The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World

by Iain McGilchrist

In contemplating totalitarianism and its atrocities, such as the Nazi death camps, Hannah Arendt speaks of ‘radical evil’, by which she means a form of wrongdoing which is not captured by other moral concepts. Central to it is the making of humans into things, devitalised automata, living corpses without will or spontaneity. ‘According to Arendt a distinctive feature of radical evil is that it isn’t done for humanly understandable motives such as self-interest, but merely to reinforce totalitarian control and the idea that everything is possible.’354 In other words, the self of the evil-doer, too, is destroyed, in the service of a power greater than itself, the ideal of which is simply – power. Power to do anything and everything possible. We have that lust within us.