicians if their views also extended to the death penalty and war. Unfortunately, the restraint that they want to force on women is not the one they want to force on themselves.

Banality of evil is a phrase used by Hannah Arendt in the title of her 1963 work Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.[1] Her thesis is that the great evils in history generally, and the Holocaust in particular, were not executed by fanatics or sociopaths, but by ordinary people who accepted the premises of their state and therefore participated with the view that their actions were normal.

Reicher and Haslam have challenged Arendt's idea of the banality of evil. They acknowledge that ordinary people can commit evil actions, but assert that it is not simply a matter of “blind people following orders.” They point to historical and psychological evidence that suggests ordinary people become evil when they identify with evil ideology.[2]

So Arendt theorizes that normal people can do evil by simply performing and not challenging the directives of evil authority where Reicher and Haslam believe that they have to have accepted the ideology behind the evil to do these things.

Evil sheep vs evil accomplices.