In five pages Arendt's text considers how the 'banality of evil' applies to Adolf Eichmann, contemporary bureaucracy, and Enron. One source is cited in the bibliography.
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law(Arendt 132). As such, then, Adolf Eichmann embodied the concept of the banality of evil. What enabled Eichmann to be Eichmann, according to Arendt, was not simply thoughtlessness, but a
determination to be blind to the moral and ethical issues. That a person could be this way, even to the day of his sentencing, thinking all the while that what
he had done was no more serious than emptying the trash cans at work. This was perhaps the scariest thing about him. Murder, then, was transformed into a bureaucratic,
technocratic duty, free of all sentiment. Eichmann was, or became, an amoral machine. Most read the account of Eichmann and are appalled, but the unmitigated truth is that this type
of mentality, this banality of evil still exists today. It is found to be most prevalent in the boardrooms and executive suites of companies across the world. Evil, Arendt, seems
to be saying is like a fungus that not only destroys one section of the body, but lays waste to the whole concept of a body. The fungus does not
consider itself evil, it is has no complexity or depth. It is merely doing what it has been programmed to do. This, then, is the plight of both upper management
and employees. So, it becomes imperative that when considering the effective management of ethics structures to pay attention to the authority of the ethics department because, more than any
other, it can be manipulated for political ends. Therefore, there must be no appearance, no hint, of corruption in the ethics agencies as it is critical to effective modern democracy.
Arendt said that most accounts list Eichmann and other Nazi officials as monsters and demons, but she contends that this credited them with much more intelligence than they had.